Poet Allen Ginsberg, whose raw, angry verse epitomised America's beat literary movement in the 1950s and `60s, has untreatable liver cancer, it was revealed yesterday. Ginsberg (70) is expected to live between four and 12 months.
In 1956 Ginsberg published Howl and Other Poems, a book of free verse considered the pre-eminent poetic work of the beat movement. It was the subject of an obscenity case but the publisher was cleared in a landmark decision in 1957.
Ginsberg and other writers such as Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, William Burroughs and Lawrence Ferlinghetti came to embody the anti-establishment literary movement that experimented heavily with hallucinogenic drugs. In the 1960s Ginsberg became a strident critic of the war in Vietnam and an advocate of gay rights.
He has written more than 40 works of poetry, his Fall of America winning the National Book Award in 1972.
A trainee policewoman, sacked in 1995 from the New South Wales state police after it was discovered she had worked as a prostitute and stripper, won an unfair dismissal case yesterday.
Kim Hollingsworth, who had given evidence about officers who had used her services as a call girl for Sydney's Black Garter brothel, said she had no ill-feeling toward the police and believed she could work successfully as a police officer.