Wednesday, August 06, 2008


Maddie returns to the front pages this morning with more revelations form the released files

I saw her in my shop says the Express

A LITTLE girl who looked “very much like" missing Madeleine McCann was seen with a foreign family in a Dutch shop weeks after she vanished.
The girl told the shopkeeper in perfect English: “My name is Maddie. They took me from my holiday.”
The encounter came less than a month after Madeleine went missing from her family’s holiday apartment in Portugal, and was outlined in detail to police there.


The Sun adds

The couple, who said they were from a circus, brought the girl into the party goods shop days after Maddie went missing from her family’s holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal.
Store assistant Anna Stam, 41, alerted Amsterdam cops just over a month later after reading about Maddie’s disappearance on the internet – and realising what she may have witnessed. Days later, on June 18 last year, Dutch police informed Portuguese detectives

The Mirror says that

Madeleine's McCann's parents accused Portuguese detectives of withholding potentially crucial evidence from them today after police files revealed a series of previously secret leads
.

The economy features in the Independent,Rescue plan to save property market

Alistair Darling is drawing up a series of radical proposals to revive Britain's beleaguered housing market as new figures show soaring numbers of homes being repossessed.
Among the measures being considered by the Chancellor are:
*A plan to reintroduce income support for mortgage interest payments for homeowners who lose their jobs.
*Suspending stamp duty so buyers only pay the tax after several years in their new home, or perhaps not until they sell the property.
*Creating a new, tax-free fund to help first-time buyers raise the deposit they need to get on the housing ladder


Brown may gamble on stamp duty says the Guardian

Stamp duty on properties worth up to £250,000 could be suspended as part of an aid package for the housing market that will be central to Gordon Brown's attempt to relaunch his premiership this autumn.
Ministerial sources said the chief aim of any "payment holiday" would be to show the government was on the side of home buyers at a time when property values have slumped and sales stagnated.


The Telegraph leads with

David Miliband lines up Alan Milburn as Chancellor as leadership plot gathers pace

The Foreign Secretary has held private talks with the "ultra Blairite" former health secretary about taking a senior role in a Miliband Government.
In a sign that his plans to become Labour leader are at an advanced stage, Mr Miliband has told friends that Mr Milburn, a hate figure for many of Mr Brown's allies, would play a central role in trying to revive the Government's fortunes
.

Gordon Brown is leading Labour to its worst electoral defeat since the 1930s, according to a new "poll of polls" for The Independent. On current levels of support, Labour would lose almost half its MPs at the next election and David Cameron would become Prime Minister with an overwhelming majority
says the Independent

The Guardian reports that Tory admits harassing rivals in hate campaign

Ian Oakley, 31, may have been trying to "change the political landscape" when he vandalised the property of his rivals and bombarded them with hate mail. But after admitting to 75 offences yesterday during a two-year campaign of intimidation and harassment against local Liberal Democrats, the former chairman of Durham University's Conservatives can now add crimes including falsely accusing opponents of being paedophiles and making menacing phone calls to his political résumé.




There is much coverage from China ahead of the Olympics,the Telegraph reports that

Two Britons have been arrested by Chinese police after they unfurled giant pro-Tibet banners outside the Beijing Olympic Stadium, activists claim.


But its the smog that gets much of the attention

Pollution over Beijing? Don't worry, it's only mist, say officials says the Guardian

As Beijing's polluted air came close to exceeding levels even the Chinese consider dangerous yesterday, one of the International Olympic Committee's most senior figures dismissed the yellow-grey haze that periodically hangs over the city as mist, and blamed the media for overstating pollution problems
.

Our filthy hospitals is the lead in the Mail

Filthy NHS wards are being plagued by pests - with maggots found in slippers and rats in maternity units, it was revealed last night.
Hospitals are so dirty that pest controllers were called out to 20,000 infestations in the past two years.
Experts warned that the appalling levels of hygiene added to the danger to patients from the deadly superbugs MRSA and C.diff, which multiply in the same environments as pests.


Just when you thought it was safe to go back to hospital says The Sun

FILTHY hospital wards are crawling with rats, cockroaches, flies and maggots, it has been revealed.
Shock new figures show there were 20,000 separate infestations in just over two years.
Virtually every NHS trust in the country has been hit by the stomach-churning crisis.


The Times leads with an exclusive

Fakeproof’ e-passport is cloned in minutes

New microchipped passports designed to be foolproof against identity theft can be cloned and manipulated in minutes and accepted as genuine by the computer software recommended for use at international airports.
Tests for The Times exposed security flaws in the microchips introduced to protect against terrorism and organised crime. The flaws also undermine claims that 3,000 blank passports stolen last week were worthless because they could not be forged.


According to the Telegraph

Garages ripping off motorists by 9p a litre

Edmund King, the AA's president, said yesterday that drivers were being "taken for a ride" by retailers. Less than a month ago oil was selling at a record $147 a barrel but by the start of this week it had dropped to about $120. However, prices at the pumps had not fallen to the same extent.


Unmanned spy planes to police Britain reports the Independent

The Government is drawing up plans to use unmanned "drone" aircraft currently deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan to counter terrorism and aid police operations in Britain.
The MoD is carrying out research and development to enable the spy planes, which are equipped with highly sophisticated monitoring equipment that allows them to secretly track and photograph suspects without their knowledge, to be deployed within three years


News from abroad

'Freeze-for-freeze' package ignored as Iran stalls for time on nuclear demands

Iran has ignored the demand that it freeze all nuclear activity in its answer to the international offer of a package of incentives to try to defuse the looming crisis over its nuclear ambitions.
Tehran yesterday reinforced the impression among western diplomats that it is still playing for time by waiting yet another day before delivering a written response to Javier Solana, the EU foreign policy chief, who is leading efforts to avert a confrontation in the Middle East
says the Guardian

'Al-Qaeda woman' in court on attempted murder charge reports the Times

An American-educated neuroscientist who is the only woman accused of working for al-Qaeda’s top leadership appeared in court in New York last night after her capture in Afghanistan.
The US Government alleges that Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani mother of three with a biology degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a doctorate in behavioural neuroscience from Brandeis University, near Boston, is married to the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the man who claims to have organised the September 11 terror attacks in 2001


Tennant Who? says the Independent

He's alienated, adrift in an inimical universe, and subject to bouts of existential depression and to fits of larky lunacy. He gives the impression of knowing more than he can possibly tell to other creatures. From time to time, he exhibits a penchant for sporting student scarves and he exudes the air of a brilliantly batty, eternal undergraduate. Yes, it's clear that Doctor Who must have been a key role model for young Hamlet. Perhaps the Tardis touched down in Elsinore during the troubled Dane's formative years.



Finally the Mail asks Can you give your dog an attack of the yawns?

Everyone who has sat for ages in a doctor’s waiting room will be aware that yawning is infectious.
But did you know that dogs can catch it too?
Research suggests that man’s best friend yawns when he yawns, as a way of empathising with its master.

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