What happened to childhood? How we are failing the young asks the Indy
The health and well-being of an entire generation of children are at risk because the Government is failing to uphold their rights to privacy, safety and equality.
A dossier of evidence from 380 campaign and welfare groups, the most extensive ever into children's rights, obtained by The Independent on Sunday reveals that more than 40 child-protection safeguards are being breached in the UK.
The Children's Rights Alliance for England (CRAE), which represents the groups, is to hand over the evidence to the United Nations and accuse the Government of "wilful neglect" over its repeated failure to implement the international treaty protecting under-18s, the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
CRAE, whose members include Save the Children and Barnado's, warns that the widespread use of CCTV in schools, the "naming and shaming" of Asbo teenagers and the fact that parents can still smack children at home are just some examples of how the rights of children are being undermined.
Meanwhile the Observer reports on
Call to ban all school exams for under-16s
All national exams should be abolished for children under 16 because the stress caused by over-testing is poisoning attitudes towards education, according to an influential teaching body.
In a remarkable attack on the government's policy of rolling national testing of children from the age of seven, the General Teaching Council is calling for a 'fundamental and urgent review of the testing regime'. In a report it says exams are failing to improve standards, leaving pupils demotivated and stressed and encouraging bored teenagers to drop out of school.
The Telegraph reports that
Student debts break £3 billion
Figures to be released by the Student Loans Company this week will show a rise of more than £620 million in the money undergraduates in England owe.
The debt of current students - due to a combination of £3,000-a-year tuition fees and maintenance loans of up to £6,000 - is now three times the 1997 level.
The figures cast a shadow on the thousands of A-level entrants hoping to start university in the autumn. By the time they graduate, they will face debts of about £30,000, which most will still be paying off into their mid-thirties.
It leads though with
Dilemma for Brown as Blair plans EU deal
Less than three weeks before he relinquishes power, Mr Blair held talks on the framework for the treaty, an updated version of the failed European Union constitution, with Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president.
The controversial manoeuvre, at the G8 summit in Germany, came despite a promise to MPs by Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, that "nothing you could really call negotiations" had taken place.
For the Times the lead is
UK’s richest man in slave labour row
WORKERS employed by Lakshmi Mittal, Britain’s richest man, are accusing the billionaire of cashing in on “slave labour” conditions after scores have died in accidents in his mines.
Coalminers working in Mittal’s Kazakh mines claim his firm is endangering their lives by using dangerous, outdated equipment and by cutting corners. More than 90 have died in the mines since 2004.
Miners claim that conditions are worse than in Soviet times and say they would rather work in Siberian mines.
This weekend Arcelor Mittal, his company, said health and safety was a “top priority” and that it intended to invest £63m improving safety at the mines.
Meanwhile the same paper reports on its front page
Secret plan to send Harry to fight Taliban
ARMY chiefs are planning to deploy Prince Harry quietly to Afghanistan in an attempt to deter him from quitting the army.
He is training at a remote British Army base in Alberta, Canada, from where he can be flown to the war against the Taliban without attracting attention. The death yesterday of the 60th British serviceman in Afghanistan means it could still be as dangerous a posting as Iraq.
The prince, a junior officer in the Blues and Royals, is receiving extra training on armoured vehicles, particularly the Scimitar reconnaissance vehicle used by his unit.
The News of the World though has rather different news on Harry
DRUNKEN Prince Harry is pictured slobbering all over girls in a sleazy club — just hours after our 150th soldier died in Iraq.
As British troops mourned the landmark casualty, we can reveal Harry spent his off-duty hours on army training in Canada SLUGGING back booze and SNOGGING barmaids.
The unruly royal — held back from a posting to Iraq and warned to watch his behaviour as his comrades headed for the front — drooled over beauty Cherie Cymbalisty, asking her: "Are you wearing any underwear?"
TERROR THREAT ENDS HARRY NIGHTCLUBBING says the Express
THE REAL reason Prince Harry has been told to stay away from nightclubs is because of fears he could be killed by Islamic terrorists.
The third in line to the throne was reported to have been banned from clubbing last month after his deployment to Iraq was blocked by the head of the Army, amid fears his presence would put his colleagues in greater danger.
The Mail has a front page exclusive
The picture that proves 'torture flights' are STILL landing in the UK
The row over CIA 'torture flights' using British airports has deepened following fresh evidence that a plane repeatedly linked to the controversial programme landed in the UK just days ago.
The plane was logged arriving at RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk last weekend, and watching aviation experts said the aircraft, piloted by crew clad in desert fatigues, was immediately surrounded on the runway by armed American security forces.
