17/02/2016 The Papers

knee injury. We'll tell League, and Shaun Murphy may have lost his place

in world Snooker. -- we will tell you all about the Champions League.

Hello and welcome to our look ahead to what the papers

With me are Cassell Bryan-Low from the Wall Street Journal and

Ben Chu, the economics editor at the Independent.

"Europe: Deal or No Deal" is the Telegraph's headline.

The paper says there is no guarantee EU leaders will back David Cameron

over his renegotiation plans at crucial talks in Brussels.

The Guardian says the Prime Minister is set for a battle

of brinkmanship in Brussels over the next couple of days.

The Times says the number of EU migrants working here has increased

That's also the lead for the Mail with the paper describing

the figures as a hammer blow for the Prime Minister.

"Higher education access gap grows" is the Independent's top story with

news that the proportion of students from poor backgrounds

going to leading universities has fallen in the past decade.

The i says 30,000 people have backed a campaign for meningitis vaccines

to be given to all children, after a mother shared an image

According to the Metro, so-called Islamic State is feared to

have secured the materials to make a dirty bomb after thieves stole

And the FT has further warnings from the Federal Reserve

Europe, no escaping it, especially in the next 48 hours or so. The

Daily Telegraph steals our title from a television programme,

Europe: Deal or no Deal. This is a story about David Cameron heading to

Brussels for 48 hours of intense discussions during which he hopes to

reach a deal on demands Britain has made. I think the chances are

generally looking good, but he is getting warnings today that there is

no guarantee they will reach a deal. The picture is of Angela Merkel, who

was addressing the Bundestag today. Her views matter enormously. She has

done David Cameron a big favour, coming out and saying, we want

Britain in the EU. It is a crucial time, and the assumption is that she

will throw her weight behind the demands that he is pushing for, and

that will swing a lot of the other EU members. As you say, Germany is

the dominant force and to have her on side is crucial for David

Cameron. We had a report earlier about who is lining up on which

side, and Northern Europe basically thinks we are OK on all of these

things, but there are a lot of countries, particularly on the

fringes, Greece and others, who are not at all happy with some of the

things we are asking for. Some Eastern Europe countries have

expressed concern about the measures, in terms of curbing access

to benefits for migrants, some others have expressed concern about

some of the wording of giving exception for the ever closer union,

feeling this is undermining the whole political rationale they have.

Of course, if we look at the Guardian, this has a very familiar,

rather bulky figure, who got off his bike. He was very circumspect, to

put it mildly, when he came out, about what he thinks at the moment.

This seemed like a bit of ritual humiliation, he was locked out. This

is a battle on two fronts. Of course David Cameron is in Brussels, he has

to persuade the member state to back him, and at home he has two persuade

his party to back him. Boris Johnson is seen as a key figure in all of

this because lots of Eurosceptics hope that he will decide that the

deal is not that great, and that he will campaign against it. That is

what the purpose was of him being in Downing Street, with David Cameron

leaning on him. It is tricky politics, because one assumes he has

leadership ambitions, but with him you never know which direction he is

going in. He has been playing FTSE on both sides, both sides want to

land him and he would be a key asset in either campaign. As you say, he

is believed to have leadership ambitions himself and he will be

weighing up the consequences of backing the wrong side in the

referendum, and his hopes for potential leader of the party. There

is talk of a plan B in case things do go wrong David Cameron. That we

could be in for another fortnight of this stuff. I think all sides want

to get this wrapped up, David Cameron wants to get its yield so he

can move on to a referendum. The Europeans want to turn back to the

big issues they have. If they can't reach a deal by Friday or possibly

even Saturday, this could be kicked down the road to the next scheduled

meeting in March. Officials are saying that they are unlikely to

want to attend an emergency meeting before that. Now, we might not quite

know what Boris thinks that we know what one newspaper thinks, the Daily

Mail. This is a classic story for the Daily Mail, looking at the

number of foreign workers in the UK, and it ties into the Europe debate.

