Category: news

US President Barack Obama has defended the first war launched under his presidency, insisting US military involvement in Libya will be limited.

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The BBC’s Nicholas Witchell reports from the kitchens of Buckingham Palace on the preparations for the wedding breakfast of Prince William and Catherine Middleton.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Duncan Jones talks about his new film after the success of his small, low-budget science fiction film Moon.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

The four wounded soldiers have been training together for several months

Prince Harry has arrived in the Arctic to join four disabled servicemen facing a challenging 200-mile (320km) trek across the polar ice cap.

The prince, patron of the charity Walking With The Wounded, will join the men on the first five days of what is expected to be a four-week mission.

They hope to enter the record books as the first disabled team to walk unassisted to the North Pole.

The charity aims to raise £2m from the trek to help injured servicemen.

Prince Harry said: “This extraordinary expedition will raise awareness of the debt that this country owes to those it sends off to fight, only for them to return wounded and scarred, physically and emotionally.”

The team are spending this week on the Norwegian Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, Europe’s most northerly piece of dry land before the polar ice cap, says Frank Gardner, who will be reporting on the trek for the BBC.

They are having to acclimatise to temperatures below minus 20C and landscapes of unremitting snow and ice.

They are breaking down their supplies and packing them into “polks” – polar sledges weighing up to 100kg (220lbs) which they will have to drag behind them, our correspondent adds.

On Friday, after completing an intensive course of training, the prince will fly with the team to the Borneo ice airfield for the first five days of their challenge.

The soldiers taking part were all injured in Afghanistan and include Sgt Stephen Young, who broke his back in August 2009 when his vehicle was hit by a bomb.

Asked about being part of the team, he said: “It feels phenomenal. When it happened in 2009 I went to Camp Bastion field hospital where they informed me that I may never walk again.

“So to go from that stage to getting the nod to walk to the North Pole is unbelievable. It feels great.”

He will be joined by Cpt Martin Hewitt, who was left with a paralysed right arm after being shot, and Cpt Guy Disney who had his right leg amputated below the knee after he was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade.

Private Jaco Van Gass had his left arm amputated and was left with significant tissue loss to his left leg when he too was hit by an RPG.

The men will be joined by two charity founders Simon Dalglish and Ed Parker and polar guide Inge Solheim.

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BlueBeat sold Beatles tracks before they were legally available online

A website that illegally sold Beatles songs online for 25 cents each has agreed to pay record companies almost $1m (£625,000) to settle a lawsuit.

BlueBeat.com, based in the US, streamed and sold music by The Beatles, Coldplay and others until it was sued in 2009.

In the few days before it was forced to shut down, it had distributed more than 67,000 Beatles tracks.

Judge Josephine Tucker ruled that the site had violated the music labels’ copyright and was unfair competition.

BlueBeat had denied wrongdoing, claiming that owner Hank Risan’s pioneering technique of so-called “psycho-acoustic simulation” allowed him to produce unique versions of copyrighted music.

The judge rejected that argument on the grounds that Mr Risan’s versions were based on tracks he had purchased on CD.

She labelled the justification as “obscure and undefined pseudo-scientific language [that] appears to be a long-winded way of describing ‘sampling’.”

BlueBeat’s attorney, Archie Robinson, said the settlement was a fraction of what music companies EMI Group PLC, Capitol Records and Virgin Records America had sought.

“I felt that was sort of an acknowledgement on their part that they don’t have the damages they claimed,” he said.

He said the California-based BlueBeat site was still active.

“So long as we pay royalties, we can stream their music all day and all night without a problem,” he said.

Music by The Beatles has been available on iTunes since November 2010, but for years music label Apple Corps was involved in a bitter trademark dispute with Apple the computer company.

The dispute was finally settled in 2007.

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As part of its service, the Writers in Prison Network helps offenders to record stories for their children

An organisation that sends writers into prison to work with offenders is among arts groups across England that fear their funding is about to be cut. But can arts for prisoners save the government money?

Erwin James, a former inmate who served 20 years for two “appallingly serious” murders, says prisons are “full of people who are not very good at communicating effectively or appropriately”.

“They can communicate with a pool ball in a sock or a razor on the end of a toothbrush or by shouting and balling,” he adds.

The 53-year-old says he went into prison in 1984 “with massive social inhibitions, I couldn’t speak or to talk people, I was always acting, I was always trying to be somebody else – I didn’t know who the hell I was”.

