Young black men make up four in 10 of youth jail population

Young black men now account for nearly 40% of the population of youth jails in England and Wales, according to a report by the chief inspector of prisons.

The report, published jointly with the youth justice board, shows that the proportion of black and other minority ethnic young men in young offender institutions (YOIs) has risen from 23% in 2006 and 33% in 2009/10 to 39% last year.

The changing demographic profile of the population inside youth jails in England and Wales also shows an increasing proportion of young Muslims, up from 13% last year to 16% this year. Foreign national young men account for a record 6% of the population.

The chief inspector of prisons, Nick Hardwick, says young people aged 15 to 18 are being held in deteroriating conditions in the YOI network, with fewer feeling safe while they are locked up.

The inspection showed that fewer young inmates felt they could tell someone they were being victimised or believed a member of staff would take them seriously. Only half said they had done something while they were inside that would make them less likely to reoffend in the future.

The report also reveals that more that one-third of the young men had been physically restrained as part of the disciplinary process at their YOI. The highest restraint rate – 66% – was at the Keppel unit at Wetherby, which deals with male teenagers who have not responded to a "normal" YOI regime. The lowest – 8% – was at the Carlford unit near Woodbridge, Suffolk, which holds 30 teenage boys serving long sentences.

The over-representation of young black men in youth jails comes despite a sharp fall in the number of children and young people in custody that has already led to the closure of five YOIs, including a specialist unit for young women.

The total population of the youth justice "secure estate", which includes eight male YOIs and three specialist units for girls and young women, continued to fall from 1,977 in March 2010 to 1,822 this March, before this summer's riots.

Hardwick says, however, that the number of black and minority ethnic children in custody has not fallen at the same rate as the number of white children being locked up.

"Between 2007 and 2011 there was a 37% reduction in white children in custody, compared with a 16% reduction in black and ethnic minority children," says the report.

The report does not discuss the reasons why young black people make up an ever greater proportion of the shrinking youth jail population. But Hardwick does note that an increasing number – 53% now, compared with 39% last year – of young men are being sent to prison for the first time.

Hardwick said: "This report has highlighted some deterioration in children and young people's experience of custody. Despite the falling numbers, this population has well-defined vulnerability and increasing numbers within minority groups. The need, therefore, to provide these people with support during their time in custody and in preparation for their release is as great as ever."

Frances Done, the chair of the youth justice board, which commissions places in youth prisons, said it would be working with all secure establishments to make sure that young people's time in custody has positive results.

The inspection was based on the experience of 1,115 young men and 47 young women in YOIs and specialist units.

The Battle for Dale Farm: Protesters torch caravan as riot police wielding axes finally start ￡22million eviction of travellers' camp

The travellers of Dale Farm and their supporters had vowed they would ‘fight to the death’ to defend the illegal camp site from the bailiffs. But in the event, none made the ultimate sacrifice.
Hundreds of riot police armed with Tasers stormed the site at dawn yesterday, swiftly gaining control despite facing a hail of bricks and being threatened with spades as two caravans were set on fire.
Sporadic resistance continued for most of the day, but by last night the Battle of Basildon was all but won after 27 arrests.

The raid to clear the site began at dawn and demonstrators quickly retaliated by throwing a hail of missiles and buckets of urine at the officials entering the area. This resulted in two people then being shot with Taser guns by police officers.
But progress in evicting the travellers was slow as police officers had to first deal with the hundreds of protesters who had descended on the site to fight the residents' cause.
Electricity was cut soon after the operation began and moments later a caravan was set alight, sending flames and thick black smoke into the air.
After a 90-minute stand-off, the police made another push into the site at 9.25am and scaled the scaffolding put up at the entrance to the camp.
Throughout the afternoon officers and bailiffs worked to remove seven protesters who had secured themselves to the scaffolding tower with ropes.
By then nearly all of the traveller families had left Dale Farm and were watching proceedings from a neighbouring legal site.
Officials used a cherry picker to get to the to top of the 40ft scaffolding and then worked their way down.
By 5pm the tower was cleared.
The tower will be guarded overnight before it is finally torn down.
There were angry confrontations with the travellers, with insults thrown at the police throughout the day.
But they continued with the eviction and strapped together the legs and arms of a man who was lying on the roof of a small building.

