NHS superbug inquiry blames trust for deaths reports the front page of the Guardian this morning

Scores of NHS patients were killed during Britain's deadliest outbreak of a hospital superbug, a damning report by the government's health watchdog reveals today.
The Healthcare Commission attributed the deaths of 90 patients at the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells hospitals in Kent to infection from Clostridium difficile, which causes severe diarrhoea and has taken over from MRSA as the main threat to patients.
Evidence will be referred to Kent police and the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) about how the trust's slack infection controls contributed to the deaths. They will decide whether to bring criminal charges, which could include murder, manslaughter or breaches of health and safety legislation, said Anna Walker, chief executive of the Healthcare Commission.

The Mail goes with the same lead

Hospital bosses face possible manslaughter charges after superbug outbreak kills 90

Police and the Health and Safety Executive have been called in to investigate the outbreak – the UK's worst-ever – at the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells trust in Kent.
Senior managers could face charges of criminal negligence or even corporate manslaughter.
Bereaved families described nursing care as 'despicable' and 'sickening', with patients left lying in their own excrement for hours. The report by the Healthcare Commission says a shortage of nurses meant showers and sinks were filthy and commodes not cleaned.

As does the Express

HOSPITAL SQUALOR KILLS 90 PATIENTS

while patients were dying in make-shift wards with beds crammed just inches apart, the trust was spending more than £600,000 on “turnaround teams” of financial experts to help them slash spending.
Initially, the trust claimed that patients had themselves to blame, accusing them of bringing the bug into the hospital when they were admitted.

The pill of life: is the lead in the Times staying with the morning's medical theme

People who take cholesterol-lowering drugs are protected from heart disease and premature death years after they stop taking them, a major study has shown.
New research into statins – the world’s biggest-selling medication – offers dramatic evidence of their long-lasting ability to halt and even reverse the progression of heart disease.
The study, involving 6,500 men, found that those who took statins were still showing benefits of the drugs ten years after they had finished taking them. The chances of suffering a fatal heart attack over the period dropped by more than 25 per cent, the scientists found, while there was no evidence of unexpected side-effects.

Yesterdays proceedings in the Commons do not go unreported

Gordon Brown is advised to rethink his strategy as Tories put him on the back foot says the same paper

Gordon Brown suffered an embarrassing mauling from David Cameron over his failure to call an election yesterday as his “fightback” Pre-Budget Report frayed at the edges.
Labour MPs, who watched in uncomfortable silence as Mr Cameron forced their leader on to the ropes, urged the Prime Minister to rethink his Commons style and strategy or risk handing the initiative to a resurgent Tory party.
Rarely has an Opposition leader scored such a complete victory in Prime Minister’s Questions, as Mr Cameron flayed Mr Brown over his reasons for not proceeding with an autumn poll and Alistair Darling’s “theft” of Tory policies on inheritance tax and non-domiciles.

Cameron mocks 'phoney' Brown over delayed election reports the Independent

Mr Cameron said Mr Brown looked like "a phoney" for denying that poor opinion polls forced his decision not to call an election. "You are the first prime minister in history to flunk an election because you thought you could win it," he said.
The Tory leader asked him: "Have you found a single person who believes your excuses for cancelling the election?"
Mr Cameron urged Mr Brown to "find a bit of courage, get a bit of bottle, get into his car, go down to Buckingham Palace and call that election". He told him: "For 10 years you have plotted and schemed to have this job, and for what? No conviction, just calculation. No vision, just a vacuum."

BROWN FLOUNDERS IN CAM ATTACK says the Sun

With his 'bottle' questioned by a succession of opposition MP's, the Prime Minister repeatedly ducked the question of his failure to call an early election. Tory leader David Cameron told the Commons Mr Brown was "treating the British people like fools" over the aborted election and yesterday's mini-budget.


The Guardian reports that

Brown faces first cabinet criticism as Johnson attacks election dithering

The first public cabinet criticism of Gordon Brown's handling of the decision to rule out an election emerged last night as the health secretary, Alan Johnson, blamed the prime minister for the government's rocky start to the new parliamentary term.
"I'm not saying we are blameless ... if he [Mr Brown] had thought it through and decided a weekend earlier, we wouldn't be having all of this," Mr Johnson told the BBC after David Cameron routed Mr Brown at prime minister's question time. The prime minister had "not had the best of weeks", Mr Johnson said.

The Teleraph reports on the

Suspect 'dubbed himself Osama bin London'

An Islamic leader who called himself "Osama Bin London" groomed and corrupted young Muslims - including the 21/7 bombers - at terror training camps across Britain, a court has heard. Mohammed Hamid told his followers the 52 deaths in the July 7 attacks on London were "not even breakfast to me", the jury was told.
Hamid organised Friday prayer groups at his home in East London and went on a camp in the Lake District with all four of the men convicted of the July 21 attempted bombings, Woolwich Crown Court was told.

According to the Mail

Mohammed Hamid is said to have taken his brainwashed followers on paintballing trips and training camps in the English countryside to prepare them for fighting.
Under his instruction, the young men allegedly performed military-style training, brandishing sticks as if they were guns and practising tactics to counter an armed ambush.

The Independent returns to Burma on its front page

VENGANCE OF THE JUNTA

Monks confined in a room with their own excrement for days, people beaten just for being bystanders at a demonstration, a young woman too traumatised to speak, and screams in the night as Rangoon's residents hear their neighbours being taken away.
Harrowing accounts smuggled out of Burma reveal how a systematic campaign of physical punishment and psychological terror is being waged by the Burmese security forces as they take revenge on those suspected of involvement in last month's pro-democracy uprising.