“What we did in the group went back to the wing with us and made us more thoughtful and more reflective,” he says. “Writing does that.”

Communication is no longer a problem for James, now a successful author and Guardian journalist.

The Writers in Prison Network (WIPN) – started in 1992 by Arts Council England and the Home Office under a Tory government – was “instrumental in making me think that maybe I could do this as a job”, he says.

The network funds writers-in-residence, each costing £20,000, at 16 prisons across England. Alongside creative and autobiographical writing, they help offenders with projects including oral storytelling, staging plays, publishing magazines, making videos, producing radio shows and recording rap music.

On Wednesday, Arts Council England – which has had its budget slashed by 30% and which currently funds half of the residencies – will tell the Writers in Prison Network if it is going to reduce or cut its grants.

If it does, the network could be forced to reduce its number of residencies – or even fold.

Erwin James, who now lives with his wife in the Welsh borders, is one of a handful of offenders helped by the network who have gone on to make a living from writing.

Its real ability to transform lives comes in building up the “very, very low self-esteem” of prisoners, says poet Pat Winslow, the writer-in-residence at category A prison Long Lartin, in Worcestershire.

“I think it’s really about opening doors, oddly, in prisons,” she says.

“People who are in prison have often been victims themselves and they’ve often had very little opportunity to express themselves or even find themselves. So I think writing is a way of validating life experiences and, also, finding out who you are and articulating things.”

For some, like 53-year-old Esther Maurice, who says she was convicted of accidental injury thanks to “a rather perverse jury decision”, it was “something to fill the hours” while she served three months of a nine-month sentence at Styal prison, in Cheshire.

“It was very difficult to bear under the circumstances – I really needed something to with my time so I didn’t stew about it,” adds the mother-of-three who is now writing a book based on her experiences of prison life.

But for another ex-prisoner, who did not wish to be named, the poetry he wrote in Shrewsbury prison while working with its writer-in-residence had a more profound impact.

“It definitely stopped me from reoffending,” says the 41-year-old from Barnstaple, north Devon.

“Before, I didn’t know how to express my emotions, it used to come out in bad ways but now I’m a hell of a lot calmer,” he adds.

“It usually used to come out in violence, it did boil over inside and get worse and worse and then it would explode.”

Now, instead, he says he “actually feels the anger flowing through my pen and on to the paper”.

Despite applying for 300 jobs without success since his release last year, he says he has a new-found confidence and is setting up his own business selling greeting cards featuring his own poetry.

The latest figures released by the Ministry of Justice suggest that, in 2009, 59% of prisoners who served sentences of less than 12 months were reconvicted within a year. The figure for young offenders was 72%.

While little research has been done to measure the impact of the arts in prison, Writers in Prison Network co-director Clive Hopwood is confident its work “helps contribute towards people not reoffending, or reoffending to a lesser degree”.

“The average cost of keeping someone in prison is £47,000 so if one of my writers – at the price of £20,000 – can have influence on one person to stay out of prison for one year, £27,000 is saved by the taxpayer,” he says.

“The arts is a real means of allowing you to feel some self-respect and self-worth. People that feel like that are less likely to want to cause other people harm”

Erwin James

“Lots of people will say, ‘prisoners are enjoying putting on plays and making videos – why should they have all the fun when they’ve committed crime’?”

“But there are 85,000 people in prison and all but a handful are coming out on a street near you soon. Would you like them to be better or worse?”

Lifer-turned-journalist Erwin James is also under no illusions about public sympathy for prisoners.

“Some people think my situation’s great – ‘oh wow, you’re rehabilitated,’ they say. Other people think rehabilitation is an insult to the victim.

“It’s a difficult one – what do you do? I did the best I could.”

James, who also completed an arts degree with the Open University while he was inside, agrees rehabilitation is “not just for the offenders’ sake, it’s for all our sake”.

A National Audit Office report published last year found that reoffending by criminals serving short prison terms in England and Wales cost the taxpayer up to £10bn a year.

“Anything that reduces the chances of that happening – arts intervention, education, giving people a chance once they get out – that’s going to save us all a whole lot of money,” he says.

“The arts is a real means of allowing you to feel some self-respect and self-worth. People that feel like that are less likely to want to cause other people harm.”

The government and Arts Council England declined to comment ahead of Wednesday’s grant announcements.



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UK model defends decision to enter beauty pageant

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