Saturday, March 01, 2008

Prince Harry continues to dominate the papers,

Let me go back says the Telegraph

A defiant Prince Harry is flying back to Britain tonight determined to return as soon as possible to frontline duties in Afghanistan. Before he boarded his flight the 23-year-old second Lieutenant in the Household Cavalry was moved from his base, only 500 yards from Taliban enemy lines in the volatile Helmand Province, to a secret and secure location after his presence in Afghanistan was leaked on an American web site.


The prince returns a hero and an enemy says the Times

Prince Harry returns to England today, a hero to the Army, a changed man in the eyes of the public and a target for jihadists.
As the Queen, the Prime Minister and the Chief of the Defence Staff queued up to heap praise on the 23-year-old second lieutenant, protection for the Prince is to be upgraded. Al-Qaeda websites posted death threats against him yesterday after the worldwide coverage of his ten weeks in Helmand province, Afghanistan. In stark contrast, army message boards carried unanimous praise for the Prince.


Both the Mail and the Express concentrate on those new dangers

Terror Target Harry says the Mail

Prince Harry has been warned that serving in Afghanistan made him a prime target for terrorists.
Muslim extremists say the young royal is a "legitimate target" after ten weeks secretly fighting the Taliban.
Two Al Qaeda-affiliated websites are calling on jihadists to "slaughter" the third in line to the throne.

Target Harry says the Express

SNEERING Muslim fanatics labelled Prince Harry a target for assassins last night after his heroics against the Taliban.
Harry’s perilous Army mission in Afghanistan was dismissed by British extremists as a mere publicity stunt.
But they also claimed that by participating in an “illegal war”, the brave young Prince had made himself fair game for a
terrorist attack.

The Sun meanwhile reports that

Now Wills is off to fight

PRINCE William is to serve on the front line aboard a Royal Navy warship, The Sun can reveal.
Detailed plans are being drawn up for the future King to fight for his country at his own request — like his war hero brother Harry, 23, who was flying home from Afghanistan last night.Army officer Wills, 25, will be commissioned into the Navy and serve on a frigate or destroyer in one of the world’s trouble spots for at least 30 days later this year.
The Sun knows exact details of where and when Navy top brass are considering sending William.
But we have agreed to withhold key information to protect him and his sailor comrades.

Dogs of war or Pr king? asks the Guardian

The Sun had its own free pullout poster. The broadcasters have been running film on a loop of him out in Afghanistan - firing guns, sitting in tanks and eating an awful lot of army rations.
The media has feasted on Prince Harry since his deployment to Helmand province was revealed on Thursday, and it is likely to continue when he returns to Britain, probably later today.
The extent of the coverage, and the way all the British media - including the Guardian - agreed to keep his tour of duty a secret, has provoked a furious debate and led to questions about whether the third in line to the throne, who is being withdrawn for safety reasons, had become a pawn in a propaganda war.

The Mail meanwhile reports on

Fury as Channel 4 newsreader Jon Snow 'thanks God for Drudge website' for breaking Harry's cover

Jon Snow faced a backlash yesterday after attacking the British media for agreeing to a news blackout.
Angry viewers bombarded the Channel 4 website after the newsreader said journalists should have reported Prince Harry's deployment to Afghanistan - even if it put lives at risk.
In a mass email on Thursday afternoon, Snow praised the Drudge Report - the American website which broke the news and forced the Ministry of Defence to confirm it.


Back to the Guardian which leads with a different story though

Labour MPs revolt over 42 day detention

Gordon Brown is facing the threat of his first defeat in the Commons since taking over as prime minister, after a Guardian survey found strong - and growing - opposition among Labour MPs to the government's plans to detain terror suspects without charge for up to 42 days.
As the Labour party gathers in Birmingham for its spring conference, where ministers will be lobbied by opponents of the planned anti-terrorism laws, the Guardian found as many as a third of the party's 205 backbench MPs could rebel against the government.