Wearing helmets and clutching shields, the officers turned up at the site determined to tackle the travellers who last night declared 'this time it's war - bring it on'.
The police had prepared under the cover of darkness and marched over nearby countryside to arrive at the back of the site just before 7.30am.
A warning klaxon was sounded three times to notify travellers  then bulldozers were used to smash down fences.
Police hacked through shabby fences to get into the site.
At another barricade, a strong line of officers ignored a rambling traveller and pushed forward.
Anarchists were chained by their necks to ruined vehicles filled with concrete.
Just 24 hours earlier, following years of negotiations that cost the taxpayer ￡18million, the travellers lost their bid to keep the homes that had been built illegally on green belt land.
Essex Police said two protesters have been Tasered today and one person arrested.
They made a number of attempts to negotiate with demonstrators to leave the site peacefully.
The force said: 'Officers have this morning entered the Dale Farm site following intelligence which informed the commanders that anyone entering the site was likely to come up against violence and a serious breach of the peace would occur.
'Intelligence received indicated protesters had stockpiled various items with the intent of using these against bailiffs and police.
'The first officers on the site were attacked with missiles being thrown, including rocks and liquids. These officers were fully equipped to deal with this situation.'
Labour leader Ed Miliband last night appeared to sympathise  with the travellers by suggesting that the tactics had been heavy-handed.
He called for ‘greater sensitivity’ to be shown by the council in the next stage of the operation.
During a question-and-answer session on Twitter, Mr Miliband said: ‘Alternative provisions should be made for travellers and far greater sensitivity shown by council in enforcement of law.’

Residents in neighbouring counties have been preparing themselves for an influx of the evicted travellers.
Park wardens have started digging trenches around open land to ensure that caravans cannot be driven onto the grass.
Supermarkets have also stepped up security to prevent the travellers from using their carparks and road junctions are being monitored.

Farmers in the area surrounding Dale Farm have placed hay bales and farming equipment at the entrances to their land to prevent residents getting in following the eviction, local residents said.
One said: 'They have begun to do this in the last couple of weeks. It looks like it is to stop evicted residents getting on to the farms.'
Tony Ball, leader of Basildon Council, said: 'We now believe that those who want to leave peacefully have already done so and those who are left have made it clear that they have no intention of co-operating with the council.
'Resistance and violence as some are now suggesting will be in nobody's interest - especially not the travellers or their families. We now must get on with the difficult job of clearing Dale Farm in as safe and dignified a manner as possible - and that is what we will now do.
Mr Ball thanked the police and congratulated them on the professional way they had carried out the operation.
He said: 'When I became a councillor, it was never in my mind and never did I want to preside over an operation where we saw riot police on the streets of Basildon.But I am absolutely clear that after 10 years of negotiation to try and find a peaceful solution to this that actually what we're doing is the right thing.
'I think we have seen from the level of violence put up by the protesters this morning that it was absolutely right that the police led the operation.'

The Face of Anger

Media coverage of the Occupy Wall Street protests in lower Manhattan over the past few weeks might lead you to believe they were merely an excuse for a few hundred dim-witted hippies to make some trouble. There’s been some of that. One knucklehead declared the U.S. government a greater evil than Al Qaeda while standing across the street from Ground Zero. An uninformed graduate student said she wasn’t worried about the rain because “we have a tarp.” (When told that the bailout program was actually called TARP, all she could think to say was, “How ironic.”)
But those are the easy stories—the ones that convince us that the protesters are other, lesser people than ourselves. On last Tuesday’s “Millionaires March” past the homes of such financial titans as Rupert Murdoch and David Koch, the protesters looked very different. They looked like Americans—ordinary people fed up by the unfairness that has infected our national life in recent years. It’s the unfairness of reckless financiers triggering a brutally harsh economic crisis, accepting a government bailout, and then going on to become even richer while everybody else has been left to struggle.

There was a 49-year-old home attendant who has a son with the Army in Afghanistan. He marched with David Parsons, 59, a businessman with a peace symbol affixed to his cap and an American flag in his hand that he bought from a street vendor for a dollar. “It seemed a good investment,” he reported.

Behind them came a subway motorman who said that underground suicides are up and that he worries some poor soul will be driven by hard times to jump in front of his train. “It is just a matter of time,” he said.

At first it seemed that Marilyn Kosimar, an expensively attired woman wearing red-soled Louboutins, had chanced onto the march as she walked her lap dog. She confirmed that she resides in the tony neighborhood but also declared herself one of the protesters. “The unemployment rate is unacceptable,” she said.

When the marchers came upon a construction worker in an orange hardhat who was perched on a scaffold, a protester handed up a leaflet reading, “We Are the 99%.” He held it up for all to see, noting that he’s been working since he was 14 and is now struggling to raise two young children. “I worry how it will be for them,” he said.
There were more construction workers back down at Zuccotti Park, where the protesters have been encamped since Sept. 17. A 45-year-old ironworker named Rob Chamberlain brought a spud wrench that is usually employed to tighten huge bolts. He was using it as a paperweight to hold down leaflets in a gusting wind. He announced, “I’ve just been pissed off” since the economy imploded. “Pissed off at Wall Street, pissed off at D.C.,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for something to happen.”

