Big Brother's spectre dominates papers

One way or another, it is hard to avoid Big Brother on Saturday morning.

For a start, there is more than a whiff of 1984 in the Daily Telegraph's chilling account of life inside Camp Delta - America's detention centre for terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

It is not horror that crushes your spirits when you enter the cells, writes David Rennie, the first British correspondent to report from the camp.

Instead it is an absolute sense of defeat, of being helplessly caught in a great steel machine, remorseless in its efficiency and patience.

Reality romance

Meanwhile, the media leviathan that is the "other" Big Brother - the one that has less to do with George Orwell and more to do with television ratings - stirs on the front, and countless inside pages.

The 12 bright young things who have volunteered away their freedom and privacy to appear in the new series of the Channel 4 "reality" show are widely pictured.

According to the Daily Express romance is set to blossom among the contestants.

The Daily Star is less coy.

It says the new housemates are so sexy that bookies are already taking bets on who'll bonk first.

In the same vein, the Sun asks: "Will they be the DIRTY dozen?"

Perhaps we are all a bit potty to become so obsessed with Big Brother, the paper reflects in an editorial.

"But it makes a happy change to be talking about something other than al-Qaeda bomb threats."

Terror threat

Not that the threat of terrorism has gone away. Quite the opposite, in fact.

The Times believes the anti-terrorist barriers which have appeared around the Palace of Westminster are just the start.

It says many of London's most popular tourist landmarks are to be surrounded in a similar fashion, as a result of a summit between the heads of the CIA and MI5.

The paper reckons we will learn to live with the hideous concrete blocks and the threat of random terrorist attacks.

Life will go on. Otherwise the terrorists will have won.

But the Telegraph calls the defences "a concrete triumph for al-Qaeda".

To have turned the world's most ancient shrine of parliamentary democracy into a fortress is the stuff of Osama Bin Laden's dreams, it says.

Beckham's hand

Much fun is had in the papers at the expense of David Beckham, and his broken hand.

He is pictured in many of them sporting a plaster cast.

The Daily Mirror carries a sequence of shots of the England skipper looking perplexed.

He is either bravely battling the incredible pain, it says, or someone has just asked him to pronounce "scaphoid".

That, as we all now know, is the medical name for what the Express describes as the tiny "cashew-sized" bone he managed to break in South Africa.

The Telegraph's cartoonist, Matt, shows a doctor telling the injured player: "For a while, Mr Beckham, you'll only be able to count to five."

The Star reports that, despite the mishap, David Beckham has given Manchester United's potentially highly lucrative tour of the United States the thumbs up - though presumably not with his right hand.

Yellow peril

Finally, the Sun has news of traffic wardens who sprayed a yellow line under two cars at Islington in north London, and then clamped them while the paint was still wet.

A member of the local constabulary tells the paper that the borough's traffic wardens are a law unto themselves. They even, apparently, put tickets on police cars.