The GMB union today announced that baggage handlers at Stansted Airport are to strike over Easter in a row over pay.

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The chocolate usually appears on the pillows in your hotel room, but at The Cavendish Hotel on London's Jermyn Street it is the hotel room.

Riot police fired tear gas to disperse dozens of protesting steelworkers in Paris yesterday.

Today, 8 March, is results day for all those pupils who took A-level exams in January. Traditionally this was known as retake results day, as most of the candidates in this mid-winter session were resitting their papers from the previous summer to improve their grades or even achieve at least some pass grades. Nowadays, the clientele for this set of exams has changed enormously, as have their academic ambitions. Many January candidates have been taking early AS and A2 modules for the first time, in each of the sixth form years. Whether their results are good or bad, quite a few then take decisive action before the main June sessions and sign up for one of the many organised revision courses that are run by schools, colleges and tutoring agencies during the Easter holidays.

Harlequins number eight Nick Easter has signed a new three-year contract that will tie him to Twickenham Stoop for the remainder of his career.

People flock there now for its perfectly picturesque seaside and Rick Stein's fish and chips, yet in Frank Meadow Sutcliffe's day, Whitby was a place of Bram Stoker stories, gambolling urchins and an endlessly photogenic sea.

At one level Patrick Shovelton was the epitome of a conventional British senior civil servant whose education at a top public school and Oxford endowed him with a cut-glass accent. A Royal Artillery officer during the war, he rose to the highest echelons of the civil service and was awarded a CB and CMG. He was married to the daughter of the official historian of the RAF, who was herself a Dame of the British Empire.

Harlequins 20 Gloucester 14

Northampton 24 Harlequins 3

Wasps 16 Harlequins 22

Gloucester 9 Harlequins 28

Harlequins 48 Sale Sharks 41