What the papers say

Journalist Mike Philpott takes a look at what is making the headlines in Friday's morning papers.

The Irish News wants to know how a leading loyalist managed to win his appeal against a six-year jail term for having a weapon in suspicious circumstances.

Andre Shoukri's sentence was set aside after the Appeal Court decided he had the weapon for his own protection.

In a leader, the paper looks forward to hearing the court's reasons for its decision.

If it turns out that existing laws are in some way deficient, it says, then the issue must be addressed by the authorities with the utmost urgency.

A picture of Ted O'Hare, whose funeral takes place on Friday, appears on the front of the News Letter.

Mr O'Hare, 73, died after a robbery at his home in Loughbrickland. The paper says that as the family made final preparations for his funeral, the police confirmed that they were treating his death as murder.

Military action

In its Morning View column, it welcomes the use of speed cameras, after it was revealed that 6,000 drivers were caught by the police in just three months.

The paper believes this is one police initiative which the majority of people will commend. Anything that saves lives must surely be good, it says.

George Bush undertakes something of a press offensive in advance of his visit to Britain next week.

He tells the Daily Telegraph that war was the last choice a president should make - and he had no plans to take military action against Iran or North Korea.

The paper sees his comments as being directed at the demonstrators who plan to take to the streets of London.

Its correspondent, who interviewed him in the Oval Office, says he moves easily between a forbidding formality and disarming informality, asking at one point: Do you pump iron?

The Daily Mail warns that anarchist groups intend to hijack the protests, and reports that there is a plan to storm the grounds of Buckingham Palace.

The former Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, tells the Independent that President Bush should not have been invited. He describes the relationship between Washington and London as being so one-sided it's an "affront to our national dignity".

The papers in Dublin look ahead to the budget on 3 December. The Irish Independent says the Finance Minister, Charlie McCreevy, has ordered an iron grip on public spending and plans to introduce "stealth taxes" to put more money in the kitty.

Back pain

The Irish Times has a graphic indicating what those taxes will be - and they include more expensive passports, higher road tax, and bigger hospital charges.

If you have woken up with a sore back, you'll be interested to read the outcome of a study conducted in Spain and carried by most of the papers.

As the Mail reports, a hard mattress is not the answer. The research found that back pain sufferers were twice as likely to improve if their beds were medium to firm instead.

Finally, the Independent reports the story of Ronnie Campbell, a hairdresser in Cumbria, who was bemused when he received an email from Tony Blair asking for advice on his address to the Labour Party conference.

His confusion was heightened when another message arrived, asking if he could obtain some House of Commons whisky for the sender. That was followed by invitations to parliamentary events.

It turns out his email address had been confused with that of another Ronnie Campbell, MP for Blyth Valley.

But before alerting the police, Mr Campbell the hairdresser replied to Tony Blair on the subject of his conference speech. "It's very good," he said. "Just go ahead with it."