More politics in the Times which reports

Nurses denounced as dirty, lazy drunks

A Conservative peer who branded nurses “grubby, drunken and promiscuous” during a debate in the House of Lords faced a rebuke from David Cameron and fury from nursing leaders and ministers yesterday.
The Royal College of Nursing said Lord Mancroft’s comments were “grossly unfair on nurses across the UK” and amounted to a “sexist insult about the behaviour of British women”.
Mr Cameron, who was said to be furious, told Lord Strathclyde, the Conservative leader in the Lords, that he should reprimand the peer.

The Telegraph meanwhile

Tories fail to profit from Gordon Brown misery

The YouGov survey found that the Conservatives have not capitalised on the Government's embarrassments, such as the nationalisation of Northern Rock.
Support for the Tories has fallen back to 40 per cent, down one point in a month while Labour's standing, holding steady at 33 per cent, has been unaffected. The results are likely to raise questions about why Mr Cameron's party is not doing better.

The Independent reports that

Balls rejects claims that political interference damages schooling

Ed Balls, the Children's Secretary, has come out fighting after researchers claimed political interference in the curriculum was preventing primary schools from providing a better education. "I am not going to apologise for delivering what parents want even if these researchers – on the basis of often old research – don't like it," he said.

The paper leads with the headline

A revolution in the skies... a disaster for the planet

Cheap flights. More flights. Multiplying routes. At the end of a week that has seen protests against airport expansion, predictions of further airport chaos, and record oil prices, British travellers are showing no sign of shaking off their addiction to CO2-heavy cheap flights.
A record number of new air links will open from the UK to Europe this summer. The Independent has identified 100 entirely new short-haul international routes to be launched from Britain when the summer schedules begin at the end of this month.


Foriegn news and ahead of Russia's presidential elections the Guardian reports

Kremlin accused of fixing presidential poll

The Kremlin is planning to falsify the results of tomorrow's presidential election by compelling millions of public-sector workers to vote and by fraudulently boosting the official turnout, the Guardian has been told by independent sources.
Governors, regional officials and even headteachers have been instructed to deliver a landslide majority for Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's first deputy prime minister, whom President Vladimir Putin has endorsed as his successor.
Officials have been told they need to secure a 68-70% turnout in this weekend's poll, with about 72% voting for Medvedev. Independent analysts believe the real turnout will be much lower, with 25-50% of the electorate taking part

Turkey halts offensive on separatist Kurdish rebels reports the Times

Turkish troops pulled out of northern Iraq yesterday after a controversial week-long military offensive aimed at dealing a physical and psychological blow against separatist Kurdish rebel hideouts based across the border.
The army said it had killed 237 militants of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and destroyed nearly 300 shelters. Many rebels had been driven from the region and communications had been disrupted. “It has been concluded that the operation met the targets it set at the beginning,” the army said. It added that 27 members of the Turkish security forces had also died.

The Independent report on the latest from Gaza

Israel's warning: rocket fire from Gaza will result in a Palestinian 'holocaust'

An Israeli government minister warned yesterday that increasing rocket fire from Gaza would bring Palestinians a Shoah – the Hebrew word normally used to denote the Nazi Holocaust inflicted on Jews during the Second World War.
The declaration by the Deputy Defence Minister, Matan Vilnai, came amid fresh calls from some Israeli politicians for a ground invasion of Gaza provoked by the launch of eight Soviet-designed Grad rockets into the southern city of Ashkelon during the lethal violence of the past three days.


Meanwhile according to the Times

Settlers dig tunnels around Jerusalem

Jewish settler groups are digging an extensive tunnel network under Muslim areas of Jerusalem's Old City while building a ring of settlements around it to bolster their claim to the disputed city in any future peace deal, anti-settlement campaigners have told The Times.
One group, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, said that settler tunnels could one day extend under the al-Aqsa mosque, Islam's third-holiest site, and claimed that extremists could use the access route to attack the structure in an attempt to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state. Settler groups flatly deny such allegations.

