EDU WATCH - Education news from Africa and the world

THe London School of Economics has severed links with the Libyan authorities following violence against anti-government protesters that has led to more than 200 deaths.

A Johannesburg Schools Education Summit is expected to take place in March to look into the schooling disruptions in Soweto last year, announced Gauteng Premier Nomvula Mokonyane, while delivering the State of the Province Address.

Minister for Basic Education Angie Motshekga told a press briefing in Cape Town that students in Further Education and Training colleges who qualified for financial aid would be "exempted completely from paying academic fees".

The MIT Press have released Learning From YouTube, a free, peer-reviewed "video book" written by Alexandra Juhasz, a professor of media studies at the Pitzer College in Los Angeles in the US, who teaches a class about YouTube. It's the first time the press has published an online-only book.

Speaking two languages confers lifelong cognitive rewards that spread far beyond the improved ability to communicate, a study by Ellen Bialystok (a professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, Canada) has shown.

One hundred academics at the University of California in the US have signed a letter of protest over the treatment of Muslim students who disrupted a speech by Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador to the US.

Calls to segregate men and women in all Iranian Universities are gaining ground after the nation's science minister said institutions' "Western values" were a problem. "The problem is our universities were built on Western values ... that are not compatible with our Iranian-Islamic values," said Kamran Daneshjou.

Four students at Pakistan's University of the Punjab attempted to set themselves on fire outside the vice-chancellor's office in protest over degree recognition. The students, male and female, based at the university's Institute of Plant Pathology, were "intercepted" by the police and given first aid.

The British government plans to overhaul the country's immigration system and drastically reduce the number of visas issued. This amounts to a "hostile act against Britain's universities" and contains elements that have an "ugly taste of apartheid", Edward Acton, vice-chancellor of the University of East Anglia, has warned.

(Sources: AllAfrica, Chronicle of Higher Education, Times Higher Education)