Thursday's papers

The Telegraph is not happy that on the day when thousands stood in two minutes silence,Civil servants at the Ministry of Defence have been paid £47 million in performance bonuses so far this year.

The MoD said the bonuses were paid for “exceptional performance” but the disclosure came as the Government faced increasing pressure over the lack of equipment for troops serving in Afghanistan.

The Mail also leads with the story under the headline Indefensible,it says

The civil servants have seen 'good performance' payments - including rewards for saving money - double.
The pen-pushers also won extra cash for hitting targets for promoting diversity and improving health and safety.

The Times has an exclusive,

Anyone who wishes to become a nurse will need to have a degree within four years, in one of the biggest shake-ups of medical education in the history of the NHS.

adding that

The Government will announce today that all new nurses will need to be educated to degree level in an attempt to improve the quality of patient care. The move, which will be enforced from 2013, is designed to raise the status of nursing and to end the stigma of the “doctor’s handmaiden”.

Meanwhile the Guardian reports

Hospitals and schools would be transformed into John Lewis-style partnerships under radical plans that could form a central plank of Labour's general election manifesto.

The same paper says that Gordon Brown will intervene in the critical issue of immigration

using a major speech tomorrow to promise that migrant workers will only be used to fill jobs temporarily in parts of the economy where there are labour shortages.

Unemployment has fallen for the second successive month, suggesting for the first time that the number of people out of work may have peaked.reports the Independent

That would bolster expectations, raised by more optimistic surveys of business confidence, that the economy as a whole has turned a corner, and will return to growth by the end of the year

The Express believes that we are on the mend.

BRITAIN is bouncing back from the brink of economic ruin, an upbeat Bank of England revealed yesterday.
Governor Mervyn King predicted economic growth would hit a brisk 4 per cent next year with “a more buoyant picture ahead”.

Afghanistan is never far away in the headlines at the moment.The Telegraph says that Barack Obama does not plan to accept any of the Afghanistan war options presented by his national security team and is pushing instead for revisions to clarify how and when US troops would turn over responsibility to the Afghan government,

As the Guardian reports that

The US ambassador in Kabul has objected to Washington's generals' plans to send tens of thousands more troops to Afghanistan.

Meanwhile the Times carries an interesting report on how the Taleban spin doctors are winning the propaganda war with Nato.

since 2006, the Taleban have been harnessing that same despised technology in an escalating campaign of propaganda against which Nato appears to have no effective answer.

Propoganda of a different sort on the front of the Independent as it reports that

David Cameron has been accused of making a "contract" with Britain's biggest media company to trade political support before an election for government favours afterwards if the Tories win.The accusation was levelled yesterday by the Business Secretary Peter Mandelson,

Meanwhile the Telegraph believes that Lord Mandelson is set to become the Government’s 'Minister for Information'.

Lord Mandelson could also make history as the first minister to make weekly televised briefings. They would be broadcast direct through the Downing Street website.

Police Farce is the headline in the Sun,as it reports that

POLICE chiefs faced ridicule last night over plans to give cops guides on how to ride a bicycle.
The potty pamphlets, running to 93 pages in TWO volumes, tell cops how to balance so they do not fall off.

The Mail reports that tens of thousands of children face being turned away from local primary schools because classrooms are full to bursting point, a report warned yesterday.

Parents could be forced to separate four-year-olds from older siblings and send them to schools miles from their home.
As councils struggle to educate all children in their boroughs, they are being forced to resort to measures 'they would not choose under any other circumstances', the report said.

Finally the Independent reports on the case of the police worker who was sacked because he believed psychics can help solve criminal investigations is to go to court today to defend his right to legal protection from religious discrimination.

In the first case of its kind Alan Power, a trainer with Greater Manchester Police, will rely on a previous judgment that found his belief in mediums who contact the dead is akin to a religious or philosophical conviction.