That something is this protest, which was conceived by an activist group in Canada (Adbusters) but has now taken on a life of its own, with no leaders to disappoint the people, no particular agendas to exclude anyone, only a shared conviction that the present situation is unacceptably unfair.“I’m pro-capitalism,” Chamberlain said. “I just want it to work for everybody.”

President Obama and congressional Democrats have offered words of support for the protests while trying to channel their energy and outrage for political gain. With 38 percent of the country saying it agrees with the demonstrators, that’s hardly surprising. The question is whether it will work—or if, instead, those millions of Americans will merely end up wondering what took the politicians so long to gauge the country’s mood.

Meanwhile, on the streets of New York, the protesters continue to tap into and express, sometimes despite themselves, the furious frustration that simmers just beneath the surface in America today. But anger isn’t the only emotion coursing through the streets. There is also optimism—the hope that comes from people finally doing something in response to injustice. Even if it amounts to little more than saying, “We’ve had enough.”

One week of Meetups

Washington is not, by any means, an easy place to find your social circle. The mix of newcomers, workaholics and far-out suburbanites makes it hard to meet anyone, much less make plans to hang out over the weekend.

So for one week late last month, I made my own plans.
I went Meetup mad. I logged a nearly five-mile run in the shadow of the monuments, took a lesson from veteran salsa dancers in the subtle art of working it, shed my usual heels and hit the hiking trails — I even rode a party bus — all with complete strangers. With my little experiment, I’d intended to prove that I could fill my calendar with meetup after meetup, but with it came an altogether different result: With each outing, I grew more confident; I could fly solo and have a great time doing it.

Meetup.com was launched 10 years ago in New York in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. An open invitation to defy the instinct to hide out in our homes, it gave mommies and rock climbers and techsters a way to find one another outside of chat rooms and instead plan play dates, expeditions and happy hours. “Every Meetup,” co-founder Scott Heiferman wrote in an e-mail to users last month, “starts with people simply saying hello to neighbors.”

In Washington, described so often as a “transient city” that one wonders if it isn’t printed on all plane tickets to Reagan National Airport, the most frequented Meetup gatherings are social ones, revolving around networking, making friends or bringing together singles. With such a thriving Meetup community — the sixth most active in the nation — it’s possible to scratch just about any itch, whether you’re a geography buff (for whom there is the GeoNerds DC Meetup), a Francophile (try the very active DC French Meetup) or simply slay at board games (see: VA/DC Social Boardgame Meetup). Often, it’s as easy as searching for an interest, clicking to RSVP and then showing up — and not only is it acceptable to arrive solo, it’s the norm.

“Meetup lends itself to people coming out on their own, without having the need to drag someone along,” says J.T. Yaung, a lead organizer in the area’s most populous Meetup group, the 20s & 30s Going Out Group.

Yaung’s group — one of the five I visited in my meetup-filled week — draws a mix of singles and classic transients, 20-somethings who have landed their first big job in a new city (or are looking). But others attract an in-cred-ibly diverse mix of people, ranging from longtime locals rethinking their social circles as their friends couple up to empty-nesters trying new hobbies.

What follows is the lowdown on how some of the area’s most popular Meetups groups have managed to help people find their niche.

“The stories — people getting married, people finding great buddies — it’s so uplifting,” says Kellie Carlisle, who in 2007 founded the Mid-Atlantic Hiking Group and has since seen the group transform into a network of thousands of outdoors enthusiasts. “That’s the story of Meetup. We don’t have little cliques to shut people out.”

Katie Price: heroine or hypocrite? Jordan slams the sexualisation of children

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Katie Price: heroine or hypocrite? Jordan slams the sexualisation of children
by Clemmie Moodie, Daily Mirror 13/10/2011
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Katie Price stands outside the Oxford Union debating chamber (Pic: PA)
KATIE Price is angry. In fact, she’s furious and has something she is desperate to get off that famously pneumatic chest of hers...

Off the back of a Government-ordered review into the over-sexualisation of children, the Tango-tanned, collagen-lipped mum-of-three is on an unlikely moral crusade.

Katie, 33, is “disgusted” by recent trends including beauty parlours offering toddler tanning and pre-teen makeovers.

She says: “It is disgusting. I don’t agree with it at all. I think surgeons and mums who encourage these young girls to have cosmetic work done, or have fake false boobs, should be shot.

“It’s horrible when you see these pictures of young children wearing make-up, having fake tans and so on. It’s sad.”