The devastating cost of Africa's wars: £150bn and millions of lives reports the Guardian

Conflicts in Africa since the end of the cold war have cost the continent £150bn, equivalent to all the foreign aid it has received over the same period, according to a report released by Oxfam today.
The study, Africa's Missing Billions, says that almost half of the countries on the continent have been involved in some form of conflict since 1990 at a substantial cost to lives and development.
The report compares African countries afflicted by conflict with those at peace and says nations at war have, on average, 50% more infant deaths, 15% more undernourished people and life expectancy reduced by five years. Indirect deaths are 14 times higher than deaths in combat.

Princess Diana: 'Paparazzi did'nt help victims' says the Telegraph

One of the first people to arrive at the scene of the car crash which killed Diana, Princess of Wales, has told an inquest jury paparazzi were already taking pictures of the wrecked Mercedes but were making no attempt to help the victims inside. Antonio Lopes-Borges, a motorist, had been overtaken by the speeding Mercedes moments before it crashed in the Alma underpass in central Paris in August 1997, and pulled up his car at the entrance to the tunnel when he realised there had been an accident.

DIANA CAR CRASH SCENE ‘LOOKED LIKE TERRORIST ATTACK’ says the Express

There were a group of North African men, he told the inquest at the High Court in London, while another man, who appeared to be Egyptian, warned him to get out of the tunnel because there was likely to be an explosion.
Mr Lopes-Borges, a Portuguese living in the Parisian suburb of Boulogne, remembered seeing a car – identified by his girlfriend as small and white – weaving its way past the wreckage after apparently entering the tunnel from a slip road.

The Indy reports on another inquest

Bismarck died after injecting cocaine 'every hour for a day'

In the aftermath of the notorious drug-induced death 21 years ago of his friend Olivia Channon, Count Gottfried von Bismarck vowed: "My days of living it up are all over."
The extent to which he failed to keep to his promise was revealed yesterday when a pathologist told an inquest that the count's body had the highest level of cocaine he had ever seen.

And another from the Guardian

Judge killed by blast had loathed wife, says lover

The mistress of a crown court judge who died in a shed fire after a row with his wife over a divorce has described how he had been locked in a loveless marriage with a wife he "loathed".
Kerry Sparrow, 38, a former legal executive who had a two-year affair with Andrew Chubb, 58, told an inquest yesterday that she did not believe his death in a fireball in the grounds of his country home in Westvale, near Chard, Somerset, was an accident or suicide.

Families 'must pay an extra £2,600 a year tax' says the Telegraph

Alistair Darling's proposals had been billed as offering tax cuts to millions with an eye-catching announcement that the inheritance tax threshold would be doubled for couples.
But those claims began to unravel after analysis by the Institute of Fiscal Studies showed that by 2012 millions of households will be facing an annual tax bill of more than £20,000, an increase of around £50 a week.

The same paper reports

Wildcat strikes add to chaos in postal service

The biggest strike for 20 years was due to end yesterday but workers at over 20 sites, including Glasgow, Merseyside, Lancashire and parts of London, stayed away.
The show of defiance came despite both Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, and John Hutton, the Business Secretary, telling the unions to stop the strike action immediately

. adding that

The pressure seemed to have worked last night with the Communications Workers Union confirming that talks over pay, pensions and changes to working practices had restarted

.

Both the Mirror and the Sun lead with

McCartney's £60m divorce D-day says the former

Sir Paul McCartney and Heather Mills will face each other today in a bid to thrash out a £60million divorce deal.
The estranged couple and their lawyers are holding a secret meeting before a High Court judge.
If things go smoothly, the settlement - the biggest in British legal history - could be agreed by Sir Paul, 65, and Heather, 39, by the end of the day.

The Sun's headline is less complimentary

MUCCA GETS £50M TODAY

It is FIVE TIMES the amount Heather, dubbed Mucca over her porn past, had originally demanded from the fomer Beatle.
They decided on the settlement to avoid a lengthy legal battle for the sake of daughter Beatrice, three.

Staying with the Sun it reveals

SVEN AND MRS SKIP HIRE

FRIENDS of the skip firm boss who is Sven Goran Eriksson’s latest flame are praying he won’t bin her.
The Swedish philanderer, 59, has been secretly seeing sultry Marisa Cauchi, 35, for weeks.
She has told pals their relationship is “serious” – but they are not so sure about the Manchester City manager’s intentions.


Gore's climate film has scientific errors reports the Guardian

An Inconvenient Truth, was yesterday criticised by a high court judge who highlighted what he said were "nine scientific errors" in the film.
Mr Justice Barton yesterday said that while the film was "broadly accurate" in its presentation of climate change, he identified nine significant errors in the film, some of which, he said, had arisen in "the context of alarmism and exaggeration" to support the former US vice-president's views on climate change.

Arise 'Sir Beefy' - Ian Botham knighted reports the Mirror

Proud Sir Ian Botham collected his knighthood from the Queen today and declared: “That was mind blowing.”
The cricket legend, 51, is better known to sports fans simply as “Beefy.”
From today, that’s “Sir Beefy.”
As he left Buckingham Palace, Sir Ian revealed he was still waiting to be addressed by the new nickname, but added: “I’ve been called Sir Loin of Beef.”




Finally the Xmas stories have started,the Mail reports that

Santa's sack might be missing Igglepiggle: Shops sell out of Christmas toys

His calming presence just before bedtime has been a godsend to the weary parents of young children.
Igglepiggle - a rising star of the BBC's CBeebies channel - helps lull toddlers to sleep with his songs and stories in the daily episodes of In the Night Garden.But families hoping to buy a replica Igglepiggle as a Christmas present are likely to be disappointed.
Shops are selling out of the cuddly toys as soon as they arrive and few extra shipments are planned.