Newspaper headlines: 'Don't lock up low-risk paedophiles' By BBC News

Staff Published duration 28 February 2017

Britain's most senior child protection police officer has said paedophiles who view indecent images should not be given any criminal sanction unless they pose a physical threat to children, according to the lead in the Times.

He is "surely correct", says The Times in an editorial - the police have to set controversial priorities and focus on those who pose the greatest risk.

image copyright PA image caption Former UKIP leader Nigel Farage (right) has called on MP Douglas Carswell to be thrown out of the party

Former UKIP leader Nigel Farage has written an article for the Daily Telegraph in which he says the party's only MP, Douglas Carswell, should be thrown out.

He accuses Mr Carswell of trying to "divide UKIP in every way imaginable" since defecting from the Conservatives in 2014 - and of blocking attempts to secure him a knighthood, something Mr Carswell denies.

The Daily Mirror highlights a warning from MPs that growing numbers of workers in poorer areas will die before they collect their state pension.

In a report, the Work and Pensions Committee says the retirement age will rise to 70.5 by 2060, which is higher than male life expectancy in many areas.

In an editorial, the Mirror suggests the answer might be to pay the state pension earlier to "manual grafters" - and later to bankers.

"We want a welfare state helping ordinary Britons," it says, "not wealth-fare for the richest".

It expects him to announce what it describes as "a massive hike in military spending at the expense of foreign aid and environmental programmes".

The paper says the reductions in non-defence spending will be the biggest since the start of the Reagan administration in 1981.

The Guardian says the US already spends more on the military than the next eight countries combined.

Theories abound as to who or what is "to blame", as the Financial Times puts it, for the "near collapse" of the merger between the London Stock Exchange and Deutsche Borse.

The FT says it was the LSE's decision to "aggressively reject concessions demanded by Brussels, without warning or consulting its German partner".

Although billed as a "merger of equals", the paper says, it is effectively a takeover by Frankfurt's Deutsche Borse that threatens London's position as the financial centre of Europe.

The paper hopes UK regulators will take the opportunity to look at the deal again, and perhaps kill it off.

Many of the papers devote a large section of their front pages to the shambolic climax at the Oscars, in which La La Land - instead of Moonlight - was inadvertently named Best Picture.

image copyright Reuters