Ms Bown, a distinguished octogenarian herself whose previous subjects have included Sir Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Muhammad Ali and Samuel Beckett, said: "It was a happy experience and I was totally enchanted by him."

Pooh has been invited to attend the Children's Party at Buckingham Palace on Sunday June 25 to honour the Queen's birthday with the biggest celebration of British children's literature.

The first book featuring AA Milne's famous character was published in October 1926. Hundred Acre Wood is based on Ashdown Forest, which was near the author's country home Cotchford Farm.

Recalling the trauma she faced, Ramani narrates: "I was tortured and forced to eat human excreta just because I was branded a witch by the ojhas (witch doctors)."

Today Ramani is not alone in the fight.

Vaisakhi, another survivor, says: "It is a blot on our society. We have to face such inhuman torture even in this 21st century. It is a shame that when women have reached space, we are subjected to such horror."

Vaisakhi, in her 50s, had also been brutally beaten up by a villager, who branded her a witch.

There are scores of women who have been branded witch by villagers and tortured. Many were killed, sometimes by beheading or dismembering their limbs.

Many like Ramani Devi are forced to drink urine or consume human excreta. Some are ostracised and thrown out of their villages.

"When these women tell the gory acts and inhuman things they were subjected to, people can feel it. They succeed in pulling a good number of crowds," says Vasvi, a social worker engaged with Free Legal Aid Committee (FLAC), an NGO that organises the street plays and works to spread awareness against witch killings.

"Witch killing follows a rising graph if we look at the figures," says Ajoy Kumar, director of FLAC.

"In 1991-2000, a total of 522 people, mostly women, were killed after they were branded witches. We don't have the exact figure of killing since then," Kumar says.

According to the crime branch of the Jharkhand police, however, 190 witch killings were reported in the past five years. "Only an awareness programme can curb it," says Kumar.

The street plays try to create awareness at different levels. It first tries to inform people about the reality and scientific aspects of witchcraft.

It also tries to educate the people about legal aspects and how courts could punish the perpetrators.

The Prevention of Witch Practices Act was formulated in 1999 to curb the menace, but in most of the cases the witch doctors went scot-free.

"The arrested people rarely name the witch doctors fearing their wrath," says a police official with the Criminal Investigation Department. "Even the conviction rate is a low 15 percent."

'Taken away'

The ATL, which conducted 188 interviews with school staff, said teachers were complaining that testing of seven, 11 and 14-year-olds had "gone too far".

Its report - Coming Full Circle - said: "Increasingly the performance of teachers was being judged according to their ability to enable pupils to meet attainment targets."

Recent government initiatives have stressed the need for more "creativity" in the classroom.

But ATL general secretary Mary Bousted said reforms were "putting back into teaching what had been taken away by the imposition of narrow and prescriptive literacy and numeracy strategies".

The survey, which compared teachers' views of the regimes operating in schools in 1992-94 and 2003-05, said there had been a "dramatic increase in whole-class teaching" since Labour's 1997 election victory.

Meanwhile, the curriculum had moved from "activity-based" and "topic-centred" to a "subject-centred" one.

Children were more likely to sit in rows - rather than grouped around tables - than previously.

'Broad skills'

However, the changes to learning had "generally" been viewed positively, although the extra paperwork involved was regarded "very negatively".

The ATL, Britain's third-biggest teaching union, wants tests for under-16s to be abolished.

It says the national curriculum should be cut, to give children "entitlements" to broad skills, such as creativity and physical co-ordination, rather than specific knowledge.

A Department for Education and Skills spokesman said: "National tests are an integral part of effective teaching and learning, helping to identify pupils that need extra support as well as those with talents that need to be stretched.

"Children sit just three sets of national curriculum tests during their 11 years at school. Teachers are well accustomed to ensuring that their children know what to expect and can cope well with the tests."

The four-year study - entitled Unidentified Aerial Phenomena in the UK - tackles the long-running question by UFO-spotters: "Is anyone out there?"

The answer, it seems, is "no".

The 400-page report puts it like this: "No evidence exists to suggest that the phenomena seen are hostile or under any type of control, other than that of natural physical forces."

It adds: "There is no evidence that 'solid' objects exist which could cause a collision hazard."

So if there are no such things as little green men in spaceships or flying saucers, why have so many people reported seeing them?

Well, here is the science bit.

"Evidence suggests that meteors and their well-known effects and, possibly some other less-known effects are responsible for some unidentified aerial phenomena," concludes the report.

Unidentified Flying Object Meteors may have been responsible for some UFO sightings "Considerable evidence exists to support the thesis that the events are almost certainly attributable to physical, electrical and magnetic phenomena in the atmosphere, mesosphere and ionosphere.

"They appear to originate due to more than one set of weather and electrically charged conditions, and are observed so infrequently as to make them unique to the majority of observers."

People who claim to have had a "close encounter" are often difficult to persuade that they did not really see what they thought they saw. The report offers a possible medical explanation.

"The close proximity of plasma related fields can adversely affect a vehicle or person," states the report.

"Local fields of this type have been medically proven to cause responses in the temporal lobes of the human brain. These result in the observer sustaining (and later describing and retaining) his or her own vivid, but mainly incorrect, description of what is experienced."

There are, of course, other causes of UFOs - aeroplanes with particularly bright lights, stray odd-shaped balloons and strange flocks of birds, to name but a few.

The report admits its findings will not persuade everyone
Yet, it will be difficult to convince everyone that there is a rational explanation for all mysterious movements in the sky.

Some UFO-spotters believe governments will always cover up the truth about UFOs, because they are afraid of admitting that there is something beyond their control.

It is not clear how much time and effort the MoD has spent looking at the skies in recent years, but it appears there are no plans for an in-depth UFO report like the one written in 2000.

A MoD spokesperson said: "Both this study and the original "Flying Saucer Working Party" [already in public domain in the national Archives] concluded that there is insufficient evidence to indicate the presence of any genuine unidentified aerial phenomena.

"It is unlikely that we would carry out any future studies unless such evidence were to emerge."