Papers demand Maxwell justice

The Department of Trade and Industry's report on Robert Maxwell is laid out and then dissected on the inside pages of most newspapers.

They reveal a man who was both a charmer and a bully, and would stop at nothing - including fraud - to get what he wanted. Maxwell's former paper The Mirror asks - on its front page - why the guilty men who failed to stop the massive fraud by its former owner are to escape punishment.

It says the report is a devastating indictment of City greed during the Thatcher years. In its editorial, it says the DTI's findings must be acted on, because there has been no justice so far.

The paper points out that the few City firms which were fined got off with paying little more than petty cash.

Writing in the Daily Mail, Tom Bower, the author of a book on Maxwell, accuses the DTI investigators of cowardice.

'Lacked courage'

He claims they "lacked the courage to expose the City of London's monumental collapse of honesty which Robert and Kevin Maxwell so profitably exploited".

The Financial Times gives the City's response. It says that as the report came out City institutions moved to defend their dealings with Mr Maxwell.

HSBC Bank, which owns Samuel Montagu - the merchant bank that was heavily criticised for sponsoring Maxwell's flotation of the Mirrior group - offered this defence: "If you have a company run by an executive chairman who turns crooked and others do nothing to stop him, then there is nothing that City auditors, lawyers or bankers can do to stop it ".

The Guardian is prompted to ask whether it could all happen again. It says while many loopholes arising out of the Maxwell affair have been closed, the underlying culture in the City, with its excessive bonuses and inflated salaries will always make it vulnerable to fresh scandals in the future.

The dramatic events in Belgrade as Serbian security forces attempted to detain the former President Slobodan Milosevic happened too late for the early editions.

But The Guardian clearly had an inkling that something was about to happen as it reported on police movements around his home. It noted that a police van, several vehicles and an ambulance had been parked near the villa.

Sea hero

The sea-soaked picture of Jim Shekhdar smiles out of the pages of all the newspapers, as he completed his record breaking row across the Pacific.

The Sun says as he enjoyed his first cold beer after 274 days at sea he joked that he'd rowed the 8,000 miles to get away from the missus.

The headline in The Star tries to sum it all up "Sharks, cyclones, no food...it was a doddle".

The Daily Telegraph says while Chinese characters may have survived conquests by Mongols, Manchus and even Mao Tsetung, they now face their greatest peril - the computer.

Chinese children, who for generations have painfully memorised all six thousand characters, are forgetting how to write.

Modern software programmes are able to duplicate the Chinese written language, but take away the computers and many children find their minds go blank'; a syndrome known as ti-bi-wang-zi, or forgetting the character as you lift the pen.

The paper says scholars fear that in time the ancient skill of writing Chinese by hand will die out.