Interesting to see what the the Sundays have devoted their in depth coverage and articles to today.

Starting with the Times its focus section has three stories.

Focus: The great middle-class squeeze

Chris Proud and his wife Lorraine should be sitting pretty. The 41-year-olds have a combined income of more than £100,000. He is an accountant and she is a chef who runs her own business catering for executive events and weddings.
They live in an £800,000 detached four-bedroom home in West Sussex with their son William, 12, and nine-year-old daughter Emily. Like many other families, however, they are feeling the squeeze. Their cost of living is rising sharply and they are having to cut back.

“Both our children go to private school and the fees have risen above inflation for the past 10 years,” said Chris. Rising gas and electricity bills, the January hike in train fares, higher council tax and increases in other taxes are adding to the pressure on the family finances. The couple have a fixed-rate mortgage but are not looking forward to the time when it has to be renewed.
“Now we go on only one holiday a year rather than two. My wife is is having to do more functions to keep the balance. We are just having to be a bit more careful and forgo certain things such as fixing things around the house and around the garden. Car insurance has gone up and when my wife is working in London she has to pay the congestion charge.”

Not suprisingly its second one is

Focus: Beauty and the bigot

Another story on the Big Brother crisis

The Channel 4 programme that created the moronic celebrity Jade Goody ate her alive last week. It is now choking on her remains and is unlikely to survive.
C4’s own future as a public broadcaster might also be in jeopardy. And all because of the cynical manipulation of an inarticulate “chavette” with fewer social skills than the jungle woman found in Cambodia last week.

Goody first joined the British celebrity subculture in 2002 after appearing as a freak in the third series of Big Brother, the “reality” show. She famously thought Rio de Janeiro was a footballer and that “Pistachio” painted the Mona Lisa.
Nonetheless, she was subsequently transformed by astute agents into a brand that appealed to legions of similarly afflicted women, and was said to be worth £8m.
No longer: when she emerged from the Big Brother house on Friday, eager for the attention she has come to enjoy, she discovered that her racist bullying of an Indian competitor on the show had caused an international scandal.

The Third is a overseas report,

Focus: End of the run for the Russian party mob


When French police raided the ski resort of Courchevel they brought the ‘party of parties’ to an end. Now locals fear the Russian billionaires who made them rich may never return. John Elliott reports
As the jagged Alpine peaks echoed to the beat of Zveri — a Russian rock band flown in at the whim of a billionaire — everyone agreed it was the best party money could buy. Girls in fur bomber jackets and microskirts tottered across the snow to dance among a huge crowd of Russian men, while overworked waiters struggled to keep up with the demand for super-cooled vodka and gold-flaked champagne.
Earlier that day, diamond-encrusted watches and jewellery had been scooped from the display cabinets of local boutiques like so much candy. Now, fireworks erupted above an 18ft-wide ice replica of the Saviour’s Tower in Moscow, illuminating the revellers below. Private parties were running wild in the £9,000-a-night luxury suites that overlooked what was, by any standards, a stunning scene.

The Observer reports on

Castro: his last battle

In 1997, two men sat down, with others, to dinner in Havana. One was John F. Kennedy Jnr., eldest son of the assassinated US President. The other was 'El Jefe Maximo' - the Maximum Chief - Fidel Castro. What a meeting: Castro and his guest's father were the men who, in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, took the planet closer than ever before, or since, to blowing itself up.
The talk over this meal of shrimp and ice cream, recalls Inigo Thomas, a friend of Kennedy who was present, was 'all about the past', and the discourse largely 'a series of Castro speeches interspersed with questions for John'. Kennedy gave Castro a copy of The Kennedy Tapes . Castro said he was reading books by Winston Churchill and Stefan Zweig, and asked Kennedy what he thought of Richard Nixon. Kennedy replied diplomatically that Nixon had been 'courteous' towards his family. Near the end of the evening, Castro explained his decision not to admit Lee Harvey Oswald to Cuba, prior to Kennedy's assassination. At 2am the encounter ended, Castro saying how much he admired Pope John Paul II - about to make a visit - for rising at five, two hours after he was accustomed to retiring. Two years later the young Kennedy died. A decade on, the world's longest-surviving ruler nears his own end.

Its second story is

My plea: keep art at the heart of Britain

In this wide-ranging and passionate essay, the National Gallery's director, Charles Saumarez Smith, warns that Labour has lost its nerve over the country's treasures

Cast your mind back 10 years to May 1997. There we were, at the start of a bright, vigorous administration called New Labour which came to power on a wave of public optimism about the future of the country and the opportunities for a fresh government of radical change. What were Britain's museums and galleries like?
Most of the effort of the previous Tory government had been placed on trying to get museums to be, as far as possible, financially more self-sufficient; less dependent on government funding and much more on the marketplace; more visitor-oriented and less dominated by narrow scholarly and professional concerns. Museums were to be less dependent on public funding and more on private, including, most especially, charges to visitors.

The Telegraph's new review covers similar ground to the Times with two stories,

It's the economy, stupid

Could Britain get caught in a "wage-price spiral? Could our high-performance economy, "the most successful in the Western world" as Gordon Brown likes to tell us, get sucked into the kind of inflationary problems that did so much harm in the 1970s?
It is a horrifying prospect and, in the wake of last week's price data showing the most important inflation index at a 15-year high, increasing numbers of analysts think such a disaster could happen.
But inflation isn't the only threat facing the British economy. As the Chancellor returns from his tour of India, a number of other potential disasters are crowding the Downing Street doorstep. By the time he finally gets the keys to Number 10, sometime in the summer, the economic good times enjoyed by Mr Blair will be over: winter will have arrived early.

Reality unchecked

It's supposed to be entertainment, but the racism, bullying and ignorance displayed in 'Celebrity Big Brother' is also an indictment of the divided nation we have become. And it won't stop with Jade Goody's eviction