A lot of this will be about immigration, and this particular

story is talking about the increase in foreign workers in the UK, 2

million of the 3 million foreign workers are from the EU, and that is

where pressure has been put on David Cameron to bring those figures

down. He has been unable to keep his pledge of reducing net migration. We

would expect them to go on about this, but they have quite a lot of

interesting facts and figures at their command. They do, because the

labour market statistics have come out today, and I was looking through

that. What has happened to wages, to overall employment and part-time

employment. Some newspapers go straight to the bit where it tells

you how many foreigners are working in the UK, and they have these

figures. Apparently it is a big issue that the number has tipped

over 2 million for EU workers, and crept over the 3 million mark for

foreign workers in general. As is their won't, they will use this as a

bludgeon to say that it is terrible, and that he British PM

should get some action on this -- wont. An interesting figure is the

employment numbers that are at record levels, unemployment is

falling, so that is good news for the PM and the Chancellor, although

the one caveat is wages, which seems to have weak growth. That might be

an interesting... I don't think the Daily Mail in its theory about this

has got into this. It has often been said that the reason why wage growth

is slow is because of foreign workers taking lower salaries, and

so on. Does that hold water? It is a Ukip line, and it may get some

credence, but I think immigration actually doesn't have that dampening

effect. It fills gaps in the workforce rather than... There may

be some element of the lower end, but in general it is positive. The

proponents are saying that foreign workers also contribute to the tax

coffers, it is many are coming here to work. I saw somewhere that over

Europe as a whole, amongst them anything said today, the figures are

positive rather than negative in terms of the positive impact rather

than negative. The front page of the Financial Times, the Federal Reserve

frets over the growing risks to US economy amid market turmoil. This is

not terribly new, is it? What is new today is the fact that minutes were

released of this meeting, and we get some insight into the thinking of

Federal Reserve officials, and it tells us that they are struggling to

make sense of uncertainty over the outlook for inflation in the

economy. Bearing in mind that we have our own debate among Bank of

England officials about when to raise rates, and officials here have

tiptoed away from expected increases themselves, and Governor Mark Carney

earlier this month said the global environment remains very

unforgiving. Ben, what did you make of it when you read what the Fed has

been up to? There has been a huge sell-off in stock markets, the oil

price has crashed, although it came back a bit today. The Fed raised

rates since timbre, the first time it had done that in about a decade.

Everyone thought the cycle was turning, everything would go up, and

low and behold it has changed plans in less than a month. Nobody expects

them to rise all year in America. This has been a significant change,

and this is reflecting that mood. The headlines we are seeing is what

has been happening with share prices and stocks, and so on, and there has

been quite a big rebound in the past few days. Is this the sort of thing

that will turn out on its head and we shall see prices crashing down

again? Do they have a lot further to fall? This will send mixed messages,

I don't think shares will go into freefall, I think there are plenty

of other things making investors jittery, but clearly this reinforces

what the markets are already at end upon. I don't think the central

banks putting out minutes tends to change market views. Nobody really

knows what is driving the big market sell-off, there is nothing

disastrous in the data that would reflect this, in America all China,

so it is a bit of a conundrum. Fear seems to be feeding on itself.

Staying with the Financial Times, they have this story about Apple and

an iPhone that the FBI would like to crack or hack or whatever the right

term is. Why is there such a big argument? This story is rooted in

the suspected terrorist attacks that we saw in San Bernardino California

last year, and the FBI is continuing to investigate this and one of their

key pieces of evidence is an iPhone that belonged to the suspected

couple behind the attacks but they are having trouble getting into it

because iPhones are encrypted. The authorities have gone to the courts

to try to force Apple to unlock the phone. The authorities argue it

would be key to their investigation to find out who was behind this

terror attack. Apple is digging in its heels and saying it won't comply

with the order. Its argument is that it would undermine the security it

offers all its uses, because if you unlock one it would set a precedent,

and anyone who uses an iPhone could potentially be vulnerable, whether

it be hackers or cyber criminals. What you think of that argument? As

Apple have a case? They certainly have a case, but it will be

interesting to see how this plays in public opinion. Tech companies like

Apple have had a lot of bad publicity lately, avoiding tax et

cetera. This is one where they are saying they are standing up the

rights of the users, and that may play well. People may think,

obviously the US government has a case as well because it is trying to

stop terrorist networks, but there are civil liberties invocations.

Remember the Snowden revelations, they seem to suggest that these tech

companies were giving all sorts of rights of access to people's private

data that people didn't know about, and tech companies were stunned by

that. I think we are seeing a reaction to that, realising how

toxic it is in trying to change the perception. The reason encryption

and making things more secure is because there are criminals out

there desperate to hack into everything we have. It will be

interesting to see how this plays out, because authorities on both

sides of the Atlantic want to be able to compel tech companies to

give them the key, and we have not yet seen a mechanism legally for

them to do that here, so it will be interesting to see if the US does

that. Big companies throwing their weight around close to other

matters. Then, the Independent, the figures go up and down, but

something a bit definite. Explain this headline. This is about people

from poor backgrounds going to university, and since they

introduced tuition fees there has been a big focus on this. One of the

big fears was that this would stop people from poor backgrounds from

going through. That doesn't seem to have happened up until now, which

suggests a more worrying picture. It says that in the elite

universities, Oxford and Cambridge, etc, many of them have seen the

proportion of poor people getting through fall. Overall it is not

disastrous, but these very elite ones, they are having not such a

good picture. People are wondering whether we are seeing what we

expected happen, but it is definitely a worrying trend. It is

all about social mobility, isn't it? Is it a trend through other

universities and more universities, it would suggest that social

mobility is not doing too well. There is another element of this

story, which is that people from poor backgrounds tend to find places

at middle and lower ranked institutions, so they tend to go to

the lower ranked ones. We don't have a lot of time to talk about this,

families give up meat over health fears. More statistics being thrown

around. This is close to my heart, this story. I am 20 year-long

vegetarian and I have recently eating meat. This is a story about

how increasing numbers of people in Britain are giving up meat on health

fears. This is the latest of a string of stories about scares of

food, in the last few days it has been about sugar. In recent history

it has been fat and salt, but now it is meat. This comes on the heels of

warnings by the World Health Organization recently that processed

meats are definitely cancer-causing, and red meat is probably

carcinogenic. Are you going to go back to vegetarianism? I have never

been a veggie, what is interesting about this is that 29% have tried to

give up in the last year, which is astonishingly high. People I know

there is nowhere near that many. I wonder if the people they have

surveyed for this are faddy types of people. Thank you very much, that is

it. Up next, Sportsday. Welcome to Sportsday,

with me, Ore Oduba. On the way tonight: A tale

of three strikers.