What the papers say

Journalist Malachi O'Doherty takes a look at what is making the headlines in Tuesday's morning newspapers.

Violence makes the lead in both local morning papers on Tuesday.

Tearful Natalie Truesdale features on the front page of the News Letter.

Natalie was the girlfriend of Jonathan Stewart, shot dead by the loyalist paramilitary Ulster Defence Association as part of its internal feud.

Natalie was at the party in which Jonathan was shot.

The tractorcade is expected to converge on Dublin on Friday and will test the good will of the public

Irish Independent

She describes how she exchanged smiles with him moments before he was killed, how a masked man kicked in the door of the house, stormed in and shot Jonathan in the back.

It is loyalist violence too which engages the Irish News, with a picture there of a bomb disposal expert at work in his armoured clothing outside Holy Cross School on Monday where a pipe bomb was discovered strapped to the gates.

Ulster Political Research Group spokesperson, John Bunting says the North Belfast Brigade of the UDA had nothing to do with the bomb and condemns it.

The Mirror is specific about who planted the bomb in a front page headline, attributing it to the Lower Shankill UDA.

Look to the south, and papers there lead with the farm pay crusade and the tractor convoy protest which took to the roads on Monday.

'Poodle'

Farmers claim that 200 million euro has been taken from farming through higher disease levies and reduced support.

"The tractorcade," as the Irish Independent calls it, "is expected to converge on Dublin on Friday, and will test the good will of the public".

The Irish Times leads with the plan by An Post, the mail service in the south, to install 500,000 letter boxes at the end of driveways to save postal workers having to go up to the door, which can be very time consuming, if sociable, in country areas.

Irish Times columnist Kevin Myers has come out against war in Iraq, and wonders if George Bush is "an automaton" and Tony Blair his "poodle".

It is a day in which the main London broadsheets are divided on what the big story is.

'Free to burgle'

For the Guardian, it is that a third of teachers plan to quit within five years and a half of them say morale is lower than at any time since they joined the profession.

The Daily Telegraph says Israel has scuppered Blair's peace strategy for the Middle East and the Independent has the shocking news that the government's environmental watchdog has been investing millions in high polluting oil companies.

The Express says we are now free to burgle, after the Lord Chancellor endorsed plans to keep first time house breakers out of jail.

The Mail is on the same tack, platforming a quote from Lord Ervine: "I don't accept that people are disturbed at first time, or even second time, burglars not going to prison".

And nobody knows better than the internet search engines what really interests us, and it isn't crime or Osama bin Laden.

The Express reports that more searches are made for information on Jennifer Lopez and Playstation 2 than for anything else.