What the papers say

Journalist Malachi O'Doherty takes a look at Tuesday's morning newspapers.

The Irish News political correspondent William Graham writes this morning that the peace process is under strain with Sinn Fein under pressure.

It is agonising over whether Gerry Adams should go to Washington to give evidence to a congressional hearing on links between the IRA and FARC guerrillas in Colombia.

William Graham says it is understood that Mr Adams wants to go to the hearings, but that some of his party colleagues are lobbying strongly against it.

Stephen Dempster's account of the same crisis in the News Letter focuses on the determination of the Ulster Unionist leader, David Trimble, to make the Sinn Fein leader "come clean".

The editorial asks Secretary of State Dr John Reid to "come clean" and explain how he arrived at the conclusion that the IRA offers no threat to the peace process. Without explanation, it adds, he is merely adding to the confusion.

Hearings

Patrick Smyth in the Irish Times looks at that Washington hearing into links between FARC and the IRA and says that if Gerry Adams refuses to attend he will not be the first.

Among others who recently refused to attend such hearings was our own secretary of state of the time, Peter Mandelson.

The economy is the greater interest in the Irish Times. The paper leads with an Economic and Social Research Institute report that by the end of the year the growth rate will be back to 5%.

The London papers are preoccupied in equal measure with the rise of Le Pen and the love life of Sven Goran Eriksen.

Le Pen pledges to quit EU, says the Telegraph. France is urged, Just Say Non, that's the Independent. And the Guardian shows a Le Pen poster smeared with what appears to be noodles in a Thai sauce, with the headline: "France unites to halt le Pen".

Choice

Robert Harris in the Daily Telegraph concludes that Mo Mowlam is a sublime egotist, after unpicking her complaint against Tony Blair and her allegations of a whispering campaign against her.

He finds it especially implausible that Blair moved against her after she received a standing ovation at the party conference.

Blair's affront to her, he says, was to offer her a choice of four jobs, including health which, Harris notes, was good enough for Nye Bevin.

The Guardian editorial is bewildered too. As ministers are doomed to be, she was here today and gone tomorrow. It is hard to know what else Ms Mowlam could have expected.