Jo Flemming had already worked as a management consultant when he took two years out to go to IESE business school in Barcelona “I benefited hugely from studying in Spain,” he says. “There are lots of ways of acquiring an MBA, but I decided that cultural difference was an important aspect for me”. In an uncertain economic climate, MBA graduates are likely to find themselves facing stiffer competition for top jobs, but the message from this year’s candidates seems to be that the qualification has fulfilled personal as well as professional goals.”The days when the MBA was an automatic ticket to a huge salary may have passed, but for many people there is a lot more to this,” says Barbara Stephens, chief executive of the Local Government Commission for England and one of the judges. “The MBA is still the essential qualification for becoming a good manager. If this year’s award demonstrates anything, it is that MBAs are now in every walk of life, from the voluntary to the corporate sector.”. Teaching assistants could take over running classes under the biggest shake-up of the education profession in more than a century. It will be much more about individualised learning for each child.”Teachers’ leaders are likely to give a cautious welcome to the PricewaterhouseCoopers report when it is published tomorrow – although it does not support their demand for a 35-hour week..

In the immediate aftermath of 11 September, The Independent on Sunday raised a series of questions about the West’s response to the suicide bombings in America. Two months after that date, after a prolonged bombing campaign in Afghanistan and on a day – Remembrance Sunday – when the dead of past wars are commemorated, we revisit those questions. Mr Bush has made it clear that he would consider the killing of Mr bin Laden as legitimate; Mr Blair does not publicly endorse this view. A limited offensive, aimed at bringing him to justice by steadily unravelling his network across the Middle East and with due consideration for the suffering of the Afghan people, would be acceptable.

An all-out war against an already exhausted and hungry people on the off-chance that it might yield up Mr bin Laden certainly is not.Will we capture Mr bin Laden and dissolve the Taliban?Early hopes that the Taliban would crumble and that the bombing would be avoided, or kept to a minimum, have been frustrated. We have been reduced to using B52 bombers, the blunderbusses of the skies, in an attempt to dislodge the Taliban. The fall last week of Mazar-i-Sharif, a Taliban stronghold, has been the goal of Western planners from the beginning. We hope that it accelerates the campaign towards a successful conclusion. But this is not simply a war on the classic model of capturing cities and permeating enemy lines. It is a war of hearts and minds, beliefs and prejudices and, in purely propaganda terms, Mr bin Laden’s position is far better than it was at the beginning of this adventure.What will be the wider reverberations of this war?Osama bin Laden has become a cult around which the dispossessed and those frustrated with the West’s self-absorption can coalesce.

Western leaders may be loath to admit it, but many moderate Muslims throughout the world feel that the West’s disproportionate attack on one of the most impoverished countries on earth is a stand against them. We do not doubt Mr bin Laden’s wickedness, but an intervention that manages to make the sponsor of 11 September into an international cult figure can hardly be said to be succeeding. If he is taken alive, he will use the international dock to continue his propaganda war on behalf of fundamentalism against the West and against moderate Islam If he is killed, he will become a martyr. Either way, we lose out.What about the humanitarian aspects of this campaign?The best reason to oppose bombing campaigns, whatever their strategic intention, is that they are too costly in civilian lives. We do not know how many people have been killed so far, but we do know that any prolongation of the bombing will endanger more civilians. B52s are not a precision weapon and do not differentiate between the guilty and the innocent.