The government is surrounded by controversy this morning in the papers.
According to the Mail

Blair caves in over adoption laws

Tony Blair has dramatically caved in over the row about gay adoption.
His hopes of a deal to avoid a direct clash with church leaders were shattered by fierce Cabinet opposition.

Instead, in a sign of the Prime Minister's crumbling authority, the Government will insist that Roman Catholic adoption agencies must not turn away homosexual couples.

The Guardian leads with the same story,but a differing viewpoint

Cabinet rejects exemption on gay adoptions

The Catholic church is almost certain to lose its battle for special treatment over gay adoption rules under a deal agreed by the cabinet to heal damaging divisions between senior ministers. Cabinet sources said the new proposals would require Catholic adoption agencies to consider gay couples - or close down - after a reasonable delay that would allow them to ensure that the children in their care are properly dealt with.

The Telegraph follows the lead of the Mail,

Blair retreats over opt-out for gay adoption

In a stark illustration of his diminishing authority, the Prime Minister has been forced to accept a deal which will rule out any exemptions for Roman Catholic adoption agencies from gay rights laws.
The Prime Minister had infuriated the Cabinet by declaring he wanted to strike a compromise after the Catholic Church threatened to close its adoption agencies if it was made illegal for them to turn away same-sex couples.

The Sun attacks the government on another front,complete with a picture of the Home Secretary with a missing brain and a question mark it says

John Reid's brain is missing

A MASSIVE hunt was under way last night for Home Secretary John Reid’s BRAIN after his abysmal failure to solve the prisons crisis.
There were fears for the Home Secretary’s sanity after he broke a series of promises to get a grip of the overcrowding fiasco.
Mr Reid had pledged to build more cells, set up prison ships and turn disused Army camps into jails. But, in what could have been a sign of dementia, he has resorted to begging judges to let crooks loose rather than send them to the slammer.

WHAT A COP-OUT

Is the headline in the Mirror,

POLICE chiefs yesterday accused Home Secretary John Reid of "letting down" bobbies by trying to cut numbers sent to prison.
Dr Reid has urged courts not to send non-violent criminals to jail because the prisons are too full.
But Rick Naylor, president of the Police Superintendents' Association said it was a body blow to the morale of officers.

The Independent has a slighty more balanced view although still blaming the government,

Police blame ministers as hunt for vacant cells is stepped up

Ministers were lambasted yesterday for failing to anticipate the jail overcrowding crisis as a desperate hunt for beds for newly convicted criminals was stepped up. With more than 80,000 people behind bars and offenders held in accommodation condemned as unfit for human habitation, prison governors warned that the only remaining beds were in low-security open jails. At current rates, even they could be filled within two days.

The Third prong of the attack is led by the Times which reports

MPs condemn Blair for skipping debate on Iraq

Tony Blair faced relentless criticism for missing a full-day Commons debate on Iraq yesterday as Margaret Beckett predicted a “potential breakthrough”, with Basra province transferred to Iraqi control in the spring.
William Hague, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, accused Mr Blair of “skulking out of the chamber” at a time when British lives were being lost, and Sir Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat leader, demanded leadership from Mr Blair, asking what could be more important than that the Prime Minister be in the Commons at a time when British forces were at risk every day.

The Independent reports from Baghdad on its front page

Inside Baghdad: A city paralysed by fear

Baghdad is paralysed by fear. Iraqi drivers are terrified of running into impromptu checkpoints where heavily armed men in civilian clothes may drag them out of their cars and kill them for being the wrong religion. Some districts exchange mortar fire every night. This is mayhem beyond the comprehension of George Bush and Tony Blair.
Black smoke was rising over the city centre yesterday as American and Iraqi army troops tried to fight their way into the insurgent district of Haifa Street only a mile north of the Green Zone, home to the government and the US and British embassies. Helicopters flew fast and low past tower blocks, hunting snipers, and armoured vehicles manoeuvred in the streets below.

Meanwhile the Guardian reports that

Britain at odds with US over Iraq troop pullout

Signs of tension between the US and Britain over London's plans to withdraw some of the 7,000 UK troops in southern Iraq from this spring emerged yesterday. Speaking on the day that the foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, said she remained confident that British troops would start to be withdrawn from Basra in the spring, the US ambassador in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, said he wanted Britain to keep its troops at its current level.

