Friday's papers

The Mail,the Telegraph and the Express all lead with the same story this morning.

The UK population passed 61 million after the largest annual increase for at least a generation,

For the first time in more than a decade, natural change - the difference between births and deaths - has overtaken net migration as the main influence behind population growth. says the Telegraph

An immigrant baby boom is fuelling Britain's fastest population growth in half a century.says the Mail adding that

Record immigration levels over the past decade have driven up the number of women of childbearing age.
This helped boost the number of births last year to 791,000 - up 33,000 on 2007.

Immigrant mothers now give birth to one in every four babies born in the UK. In London, more than half of all births – 55 per cent – are to mothers born overseas.

says the Express

The Sun asks our polititians whether they know that there is a war on.Its front page leader

THE 207 faces of our Afghanistan dead are stark reminders of the bloody war we are fighting.
Each represents a sacrifice made for democracy and freedom in the name of Britain. Yet, to its shame, our Government doesn't seem to want to face up to the fact we are in the middle of a savage conflict.

says the paper

Boys end the exam gender divide says the Independent

Boys began a historic fightback in GCSE results published today - outperforming girls in maths for the first time for 12 years.headteachers’ leaders were predicting this trend would spread to other subjects with the result the gap – currently still at 6.9 per cent in the percentage getting five A* to C grade passes – could disappear over the next few years.

Politics is on the front of both the Times and the Guardian,the former says that Gordon Brown is facing a Labour revolt over plans to cut the benefits of the poorest families by up to £15 a week,

Proposals to be implemented next April, a month before a general election, could mean some people losing a fifth of their income.

The Guardian claims that the Tory party is looking at a budget airline model

Most of the papers carry the story of the abducted girl who has turned up 18 years later in a story scarily similar to the Joseph Fritzl case.The Mail reports that

Jaycee Lee Dugard mothered two daughters, now aged eleven and fifteen, with monster Phillip Garrido - one of them when she was just fourteen.
And she was forced to spend the last eighteen years living in sheds and tents in a hidden garden behind her captor’s family house in a suburban California street.

A Populus poll in the Times reveals widespread public criticism of the releaseof Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi, and scepticism about the reasons, with much of the blame falling on the Prime Minister.

Three fifths of those questioned (61 per cent) disagreed with the decision to return al-Megrahi to Libya on the ground of compassion, with 27 per cent agreeing.

The legacy of Edward Kennedy could be a health bill named after him according to the Telegraph which reports that

Barack Obama's plans for a sweeping overhaul of the health care system could be renamed 'Kennedycare' in a bid to capitalise on the bipartisan respect for Senator Edward Kennedy.