Katie’s comments come 48 hours after Prime Minister David Cameron met internet industry representatives to discuss how to stop youngsters accessing pornography online. It is something she strongly agrees with.
Of course, it is a shock to hear the surgically-enhanced, knicker-flashing, heavily made-up star come over all Mary Whitehouse. After all, she has made over ￡30million marketing her sexy alter ego, Jordan. And you only have to look at the fans who flock to her book signings to realise she’s the poster girl for a generation of fame-hungry youngsters.

So can this really be the same Katie who enraged ex-hubby Peter Andre with a Facebook shot of their daughter Princess, then two, in full slap and false eyelashes?

Am I talking to the same doting mum who bought her little girl 100 pairs of shoes before she could even walk, straightened her curly hair and now uses Princess to model her kids’ clothing range online? Yep.

But Katie is adamant she has done nothing wrong. No, blame Britney Spears instead.

“That photo of Princess wearing make-up was from my sister’s Facebook page and was never meant to be made public,” she says.

“It was a one-off and I didn’t approve it. But Princess loves all that girlie stuff. She and her friends are always raiding my make-up bag, trying on my heels, trying to find new things. I think all little girls are like this. I don’t encourage her – it’s quite the opposite. I tell her, ‘Do as I say, not as I do’.

“Yes, she had her hair straightened. She begged me to do it. I think people assume I’m there every day, irons at the ready, when she comes out the bath, wanting to straighten her hair. I’m not! It makes me mad. Everyone blow dries their little girl’s hair and that’s all I do – dry it and brush it the way she likes it.

“If Princess said, ‘Mummy, I want to have fake boobs’, I would say, ‘No’. Of course I wouldn’t let her. It’s sick, it’s just wrong.”

The over-sexualisation of children is a subject close to Katie’s heart. At the age of six she was in a park with her friend when “some weirdo” indecently exposed himself and inappropriately touched them.

It has clearly left some deep-seated emotional scars.

She continues: “It makes me really sad to think about childhoods nowadays. I was a tomboy when I was growing up, climbing up trees or whatever – innocent stuff.

“When you look at young girls at senior school today, they’re wearing the shortest skirts and all trying to look like Britney.

“So I suppose maybe that’s where it all started – with Britney’s Hit Me Baby video, with her running around in that school uniform.

“I think the pop industry has always encouraged this kind of thing, though.

“Kids see these girls dressed in this provocative manner and want to copy them. It makes me angry, but it sells.

“To people who accuse me of in any way contributing to this over-sexualisation of kids, I say, ‘What have I done sexually, or otherwise?’ I don’t sleep around and I love being in relationships – I’m not interested in dating loads of guys or having one-night stands. And what have I done with Princess that’s so wrong? What have I done generally?”

For someone who clearly has a lot to say for herself, Katie was uncharacteristically lost for words when she addressed the Oxford Union yesterday. Her speech lasted just eight minutes before she dried up.

Katie, who wore a cream top, shiny leggings and black boots, admitted: “I’m absolutely petrified. I don’t really know what to say.”

Describing herself as a “rich chav” and “common as muck” she told her “posh” audience: “You are our future in here. You must be so intelligent, so brainy and fascinating to be around. I bet hanging out with you lot I’d actually learn a lot.” And she got a few laughs, when she added: “I wouldn’t like to play Trivial Pursuit with you.”

It was another side to Katie, who has had five boob jobs and whose nights out are rarely quiet affairs. On one, the model turned entrepreneur who has published 40 best-selling books, snogged her best friend, TOWIE star Lauren Goodger.

Hitting the town in a stretch Hummer with bubblegum pink interior, the pair were celebrating the 26th birthday of Katie’s recent squeeze, Leandro Penna.

“Squeeze” being the operative word when it came to just how these two met at Elton John’s Oscars bash in Los Angeles earlier this year. I was at the bar when a tipsy Katie grabbed my hand and giggled: “Come meet my man for the night, he’s gorgeous!” Then she thrust said hand between the Argentinian’s legs and chortled: “Have a feel of that – he’s a big boy!”

They began dating four weeks after she split up with second husband, cross-dressing cagefighter Alex Reid. But she and Leandro ended it last month.

Her first husband Peter Andre shares custody of their children Princess, four, and Junior, six, and also has regular contact with partially blind Harvey, nine (her son by Dwight Yorke).

Although Katie is not ruling out getting married again, she is happy with her life. Rubbishing claims she is now dating Danny Cipriani, she says: “Those rumours are b*******. Nothing is happening with Danny.

“I am happy being single and focussing on my kids, on my family.

“I’m not in any rush to get married again although I’m not saying I wouldn’t marry again. But it will be with the right person at the right time.”

For all those who knock her, there is no disputing Katie’s dedication as a working mum. She launched her magazine, Katie, and is now a judge in her new reality show, Sky Living’s Signed By Katie Price.

She says: “I think I’ve matured a lot over the last few years.