The Indy reporting that

Republican opposition to 'surge' grows

Ignoring President George Bush's State of the Union plea to give his new Iraq policy time to work, senior Democratic and Republican senators pressed ahead with a resolution flatly opposing his plan to send more than 20,000 extra troops to Baghdad, and setting up a clash between Congress and the executive branch.
The resolution ­ non-binding but of great symbolic importance ­ was approved by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday by 12 votes to nine, before going to the full Senate next week. Senator Chuck Hagel, the sole Republican to join 11 Democrats in support of the measure, said: "We better be damn sure we know what we're doing, all of us, before we put 22,000 more Americans into that grinder."

The Times also reports on President Bush's woes

First the Democrats, then the public: now Bush's own party is deserting him

Hours after pleading with the American people to give his new war strategy a chance, President Bush faced a growing Republican revolt on Capitol Hill yesterday and intense public hostility to his Iraq troop “surge”.
After a State of the Union address in which Mr Bush cut a drastically diminished figure, Republicans and Democrats rejected his call for steadfastness and pressed ahead with resolutions opposing his plan to send 21,500 extra troops to Iraq.
In the Senate, a growing number of Republicans broke ranks to oppose the plan as the chamber debated two resolutions repudiating the troop increase.

The Independent takes another angle on the State of Union address

Bush's 'clean fuel' move may cause more harm, say environmentalists

Environmentalists are unimpressed with George Bush's pledge to develop alternative sources of energy - accusing him of failing to confront the real issues driving climate change.

And continues

activists said yesterday that however impressive Mr Bush's plans may have sounded - especially given his reputation for intransigence over issues such as the Kyoto treaty - they offered little in substance.
"There is no revolution in global warming policy in anything the President is proposing, no matter how the White House tries to spin it," said Philip Clapp, the president of the National Environmental Trust. "The numbers are calculated to sound big and impressive but the President is being just as intransigent on global warming as he is on Iraq, ignoring Congress, major business leaders, and the public, who have called for action."

Away from Iraq and Bush the Telegraph reports that

Drug gangs ‘using primary pupils for playground deals’

Jim Knight, the schools minister, said gangs are even active in primary schools where young children are used to pass messages to older gang members.
Officials say the cities with the worst problems are Birmingham, Manchester and London.
Mr Knight said yesterday that the Government intends to crack down on school gang membership before it becomes "a genuine worry".

The Mirror's front page has an ariel picture of Old Trafford

EXCLUSIVE: WHO'S ON THE WING?

Claiming

MYSTERY last night surrounded the whereabouts of aerial footage taken of Manchester United stars in top-secret training sessions.
It remained unclear who authorised the filming in a specially converted Cessna light aircraft and whether the material is destined for this country or abroad.
The covert clips of players such as Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo working on tactics, formation, free kicks and penalties during the astonishing spying mission could be invaluable to rival clubs.
Videos and stills of the training were driven from a Derbyshire airfield to Heston Services on the M4 - a mile from Heathrow airport - and handed to a mystery client in a Chrysler Grand Voyager with blacked-out windows.

A good story for the Front of the Express,

Tax refunds for millions

MILLIONS of families are in line for council tax windfalls after being overcharged for more than a decade.Experts revealed that town halls have placed up to a quarter of all households in the wrong tax bands.Now council tax payers are being urged to claim back the money, which could mean windfalls of thousands of pounds.Financial expert Martin Lewis said: “Many thousands are already following the process and millions could gain.”

Finally as the Uk gets its first snow falls of the winter,the Telegraph headlines

A sprinkling of warm snow brings rail chaos

An inquiry has been launched by both Network Rail and train operators after a small dusting of snow threw much of the country's commuter system into disarray yesterday.
Network Rail admitted that it had failed to spray enough anti-freeze on the points and rails as a precaution against the predicted bad weather.
This is vital when — as on Tuesday night — the fall in temperature is insufficient to trigger automatically the built-in point heaters which prevent them from freezing up.
Instead the train operators were confronted with what a Network Rail spokesman described as "loose, wet snow", which compacted between the points and caused them to jam.

The Sun describes the situation as

21st Century Britain ... flaky

BRITAIN came to a standstill yesterday — after a snowfall of just threequarters of an INCH.
The light overnight flurries across south-east Britain hit trains, planes and roads — causing major delays for commuters.
And power cuts left hundreds without electricity for 24 hours.
Yesterday there was astonishment that the UK’s infrastructure ground to a halt because of a few flakes of snow.