What the papers say

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

The sad story of Lisa McMurray dominates several front pages.

It's the lead in the Belfast Telegraph, the News Letter, the Daily Mirror and the Sun.

All of them carry a statement from her family in which they paid tribute to the medical staff who treated her after she contracted rabies on a trip to Africa.

The Belfast Telegraph says that while there are 70,000 human cases of rabies around the world each year, Lisa was the first victim in Northern Ireland for 70 years.

The News Letter reports that she might have been infected as long ago as December 2006, when she sent emails home from South Africa to say that she had been scratched while trying to separate two fighting dogs at an animal sanctuary.

The Irish News carries the story on page five, and leads instead with the rejection of a plan for Northern Ireland's tallest building.

'Detrimental impact'

The paper says that - in the words of the planners - the 37-storey Aurora building would have a "detrimental visual impact" on Belfast city centre.

That issue shares the front page with a protest in Belfast over events in Gaza.

It is just one of many stories focusing on the conflict, the biggest, of course, being Israel's attack on two UN schools that left 40 people dead.

"Gaza's Day of Carnage" is how the Guardian describes it, above a picture of a wounded Palestinian being carried to safety.

The paper says it was the bloodiest attack of the campaign so far, and it prompted the US president-elect, Barack Obama, to break his silence on the subject.

'War crime'

The Independent has a simple one-word headline: "Why?"

It calls it "the massacre of the innocents". Its correspondent Bob Fisk wonders if the term "war crime" would be too strong a description.

He says the next time an Arab takes out his fury on the west, we'll wonder why they hate us so much, but we "can't say we don't know the answer".

But the historian Andrew Roberts writes in the Express that "every democracy has the right to defend itself against aggression".

The Irish Times says the latest horrific pictures from Gaza could mark a turning point in Israel's operation.

That's a view echoed in the Irish Independent. It says Israel is under mounting international pressure.

Icy waters

Meanwhile, the wintry weather captures quite a few headlines.

There are lots of pictures of frozen fountains and ponds - but the most remarkable photograph has to be the one that shows a group of soldiers from the Grenadier Guards wading waist-deep in the icy waters of the Serpentine in London.

The picture turns up in the Financial Times and the Daily Mail.

According to the Financial Times, it was part of a ceremony to say farewell to their commanding officer.

Just as bizarrely, the Mirror's reporter Matt Roper went out in shorts and tee shirt - but luckily he was in the butterfly enclosure at London Zoo, where temperatures are 28 Celsius.

Finally, the dispute involving Russia, Ukraine and Europe's gas supplies makes it into Matt's cartoon in the Daily Telegraph.

It shows a woman serving a boiled egg and some toast soldiers to her husband for breakfast.

"It may be a bit runny," she's saying. "Vladimir Putin switched off the gas while it was cooking."