The other exclusive of the week is widely examined
We did it their way says the Telegraph
To Western eyes, Saudi Arabia's super-rich royal princes appear a confusing mix of pious Muslims and decadent playboys. But it is their distinctive approach to doing business that is now giving Britain a headache.
Bribery team probing BAE case alleges UK dirty tricks say the Independent
Staff at the world's anti-bribery watchdog claim they were targets of a British-led "dirty tricks" campaign after they began investigating the Government's decision to halt an official inquiry into secret commission payments to a Saudi prince.
Senior employees at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) allege they were smeared by Britain and put under pressure to drop their probe into allegations that BAE paid bribes to win Saudi arms deals.
One senior figure said it was "absolutely clear" that the OECD was being smeared. The smears are alleged to range from seeking to remove officials from their posts, undermining them with representatives of other countries and helping to circulate damaging information about staff linked to the inquiry.
The Observer finds the beginnings of a new scandal
MI6 probes UK link to nuclear trade with Iran
A British company has been closed down after being caught in an apparent attempt to sell black-market weapons-grade uranium to Iran and Sudan, The Observer can reveal.
Anti-terrorist officers and MI6 are now investigating a wider British-based plot allegedly to supply Iran with material for use in a nuclear weapons programme. One person has already been charged with attempting to proliferate 'weapons of mass destruction'.
During the 20-month investigation, which also involved MI5 and Customs and Excise, a group of Britons was tracked as they obtained weapons-grade uranium from the black market in Russia. Investigators believe it was intended for export to Sudan and on to Iran.
So is the world a better place after the G8 summit? The answer might surprise you says the Indy
Once it was possible to sum one up before it even began, as the final communiqué would have been settled in advance, and the media swarm would have to scratch about in the "bilaterals", the one-on-one side meetings among the leaders of the world's seven largest industrialised economies, plus Russia, to find something to report.
Not this year. There was no previous agreement on the central topic of climate change. At the same time, activists, development organisations - and singers turned campaigners Bono and Bob Geldof - wanted Mr Blair to confront fellow summiteers over the targets they agreed at Gleneagles two years ago for aid to Africa. And on the very eve of the gathering, there suddenly flared up a dispute between Russia and the West which appeared to threaten a return to the Cold War.
Swim in British waters at your peril says the Times
THE chances of swimmers catching stomach bugs are up to one in seven every time they go into the sea at more than 100 British beaches.
The level of pollution is so high from sewage and farm effluent in popular resorts around the country – including Scarborough, Hastings, Ilfra-combe and Hunstanton – that the water fails to come up to standards of cleanliness recommended by the European Union.
The continuing pollution of bathing water comes despite a 30-year clean-up by water companies costing £10 billion that has brought big improvements.
The state of Britain’s polluted and dying seas is assessed in detail in Sea Change, a new book by Richard Girling, a Sunday Times Magazine journalist, which will be published next month by Eden Project Books.
PARIS ILLNESS IS CLAUSTROPHOBIA reports the Sunday Mirror
PANIC-STRICKEN Paris Hilton has been put on suicide watch in jail.
The extra safety measure comes as we can reveal that the 26-year-old hotel heiress secretly suffers from claustrophobia - a fear of enclosed spaces.
Paris is being kept in solitary confinement on the medical ward at Los Angeles' notorious Twin Towers prison.
Her room has a glass door and jail sources say a sergeant is watching her at all times
Whilst also revealing
MACCAS GET BACK
SIR Paul McCartney will spend his 65th birthday with Heather Mills next week - amid an astonishing turnaround in their bitter divorce battle.
Heather will join Paul at his Peasmarsh country estate a week tomorrow for an intimate celebration with their three-year-old daughter Beatrice.
The gathering - utterly unthinkable just three months ago as the warring pair faced each other at the High Court - marks a U-turn in the couple's acrimonious divorce.
INTRUDER SEIZED AT No 10 reveals the Express
A DRUG addict was able to walk into the Prime Minister’s offices unchallenged in a blunder that has prompted a massive overhaul of Whitehall security.
Obadiah Marius and his girlfriend were able to walk into the back offices of 10 Downing Street without being stopped or checked by staff. The alert, exposing the ease with which the couple were able to reach the heart of the Government’s supposedly secure buildings, happened last Monday, when Tony Blair was in London, but only emerged when Marius appeared in court on Thursday. Marius told the Sunday Express: “I got into an area I should never have been allowed into. It really is a disgrace. I think they are going to drop the charges. No way should I have got in wearing what I was.”
