From today's UK papers

Financial Times

Three of Britain's biggest trade unions are planning concerted action against the government's policy of giving private-sector companies a role in public services.

Independent

Lars Nittve, who presided over the Tate Modern's hugely successful first year, is leaving. He will return to Sweden.

Margaret Hodge and plain speaking go hand-in-hand. But how, wonders Lucy Hodges, will her abrasive and politically correct stance go down with vice-chancellors?

Learndirect, formerly known as the University for Industry, is using its website to encourage people to take courses from home.

Daily Telegraph

Britain's oldest subscription library, established in the 18th century to educate lead miners and their families, is to close after being unused for three years.

A study of social networks of sexual contacts has shown that princesses and paupers are closer to each other because of a handful of people with an extraordinary sex drive. (Boston University, Stockholm University; from Nature )

Times

The headmaster of Eton has criticised the government's reform of sixth-form syllabuses in England and Wales, describing it as a "curious British compromise".

Women are more likely to become pregnant after rape than after consensual sexual intercourse, according to a contentious study from St Lawrence University in New York state.


Miscellany

Britain's winter climate could become as cold as Moscow's, according to new evidence that the vital ocean currents of the North Atlantic are beginning to change. ( Guardian , Independent )

Students graduating this summer are brushing aside worries over their debts and are confident that they will easily secure good, highly paid jobs, according to a report by High Fliers Research. ( Guardian , Times )

David Irving, the author who was described by a High Court judge last year as an anti-Semite and a falsifier of history, sought permission yesterday to appeal against a ruling that he had not been libelled by an American academic. ( Guardian , Daily Telegraph )

John Collinge of St Mary's Hospital, London, believes a cure for variant CJD, the human form of mad cow disease, could be available within the next five years. ( Guardian , Independent )

Up to a third of children born five to eight weeks early may have problems at school according to a study from the John Radcliffe hospital, Oxford, which warns that the increasingly high survival rate of premature babies might put pressure on the education system.  ( Guardian , Independent )

England's kings and queens unwittingly obeyed a golden rule of evolutionary biology when they killed their kin to maintain a secure grip on the throne, scientists at Cambridge University and Indiana State University have discovered. ( Guardian , Daily Telegraph, Times ; from New Scientist )