What the papers say

Journalist Mike Philpott reviews Thursday morning's newspapers for BBC Northern Ireland.

Familiar pictures appear on the front of the Belfast papers, showing a farm sealed off after an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease.

But for the first time, the pictures are local, the farm in question being in south Armagh.

The News Letter talks of the agricultural industry being on the brink of disaster.

The Mirror says farmers are facing ruin.

The Irish Independent announces: The plague is here.

It reports on fears that the disease may already have crossed the border.

The Irish News comments that rural Ireland, north and south, is facing catastrophe.

But it calls for an investigation into why sheep which were imported from Carlisle were not slaughtered immediately, as the Department of Agriculture had been promised.

The News Letter looks at the wider picture, and argues that the chancellor should be using some of his budgetary surplus to realign the financing of the food chain.

Surely, in this day and age, we can achieve something less primitive than the spectre of a skyline blazing with burning animals, it says.

Transport of animals

The paper believes that, while organic farming is not a complete answer to the problem, it would help us to connect with our food supply and the earth that produces it.

The Irish Times calls for a searching re-examination of the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy.

It has subsidised an increasingly industrialised sector that relies more and more on extensive transport of animals, to the point where everything else is sacrificed to make way for sheer growth.

The Irish Independent has a word of advice for people who live in towns and cities.

This is not an agricultural emergency, it says, but a national crisis of the first magnitude.

Citizens in general can help by staying away from farms, and not making any unnecessary journeys.

The London-based papers are all dominated by images of yesterday's train crash in Yorkshire.

Amid pictures of the shattered carriages, the Express describes it as a billion-to-one horror.

The Mail agrees. Everything that could have gone wrong, did, says the paper.

Method of transport

If Gary Hart had lost control of his Land Rover anywhere else on the M62, he wouldn't have ended up on Britain's fasted railway line.

If the express train had been even two minutes late, Mr Hart's desperate mobile phone message could have been passed to the driver in time.

And if British Rail had not lifted its speed limit on the line last week, the train would have been travelling at 50 miles an hour less than it actually was.

The Guardian, The Mail, and The Times all remind us that no method of transport is risk-free.

The Express comments that the investigation will simply underline the freak nature of this terrible tragedy.

There's much coverage of the story of Ralph Lubkowski, who has become champion on the quiz show Countdown after coming up with not one, but two, nine-letter words from the random consonants and vowels on offer.

The Mail reports that he had the answer before Carol Vorderman placed the ninth letter on the board, because he'd had a dream about the show the night before.

The paper says he is not making it up - he told his brother the details before the programme was recorded.

Finally, several papers report on rumours in Washington that Bill Clinton may be about to sign a deal for two books - one of them his official memoirs and the other a novel.

The Guardian quotes one wit on Capitol Hill, who said the novel would be easy, because the former president never had any trouble making up a story.