News in Brief

The bodies of three servicemen killed in Iraq were flown back to Britain for a “moving and dignified” repatriation service watched by their families. The Union Flag-draped coffins of Lance Corporal Allan Douglas, 22, Corporal Gordon Pritchard, 31, and Trooper Carl Smith, 23, arrived at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire. The three were the 99th, 100th and 101st service personnel to die in Iraq since hostilities began.

Cleaners’ pay rise

Cleaners at the House of Commons are to get a near 30 per cent pay increase after a year-long campaign and two strikes. They will also get 28 days’ holiday compared with just 12 before they went on strike and will also be entitled to sick pay for the first time. From next January they will be paid £6.70 an hour.

Beat bobbies back

The bobby on the beat is to be reintroduced to London under plans by Sir Ian Blair, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Scotland Yard plans to scrap the practice of pairs of officers patrolling areas by car, first introduced in the 1960s. Up to 2,000 officers a day could be patrolling on foot under the programme.

Assets frozen

Five men, three companies and a charity based in Britain, have had their assets frozen. The men, Sara Properties, Ozlam Meadowbrook Investments and Sanabel Relief Agency are accused of being involved in financing the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, allegedly linked to al-Qaeda

Visitor numbers up

A record number of overseas visitors travelled to Britain last year despite last July’s London bombings. There were 29.95 million visits to the country last year, an 8 per cent increase on 2004, the Office for National Statistics said. The number of visits made by North Americans fell by 3 per cent to 4.23 million.

London Eye rent dispute settled

A stand-off that began in December 2004 between British Airways and the South Bank Centre over rental costs for the London Eye has been resolved. The centre demanded a rent increase from £65,000 a year, granted when the Eye was viewed as a temporary structure, to £1 million. The new rent will be £500,000 a year for 25 years. The Tussauds Group has just finalised ownership of the London Eye.

BMW relisted

Google has allowed BMW’s German website back on to its search engine index after the carmaker removed webpages that had artificially boosted its popularity. The company was accused of using a dummy “doorway” website that persuaded Google’s computers to put BMW high up on its search lists.

Falconio appeal

Bradley Murdoch, who was convicted of the murder of Peter Falconio, the British backpacker, in the Australian Outback, is to appeal against his conviction and sentence. Murdoch, 47, was told in December that he must serve at least 28 years without parole. The appeal is expected to be heard within six months.

Rose-tinted deal

A pocket sketchbook used by Pablo Picasso for one of his best-known paintings was sold for £959,640 at Sotheby’s in London. The 21 drawings of acrobats, harlequins and other circus performers evolved into Famille de Saltimbanques, one of the first large works of the artist’s Rose Period, painted in Paris in 1905.

Film casts the ‘wrong’ terrier

A new film about Greyfriars Bobby has provoked complaints from dog enthusiasts for featuring a West Highland terrier instead of a Skye terrier.

The dog, immortalised in a book by Eleanor Atkinson and a 1961 Walt Disney film, became a minor celebrity in Edinburgh in the 1860s after refusing to leave his master’s grave for 14 years. Just once a day he would venture out of the graveyard, drawing crowds as he went for his lunch at a nearby coffee house. Photographs indicate that he was a Skye terrier, and the Kennel Club described the casting of the wrong breed as a “glaring error”.

Christopher Figg, who produced The Adventures of Greyfriars Bobby, which opens tomorrow, said: “Maybe he was a Skye terrier, maybe he wasn’t. But the fact is that Westies make better actors.”

Discworld’s £10m TV treatment

Sir David Jason is to star in the first live-action treatment of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld.

The author has watched Harry Potter, Narnia and Middle Earth break box-office records, but resisted all attempts to transform the 35 million-selling series into the promised “franchise goldmine”. But yesterday he said that he had agreed to turn Hogfather, the 21st book in the series, into one of the most expensive films made for television. Jason will star as Albert, “Death’s two-thousand year-old manservant”, in a £10 million, four-hour long film, to be shown in two parts at Christmas. Its special effects will be produced by the team behind Troy and Harry Potter.

Pratchett has earned £80 million from the Discworld series, in 33 novels. His fictional world is set on the backs of four elephants standing on the carapace of a gigantic turtle.

Publisher to put books on screen

A mainstream publisher is planning to make films based on its own books.

Random House, whose bestselling authors include Dan Brown and John Grisham, is to develop, finance and produce films with Focus Features, which was showered with Oscar nominations last week for Brokeback Mountain, The Constant Gardener and Pride & Prejudice.

Random House Films will shoot two or three films a year, each with a budget of up to £11.5million. Peter Gethers, head of the company, said: “This is a first on several levels. There’s not been a mainstream publisher who has ever got into the movie business in this way . . . we’re co-financing the movies. This is the first time a publisher has been in the position where we can greenlight a movie based on our own books.”