“In the past, I’d have slagged certain people off and not really thought or cared about what I was saying. I realise that’s stupid now and don’t want to get in fights with anyone just for the sake of it.

“People are entitled to think or say what they want about me because I put myself in this industry, and have opened myself up to criticism. But I also hope people appreciate the things I have done and continue to do. I hope they appreciate me as a businesswoman at least.

“I have my new reality TV show, I’m going into management and I have just released my own-brand glossy magazine which I am really proud about.

“Critics can knock me all they want, but one thing they cannot accuse me of is being lazy.”

'Cover-up' claim over Fox in Dubai: I was told to deny meeting, says executive

Liam Fox’s close friend tried to cover up a controversial Dubai meeting which led to the Defence Secretary becoming embroiled in a ‘blackmail’ scandal, it was claimed last night.
Adam Werritty, the beleaguered minister’s best man and former flatmate, pleaded with businessman Harvey Boulter to ‘deny’ he had held highly sensitive talks with Dr Fox at a meeting also attended by Mr Werritty.
Mr Boulter told the Mail yesterday: ‘He (Werritty) contacted me and said if anybody asks, tell them that we did not meet.
‘I said, “I can’t – that makes me look like a liar”. He was trying to make me play it down. I don’t think they wanted anyone to know Werritty was at the meeting.’ Their discussions on June 17 had focused on an ill-fated proposal to provide British troops with technology to prevent calls home being intercepted by the enemy.
The now infamous meeting was set up following talks in April between Mr Werritty and Mr Boulter, chief executive of the private equity firm Porton Capital.
Despite not being on the Government payroll or having security clearance, Mr Werritty, 33, attended the meeting at the five-star Shangri-La hotel on June 17. Incredibly, no MoD officials accompanied him to the 41st floor room.
Mr Boulter said that ‘80 per cent’ of the discussion was about one of Porton Capital’s companies, Cellcrypt, which wanted to sell voice encryption equipment to the MoD.
But the remainder was a briefing to Dr Fox about a legal battle involving the MoD which had started at the High Court on June 15.
Porton Capital had teamed up with the MoD innovations unit to produce a breakthrough life-saving treatment for the MRSA superbug.
The company producing the technology, Acolyte, was sold to the U.S. firm 3M in a deal worth ￡41million. But amid claims that tests for the treatment had failed, 3M refused to pay the full amount.
On June 11, 3M’s chief executive George Buckley had been knighted for services to industry.
Leaked emails show that hours after the meeting with Dr Fox and Mr Werritty, Mr Boulter told 3M lawyers: ‘You ought to understand that David Cameron’s Cabinet might very shortly be discussing the rather embarrassing situation of George’s knighthood.’ Mr Boulter asked for a $30million (￡18million) settlement to ‘save face’ for the MoD.
Later that week 3M responded by lodging legal papers suing Porton Capital and Mr  Boulter for ‘blackmail’ – raising the prospect that Dr Fox could be called to give evidence at a U.S. court.
It was after the row between the two firms emerged in newspapers that  Mr Werritty asked Mr Boulter to deny the meeting had ever taken place. Later the MoD put out a statement saying the meeting never happened. The denial was later retracted. Dr Fox is now under pressure over whether he broke the Ministerial Code by holding a meeting about an ongoing court case without the presence of MoD officials.
Last night he apologised and said it was ‘wrong to meet with a commercial supplier without the presence of an official’.
But he had originally denied that MoD business was discussed at the ‘private’ June 17 meeting – prompting critics to claim he had been ‘factually inaccurate’. Shadow defence secretary Jim Murphy said: ‘This was a highly unconventional meeting in the first place and it now seems clear that there was a real attempt to cover it up.
‘This is genuinely disturbing and increases the pressure on the Defence Secretary. The discussions in Dubai should never have taken place without MoD officials present. We can’t just continue with this drip, drip, drip of allegation and half answer. We need to get to the truth.’     At Mr Werritty’s family home in St Andrews yesterday, his mother Irene said: ‘Nobody would be happy with what’s been coming out but we can’t comment.’

Steven Paul Jobs, 1955-2011

Steven P. Jobs, the Apple Inc. chairman and co-founder who pioneered the personal computer industry and changed the way people think about technology, died Wednesday at the age of 56.

His family, in a statement released by Apple, said Mr. Jobs "died peacefully today surrounded by his family...We know many of you will mourn with us, and we ask that you respect our privacy during our time of grief."

The company didn't specify the cause of his death. Mr. Jobs had battled pancreatic cancer and several years ago received a liver transplant. In August, Mr. Jobs stepped down as CEO, handing the reins to Tim Cook.

"Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being," Mr. Cook said in a letter to employees. "We will honor his memory by dedicating ourselves to continuing the work he loved so much."
During his more than three decade-long career, Mr. Jobs transformed Silicon Valley as he helped turn the once sleepy expanse of fruit orchards into the technology industry's innovation center. In addition to laying the groundwork for the high-tech industry alongside other pioneers like Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates and Oracle Corp. founder Larry Ellison, Mr. Jobs proved the appeal of well-designed products over the sheer power of technology itself and shifted the way consumers interact with technology in an increasingly digital world.
"The world rarely sees someone who has had the profound impact Steve has had, the effects of which will be felt for many generations to come," Mr. Gates said in a statement Wednesday.

The most productive chapter in Mr. Jobs's career occurred near the end of his life, when a nearly unbroken string of successful products like the iPod, iPhone and iPad changed the PC, electronics and digital media industries. The way he marketed and sold those products through savvy advertising campaigns and its retail stores, in the meanwhile, helped turn the company into a pop culture icon.

At the beginning of that phase, Mr. Jobs once described his philosophy as trying to make products that were at "the intersection of art and technology." In doing so, he turned Apple into the world's most valuable company with a market value of $350 billion.

After exhibiting significant weight loss in mid-2008, Mr. Jobs took a nearly six month medical leave of absence in 2009, during which he received a liver transplant. He took another medical leave of absence in mid-January without explanation before stepping down as chief executive.

Mr. Jobs is survived by his wife, Laurene, and four children.
Although his achievements in technology alone were immense, Mr. Jobs played an equally groundbreaking role in entertainment. He turned Apple into the largest retailer of music and helped popularize computer-animated films as the financier and CEO of Pixar Animation Studios, which he later sold to Walt Disney Co. He was a key figure in changing the way people used the Internet and how they consumed music, TV shows, movies, books, disrupting industries in the process.

"Despite all he accomplished, it feels like he was just getting started," Disney CEO Robert Iger said in a statement Wednesday.

Mr. Jobs also pulled off one of the most remarkable comebacks in modern business history, returning to Apple after an 11-year absence during which he was largely written off as a has-been and then reviving the then-struggling company by introducing products such as the iMac all-in-one computer, iPod music player and iTunes digital music store.

The company produces $65.2 billion a year in revenue compared with $7.1 billion in its business year ending September 1997. Apple has become one of the world's premier designers of consumer-electronics devices, dropping the "computer" in its name in January 2007 to underscore its expansion beyond PCs.
Although Mr. Jobs officially handed over the reins of the company to Mr. Cook, his long-time deputy, in August, his death nevertheless raises a high-stakes question for Apple of how the company—which has been in the vanguard of technological creativity for most of the past decade—will sustain its success without his vision and guidance. Other icons of American capitalism, including Walt Disney, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and International Business Machines Corp., experienced some transitional woes but eventually managed to thrive after their charismatic founders passed on.

But few companies of that stature have shown such an acute dependence on their founder, or lost the founder at the peak of his career. Several years after Mr. Jobs was fired from Apple in 1985, the company began a steady decline that saw it drift to the margins of the computer industry. That slide was reversed only after Mr. Jobs returned to Apple in 1997.

Mr. Jobs also leaves behind innumerable tales about his mercurial management style, such as his habit of calling employees or their ideas "dumb" when he didn't like something. He was even more combative against foes like Microsoft Corp., Google Inc., and Amazon.com Inc. When Adobe Systems Inc. waged a campaign against Apple for not supporting Adobe's Flash video format on its iPhones and iPads in April 2010, Mr. Jobs wrote a 1,600 word essay about why the software was outdated and inadequate for mobile devices.

The CEO maintained uncompromising standards about the company's hardware and software, demanding "insanely great" aesthetics and ease of use from the moment a consumer walked into one of Apple's stylish stores. His attention to the smallest details in the development and design process were instrumental in shaping some of the most distinctive features of Apple's products, while his meticulously planned onstage demonstrations helped fuel excitement that was unmatched by his peers.

At event after event to introduce new products, Mr. Jobs often puckishly proclaimed "There is one more thing" before revealing the most significant news at the very end of a speech. He enforced strict secrecy among Apple employees, a strategy that he believed heightened anticipation for upcoming Apple products.

Mr. Jobs, the adopted son of a family in Palo Alto, Calif., was born on Feb. 24, 1955. A college dropout, he established his reputation early on as a tech innovator when at 21 years old, he and friend Steve Wozniak founded Apple Computer Inc. in the Jobs family garage in 1976. Mr. Jobs chose the name, in part, because he was a Beatles fan and admired the group's Apple records label, according to the book "Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders" by Wall Street Journal reporter Jim Carlton.