The Telegraph reveals
the ad men behind the logo fiasco
After a week in which the new logo sparked nationwide ridicule, hostile questions in the House of Commons and a series of epileptic fits, it seems that only one question remained unanswered: exactly whose bright idea was this?
It can now be revealed that the man who led the design team that created the logo is Patrick Cox, the executive creative director of Wolff Olins, an Islington-based brand consultancy with links to the Labour establishment.
Hold back the lynch mob - give the logo a fair hearing says Peter York in the Independent
It's not for me, the new Olympic logo. My first reaction when I saw it on newsprint was that it was the world of Timmy Mallett - the aesthetic of a 1980s Saturday morning TV kids' show. Comic book graphics in pastel sharps, big specs in red jelly frames, Bananarama meeting the kids. (There is an early-1980s revivalism going on in the world of New Graphics so several hundred people across the world would get it immediately.) But it's not for me, in the more important sense that I'm not the core target market. Nor is the Telegraph's leader-writer. The market is global, sports-loving youth in mud huts and igloos. Nor is newsprint the medium - this isn't a tasteful bit of corporate branding, designed for the writing paper of a FTSE 250 holding company. This is a device that's meant to work at scale, to move in electronic media - on mobile phone screens and TVs and laptops - and to incorporate other things in interesting combinations. I don't know whether it can - but that's the question to ask, rather than comparing it with classic Olympic posters from the Golden Age.
The Observer picks another theme of the week
What does it mean to be British?It is the debate on everybody's lips - just how British are we? Last week came plans for a British Day. Then Gordon Brown spoke of 'British jobs for British people'. As a new study demands we celebrate 'where we live' to combat social division, is there any way to define a nation's values?
So what defines Britishness? Is it The Archers? A country house in the Cotswolds? The last night of the Proms ... or yesterday's glittering Bollywood film awards in Yorkshire? In central London yesterday, within the space of a few hours, three events typical of a June afternoon provided an added reminder of how difficult it is to define, much less legislate for, 'Britishness'.
The Sunday Times has
The Inside Story of Campign Maddy-Gerry and Kate McCann have led one of the biggest missing person appeals in history in order to find their daughter. Steven Swinford, who has covered the story from the start, explains the ideas, connections and raw emotional energy that have driven it
In the space of a few days Gerry and Kate McCann had been to Italy to meet the Pope, flown to Spain and spent the weekend with their two-year-old twins, Amelie and Sean, in Portugal.
Now they were in Berlin, hoping to jog the memory of German tourists who had been staying in the Algarve when their daughter Madeleine vanished last month.
As they sat before 60 journalists and a live television audience of millions on Wednesday they were asked the question they least expected.
Staying with the topic the Mirror reports
McCANNS: HUNT ON HOLD TO GRIEVE
MADELEINE McCann's shattered father Gerry told yesterday how he needed to put the campaign to find her on hold to take time to grieve.
In an emotional interview the heartbroken dad said: "Kate and I need to grieve.
"Not because we fear the worst but to grieve her not being with us. We just need to take stock and decide what is best to do from now."
The couple - who have worked tirelessly since their daughter went missing 38 days ago - know they have done everything they possibly can in Portugal.
Three weeks and counting
Blair 'may become a Catholic deacon' says the Mail
Tony Blair has discussed becoming a Roman Catholic deacon when he quits office.
The revelation comes as he prepares to meet the Pope amid speculation that he will use the audience in the Vatican to announce his conversion.
In his last foreign engagement, just days before he leaves Downing Street for the final time, the Prime Minister will visit Pope Benedict XVI in what officials say will be a "highly significant" personal mission.
Blairs at a loss as sun sets on their decade says the Telegraph
Tony Blair is poised to enter his final fortnight as Prime Minister with uncertainty and chaos surrounding virtually every aspect of his future life.
After more than a decade in power, he faces difficult challenges over where he will live, how he will deal with the security threat to him, how he will pay his massive mortgage debts and how he will find a fulfilling new role.
Finally a happy ending in the News of the World
BRAVE 7/7 survivor Martine Wright — who lost both legs in the terror outrage — is to walk down the aisle.
Blinking away tears of joy, Martine told the News of the World: "I WILL walk down the aisle — there's absolutely no question about that.
"My prosthetic legs won't stop me enjoying my big day. There'll be champagne and laughter. I'm going to wear a big white dress and I'll be in his arms for the first dance.
"Nick is the most wonderful man. We're both so happy. When he proposed I couldn't stop crying."
The big moment came while Martine, and Nick, both 34, were on holiday in Spain with friends.
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