Ahead of tne next round of primaries,the Guardian reports on

Hillary's last stand

After it is all over, when the balloons have deflated and the band has gone home, two incidents from the early part of the campaign are likely to survive in the collective memory. This was before things got really scrappy; before the worst of the red herrings and overreactions; before each side accused the other of what it had itself just been accused of.
The first is what has come to be thought of as "Hillary's tears", that day when she managed to imply crying without actually doing it. And the second is her husband's appearance in South Carolina, when he blew up at the press. But what I will remember most is something that happened in a small town called Indianola.
Back in January, when Hillary Clinton was still the biggest celebrity in the US presidential race, I went to see her speak in the United Methodist Church of Indianola, a small community 20 minutes east of Des Moines.

EXCLUSIVE THE BOY WHO WOULD NOT DIE is the lead in the Mirror thois morning

Proud mum Anat Abraham last night cradled her miracle baby son Matan - and asked: "How will I ever tell him his father tried to kill him."
Anat, whose ex-husband Gil Magira was jailed yesterday for trying to kill little Matan in the womb by secretly lacing her food with powerful abortion drugs, added: "You cannot imagine how wonderful it feels to hold my son.

The latest from the Jersey children's home is widely reported

Cellar police sift through the past for abuse secrets says the Guardian

Each morning this week, after pulling on boots, boiler suits and face masks, a handful of police officers descended into a small cellar with an eight-foot high ceiling and thick, foetid air. Sweating in the heat of their arc lights and trying to avoid kicking up clouds of dust, the officers picked their way through debris, examined the concrete floor and delicately removed bricks from an interior wall. Although they worked in teams, the officers' toil left them utterly drained.

The Mail has

First pictures inside 'Colditz' children' home

The world was offered the first glimpse of the horror buried inside the "Colditz" children's home yesterday.
Underneath the concrete floor of this corridor, a child's skull remained undiscovered for a quarter of a century until an abuse inquiry finally unearthed the gruesome secrets of Haut de la Garenne on Jersey.
Dressed in white protective clothing, forensic experts were continuing the job of searching the grave for clues

The Times asks

Poor little Shannon Matthews. Too poor for us to care that she is lost?

Sarah Payne, smiling in her school uniform; Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, in their Manchester United shirts; Madeleine McCann, staring inquisitively with her distinctive bleeding iris
The names and faces of these girls who have disappeared are etched into the public’s collective memory.
Camera crews camped out in their home towns for weeks or months. Donations totalled thousands — even millions — of pounds. Members of the public, many of them strangers, came in their hundreds to offer help and prayers for their safe return.
Yet the trauma and mystery surrounding the disappearance of one nine-year-old girl almost two weeks ago appeared to drift from public consciousness within days.

The Mirror reports though

Shannon Matthews' mum says all she wants for Mother's Day is daughter back

Shannon Matthews' desperate mother last night movingly declared: "All I want for Mother's Day is my princess back."
As police continued searching thousands of homes for the missing nine-year-old schoolgirl, mum Karen, 32, said: "It is a special family day and we would all spend it together.
"Shannon would usually buy me a present or make me something at school."
Stepfather Craig Meehan, 22, added: "It is going to be a heartbreaking Mother's Day."

Finally many of the papers report on the quick ending of the walk to India by Mark Boyle

The Mail says

'Pilgrim' abandons cashless 'peace walk' to India - because the French thought he was an asylum seeker

Ardent and idealistic, he calls himself a "community pilgrim".
But when Mark Boyle set out on a mission to show he could survive on peace and love instead cash, he was a pilgrim who didn't make much progress ... thanks to the tightwad French.
The aim of the firebrand anti-captialist was to walk 9,000 miles from Britain to India totally penniless, relying on the generosity of human beings in pursuit of his dream of a money-free global economy.

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