The pair came out with the Apple II in 1977, a groundbreaking computer that was relatively affordable and designed for the mass market consumer rather than for hobbyists. The product went on to become one of the first commercially successful personal computers, making the company $117 million in annual sales by the time of Apple's initial public offering in 1980. The IPO instantly made Mr. Jobs a multimillionaire.

Not all of Mr. Jobs's early ideas paid off. Apple's Apple III and Lisa computers that debuted in 1980 and 1983 were flops. But the distinctive all-in-one Macintosh--foreshadowed in a ground-breaking TV ad inspired by George Orwell's novel "1984" that famously only aired once -- would set the standard for the design of modern computer operating systems, in which users point and click on icons with a mouse rather than typing in commands.

Even then, Mr. Jobs was a stickler about design details. Bruce Tognazzini, a former user-interface expert at Apple who joined the company in 1978, once said that Mr. Jobs was adamant than the keyboard not include "up", "down," "right" and "left" keys that allow users to move the cursor around their computer screens.

Mr. Jobs's pursuit for aesthetic beauty sometimes bordered on the extreme. George Crow, an Apple engineer in the 1980s and again from 1998 to 2005, recalls how Mr. Jobs wanted to make even the inside of computers beautiful. On the original Macintosh PC, Mr. Crow says Mr. Jobs wanted the internal wiring to be in the colors of Apple's early rainbow logo. Mr. Crow says he eventually convinced Mr. Jobs it was an unnecessary expense.

Many ideas in the Macintosh came from a visit in 1979 to Xerox Corp.'s Palo Alto Research, where Mr. Jobs saw a machine called the Xerox Alto that had a crude graphical user interface and a mouse. The episode underscored his recurring role as a refiner and popularizer of existing inventions.

"Picasso had a saying, 'Good artists copy. Great artists steal,'" Mr. Jobs said in a PBS documentary on the computer industry from the mid-1990s. "I've been shameless about stealing great ideas."

Even in his appearance, Mr. Jobs seemed to cultivate an image more like that of an artist than a corporate executive. In public, he rarely deviated from an outfit consisting of Levis jeans, a black mock turtleneck and New Balance running shoes.

As Apple expanded, Mr. Jobs decided to bring in a more experienced manager to lead the company. He recruited John Sculley from Pepsi Co. to be Apple CEO in 1983, famously overcoming Mr. Sculley's initial reluctance by asking the executive if he just wanted to sell "sugar water to kids" or help change the world.

After Apple fell into a subsequent slump, a leadership struggle led its board's decision to back Mr. Sculley and fire Mr. Jobs two years later at the age of 30. "What can I say – I hired the wrong guy," Mr. Jobs brooded in the same PBS documentary. "He destroyed everything I had spent ten years working for."

Mr. Jobs then created NeXT Inc., a closely watched startup that in 1988 introduced a distinctive black desktop computer with advanced software that was initially targeted at the academic computing market. But the machine was hobbled by its exorbitant price tag and some key design decisions, including its use of an optical disk drive and a Motorola Inc. microprocessor at a time when Intel Corp. chips and floppy drives had become the norm.

NeXT eventually stopped selling hardware and failed to make money as a software company. But its operating system would become a foundation for OS X, the software backbone of today's Macs, after Apple purchased NeXT for $400 million in December 1996.

In 1986, using part of his fortune from Apple, Mr. Jobs paid filmmaker George Lucas $10 million to acquire the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm Ltd. The company he formed out of those assets, Pixar Animation Studios, first sold hardware, then software, and later turned to feature films. Pixar went on to create a string of computer-animated hits, from "Toy Story" to 2008's "Wall-E." Mr. Jobs sold Pixar to Disney in January 2006 in a $7.4 billion deal that gave him a Disney board seat and made him the entertainment company's largest shareholder.

Meanwhile, Apple began foundering. Computers using Intel chips and Microsoft software grew to dominate the market, a trend that accelerated after Microsoft's Windows emulated many elements of the Mac's visual interface.

NHS pays millions of pounds more than it needs to for drugs

The National Health Service is spending almost ￡25m a year on supplies of an antidepressant drug despite evidence that it has little clinical advantage over an almost identical medication which costs a fraction of the price.

An investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) for The Independent has raised questions about the only independent study to find evidence that the drug, Cipralex, is clinically more effective than its out-of-patent predecessor, Cipramil. Both have a similar main ingredient but Cipralex costs ￡14.91, while the older Cipramil is available for just ￡1.31.

The inquiry sheds light on the lengths to which pharmaceutical companies go to extend the lives of drugs whose patents are about to run out.

Cipralex, or Lexapro, as it is known in the US, is one of the most widely prescribed antidepressants in the world, but has been criticised for being little different from Cipramil, whose patent expired in 2002.

