Friday's papers

The bg news on the front of both the Times and the Guardian is Barack Obama's decision to scrap the European Missile shield.

The decision to shelve the Bush-era plan for a “Star Wars” defence system was denounced by Republicans as appeasing Moscow and caused dismay among former Soviet satellites.says the former

The U-turn is arguably the most concrete shift in foreign policy from that of the Bush administration, which spent years negotiating to place silos and interceptor missiles in Poland, and a radar complex in the Czech Republic

.says the Guardian adding that

The shift is a triumph for the Kremlin, which has long and vehemently argued that the shield is aimed at neutralising its intercontinental missiles; Moscow had warned of a return to a cold war arms race, and threatened to deploy nuclear missiles in its Kaliningrad exclave, surrounded by EU states.

The British commander tasked with helping to bring to an end eight years of war in Afghanistan by persuading the Taliban to lay down their arms believes many in the enemy ranks have "done nothing wrong".

reports the Independent as Lieutenant-General Sir Graeme Lamb told paper that many in the Taliban's rank and file carry a sense of "anger and grievances which have not been addressed".

The Telegraph leads with the news that MP's who have “flipped” the designation of their second home will be exposed by Parliament for the first time when the next round of MPs' expenses claims are published, John Bercow, the House of Commons Speaker, has said.

According to the Guardian

The combined cost of replacing the Trident nuclear missile system and building, equipping and running two large aircraft carriers will be as much as £130bn, far more than the government has admitted, an in-depth study of the huge defence projects will reveal today.

A second wave of qswine flu may be on the way says the Times

An estimated 5,200 people in England went down with the virus last week, compared with about 3,000 the previous week after a lull in cases over the summer. Schoolchildren were mainly affected.

The Independent reports that Baroness Scotland,

was fighting for her political career last night as immigration officials began an investigation into how she came to hire an illegal worker as a housekeeper.

Three quarters of a million Britons risk dying from heart disease because they are not taking readily available drugs reports the Express adding that

Despite it being the country’s biggest killer, responsible for one in three deaths, hundreds of thousands of heart patients have not had their condition picked up by their doctors.

Finally the Sun leads with the story of

A BOY aged 12 turned up at school as a GIRL - after changing sex during the summer holidays.
Teachers called an emergency assembly to order fellow pupils to treat him as female.