From today's UK papers

Independent

A wide-ranging government inquiry is to examine claims that radiation from nuclear power stations caused clusters of leukaemia and other cancers, Michael Meacher, the enviroment minister, announced yesterday.

A large, intact, primate skull, more than 6 million years old, has been found in Chad by researchers from the University of Poitiers and may provide another piece in the rapidly expanding jigsaw puzzle of pre-human history.

Financial Times

Animal-rights protestors opposed to the work of Huntingdon Life Sciences will today step up their campaign against City institutions by publishing documents that they claim to have obtained by infiltrating the Bank of New York.

Kenneth Clarke declared yesterday that his priority as Conservative leader would be improved public services rather than tax cuts.

Guardian

For travellers at Heathrow the eyes may soon have it as they take part in the first trial of iris recognition technology at a British airport.

A government education minister, Stephen Timms, was yesterday accused of complacency after telling teachers that he expected most school vacancies would be filled at the start of the academic year in September.

Patricia Hewitt, the trade and industry secretary, touched a computer yesterday and created a world of her own. She was the first person to log on to Durham University's state of the art cosmology machine, a supercomputer that can perform 10 billion arithmetical calculations in a second.

Times

A collaboration between Cambridge University in England and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is being undermined by a culture clash over the role of business, its US director has claimed.

Nurses, teachers, police officers, firefighters and other key workers are being priced out of many areas by the latest 10.9 per cent annual rise in house prices.

The curse of bon viveurs, the corked wine, will become a thing of the past, thanks to German scientists. Their mould-blasting Delfin microwave technique comes in the nick of time as producers have begun to shift to ugly screwcaps and plastic stoppers to head off the threat of contaminated corks.

Miscellany

A university academic who nicknamed himself "The Nerd" brought terror to a Yorkshire village with a hate campaign against several families that lasted for 12 years, a court was told yesterday. ( Independent , Daily Telegraph , Guardian )

Internet users were warned yesterday that the Code Red computer virus, which was primed to strike at one o'clock this morning after several weeks of dormancy, could be far from finished. ( Independent , Financial Times , Daily Mail ) 

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