There has only ever been one independent, direct comparative study which suggests that Cipralex is clinically more effective. But the BIJ's investigation has now established connections between employees of Lundbeck, the Danish company which makes both Cipralex and Cipramil, and Arbacom, a Russian company that sponsored the independent trial which indicated that the new drug worked better than the old one.

That trial helped to make the case for the new drug to clinicians, costing the NHS millions of pounds more in prescription costs. Last year, the health service spent about ￡3.3m more on Cipralex than on Cipramil, although the older drug was prescribed nine times as often. A paper based on the Arbacom trial, which was published in November 2007 in the medical journal Clinical Therapeutics, acknowledged "Alexander N Postnov and Markus Kornfeld at Arbacom for their help in revising the manuscript". It appears that Mr Kornfeld may have assisted at the same time that he and his wife, Asa, were working for Lundbeck.

The BIJ has seen an email from Mr Kornfeld, dated August 2005, in which he sent a protocol for the trial to a Russian woman, copied to someone called "Alex", with a message listing errors in the protocol. In August 2005, Mr Kornfeld was a Lundbeck consultant and his wife was a senior employee.

Mr Kornfeld's email also forwarded a case-report form. The document's properties appear to show this was created only two days previously, and had been modified by a different Lundbeck employee. Mr and Mrs Kornfeld no longer work at Lundbeck and neither responded to requests for comment. Anders Gersel Pedersen, Lundbeck's executive vice-president for drug development, agreed that Mr Kornfeld was a consultant at the time but said nobody at Lundbeck, to the best of the company's knowledge, had known about the Russian Arbacom trial.

The BIJ was unable to contact anyone from Arbacom, which does not appear to have been named as a sponsor of any published research before or since. The bureau uncovered further connections between Lundbeck and Arbacom. While the Arbacom trial was under way, Lundbeck entered into a research contract for an epilepsy drug with another Russian company.

In 2006 and 2007, when the Cipralex trial was being carried out, Lundbeck negotiated a research contract for an epilepsy treatment, VLB01, with the Russian firm Valexpharm. Documents seen by the bureau attach a value of $2m to the deal. Mr Kornfeld and Alexander Postnov, who were acknowledged in the Clinical Therapeutics paper about the Cipralex trial, were sent the contract. It is not clear who Mr Kornfeld was working for at this time, but Mr Postnov was using his Arbacom email address. Valexpharm appears in some listings at the same address as Arbacom, and Valexpharm appears to have registered Arbacom's telephone numbers. Another employee apart from Mr Postnov appears to have worked for both firms.

A spokeswoman for Sistema, Valexpharm's parent company at the time of the trial, denied that Arbacom was related to Sistema in any way.

However, Valexpharm's current chief executive Alexander Bakhutashvili, a former president of Valexpharm's immediate parent company Binnopharm, described Arbacom as a "partner generic company".

Mr Pedersen insisted that there was "absolutely no linkage" between the epilepsy drug contract and Arbacom's Cipralex trial. He said Arbacom had been trying to prove that Cipralex and Cipramil were identical, with the aim of producing a cheaper version of the former. When the results came out proving the clear superiority of Cipralex, he said, Arbacom offered to sell the data to Lundbeck. "We told them to publish," Mr Pedersen said. The company ended up paying for Arbacom's data, he added, but this was its only involvement in the trial. "Regulators prefer studies done by pharmaceutical companies because they are rigorous," Mr Pedersen said. "There was no reason at all for us to be involved with the Arbacom trial."

But questions remain over whether Cipralex represents good value for money to the NHS. The drug has been cited as an example of "evergreening" – a strategy manufacturers use to extend the life of a drug patent. When a drug is about to go off-patent, which would allow it to be copied and sold in a cheaper generic form, the company slightly alters the chemical make-up of its drug and files a new patent. This version is then protected and sold as a new drug, although it often contains similar ingredients to the old one.

Cipramil's patent expired in 2002, at a time when it accounted for 80 per cent of Lundbeck's revenues. Just before this, Lundbeck released Cipralex on to the market. In an article in the British Medical Journal, a senior cardiologist argued: "When resources are limited, giving one patient an expensive drug with no added value when cheaper alternatives exist stops other patients getting treatments they need."

Lundbeck rejected suggestions of "evergreening" in the case of Cipramil and Cipralex. "That is simply not the case," said Mr Pedersen.

A spokeswoman from the Department of Health said: “We are modernising the NHS so we can give patients better access to the medicines they need. That is why we are changing the way drugs are priced to ensure they offer value for money.

“Doctors should be able to focus on what matters most - achieving the best health outcomes for their patient. Value-based pricing will ensure that the price the NHS pays for medicines is based on an assessment of their value, looking at the benefits for the patient, unmet need, therapeutic innovation and benefit to society as a whole.”