The retreat from Basra
is the headline on the front page of the Indy
It is an admission of defeat. Iraq is turning into one of the world's bloodiest battlefields in which nobody is safe. Blind to this reality, Tony Blair said yesterday that Britain could safely cut its forces in Iraq because the apparatus of the Iraqi government is growing stronger.
In fact the civil war is getting worse by the day. Food is short in parts of the country. A quarter of the population would starve without government rations. Many Iraqis are ill because their only drinking water comes from the highly polluted Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
Nowhere in Mr Blair's statement was any admission of regret for reducing Iraq to a wasteland from which 2 million people have fled and 1.5 million are displaced internally.
Whilst the Guardian reports
Gunmen, children, brutality and bombs - Iraq's dirty war
At first they are ghost figures in the weapons' system monitor, glowing with body warmth and two-dimensional. From inside the American Bradley fighting vehicle approaching Burhiz, an insurgent neighbourhood of Baquba, you quickly acclimatise to the reality of this representation of human life.
Boys on bikes cycle backwards and forwards on a footbridge over a small canal lined with houses and groves of date palms. Women in headscarves look anxiously in groups from windows. Men walk with shopping bags. A gunman, clutching an AK-47, bobs his head around the corner of an alleyway close to a school.
The Sun has the headline
1600 out...one's in
THE Ministry of Defence has confirmed that Prince Harry will be sent to serve in Iraq
Prince Harry’s posting to Iraq is a major victory for the 22-year-old — who had threatened to QUIT the Army if he was barred from the front line.
The 22-year-old third in line to the throne is to become the first royal to be deployed on a tour of duty in a war zone for a quarter of a century.
His uncle, the Duke of York, flew helicopters in the Falklands conflict 25 years ago.
News that he is heading for the danger zone came on the day Tony Blair pulled 1,600 British troops out of Iraq.
Harry will go out at the end of May along with the rest of his unit, A Squadron, the Household Cavalry Regiment, based in Windsor’s Combermere Barracks.
The Telegraph talks of
Top aide's damning attack on Blair's Iraq war
Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the former ambassador to the United Nations and the first British envoy to Iraq, said the Prime Minister had taken his "eye off the ball" in the crucial first days and weeks after the liberation, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.
In the starkest language concerning the failure of the Government to anticipate the insurgency, Sir Jeremy said: "In the days following the victory of 9 April [2003] no one, it seems to me, was instructed to put the security of Iraq first. To put law and order on the streets first. There was no police force. There was no constituted army except the victorious invaders.
The Independent reports that
Tony Blair's announcement yesterday on pulling out British troops from Iraq had been long expected, and produced little by way of surprises. For almost nine months now, senior military officers have been briefing that the force of 7,100 would be reduced to half the number by this spring.
The recent American "surge" in Baghdad raised doubts about whether the British can actually carry out the withdrawal from their area of control, the Shia-dominated south, within this timetable. The US administration was anxious that this would allow the Iranians to channel even more weapons across a porous border. There were also concerns about the road convoys from Kuwait on which the Americans depend for 80 per cent of their supplies.
Mr Blair insisted that Britain would stick to the exit strategy, irrespective of US operations in Baghdad. But a closer examination of what he said shows this is not quite the case.
The Times amongst the heavyweights is the only paper which doesnt focus on Iraq for its main story
Britons fall out of love with marriage
The number of Britons choosing to marry has fallen to the lowest levels in a hundred and eleven years.
Latest figures reveal that the number of marriages has dropped by 30,000 between 2004 and 2005 to a total of just over 244,000.
Opposition parties will use the data today, compiled by the Office for National Statistics, to attack Labour policies for hastening the demise of the institution of marriage.
Experts predict that the 2005 decline of 10 per cent will get worse if the Government pushes through plans to give cohabiting couples the same legal rights as married couples.
It also reports that
High Court victory opens the way to £15bn pensions compensation
The Government was under mounting pressure yesterday to pay out up to £15 billion in compensation to victims of collapsed occupational pension schemes after four pensioners won a High Court victory.
In test cases that affect between 75,000 and 125,000 people, a judge quashed the Government’s decision to reject a finding by the Parliamentary Ombudsman that it was guilty of maladministration.
More than 50 backbench MPs called on the Government to honour the Ombudsman’s findings and pay what could be the largest compensation package from the Government.
Tony Blair stopped short of agreeing to a full pay-out but signalled that a deal would be forthcoming. The exact terms of the judgment were still being studied, the Prime Minister said. But he insisted that any package had to be affordable.
The Guardian reports that
Forensic lab errors in hundreds of crime cases
Hundreds of killers and rapists may have escaped justice because of blunders by the government-owned forensic science laboratory that were uncovered by senior police officers reviewing the unsolved murder of Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common.
Over a five-year period, the Forensic Science Service (FSS) failed to detect tiny samples of DNA in 2,500 cases involving murders, rapes and serious assaults. Senior officers believe that in many of those cases DNA samples could have been found and matched to suspects, had the FSS used different techniques that were being used by other privately run laboratories.
Meanwhile the Mail continues its weeks theme on its front page
How the banks are taking their revenge
Banks are kicking out customers who demand refunds of illegal and unfair penalty charges.
The revenge move has been condemned as part of a "deplorable" campaign of intimidation.
Banks have also begun levying hefty "administrative" fees for providing the copies of old statements needed for a refund claim.
Whilst the Express leads with
SCRAP NEW TAX ON HOUSE SALES
MORTGAGE lenders and estate agents joined forces yesterday to wage a campaign against plans for a new tax on home owners. Moves to make Home Information Packs compulsory have been branded disastrous by the powerful alliance, which fears that the new legislation could damage the housing market.Labour ministers are insisting that the scheme will speed up the home-buying process, reveal energy efficiency, cut the number of transactions which fail late and prevent gazumping. But a study by property company In2Perspective showed last year that the proposals could instead trigger a £1.35trillion property crash.
Back to the Mail which is taken aback by the non appearance of Tony Blair at the unveiling of Mrs Thatcher's statue
Blair makes his excuses and snubs the Bronze Lady's unveiling
Lady Thatcher, 81, was surrounded by her former Cabinet ministers and her successor Sir John Major.
But Mr Blair, who earlier had to listen to MPs tear into the failures of his Iraq policy, pleaded other engagements and did not attend.
Finally the Telegraph reveals a
Giant step to discovering alien life
Astronomers have captured enough light from two planets far beyond our own solar system to reveal details of their chemical make-up, marking a new phase in the search for extraterrestrial life. By analysing the faint glow of one of these alien worlds they have found tentative evidence that suggests the presence of chemicals which play a role in one theory of how life began on Earth.
The chemicals, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, may have helped the formation of RNA, the ancestral genetic material of DNA, the building-blocks of life on our own planet.
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