Education Minister John O’Dowd has announced that all primary and secondary schools in Northern Ireland will be reviewed for “teaching quality” and “possible financial savings” by the end of the school year. The reality is O’Dowd is drawing up a hit-list of schools he wants to close.
Pop sensation of the moment, Lady Gaga, has recently topped one billion views of her videos on Youtube. Her new 10-minute music video Telephone is creating quite a stir. The video has been praised as exemplifying “liberated” female sexuality and Lady Gaga herself has been held up in the media, including by feminists, as a “feminist icon and a gender revolutionary” and “a strong symbolic figure… for the openly and secretly flamboyant of all genders and sexualities.”