D-Day commemorations, EU row over Juncker and eurozone deflation worries

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-the-papers-27726939

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Images from events commemorating the D-Day landings appear across the newspapers, with the Daily Mail producing a moving front page to its 70th anniversary edition.

The Sun offers an eight-page pullout recounting how Operation Overlord unfolded, with accounts from veterans explaining that many servicemen who trained for two years for the amphibious assault "didn't even make the beach" and that the battles that followed were "even worse".

Meanwhile, the Daily Express reproduces its front page from 7 June 1944 as a centrefold. The headline reads: "Tanks 10 miles in - no longer any opposition on the beaches."

And the Daily Telegraph prints extracts from wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill's Commons address from 6 June 1944, informing MPs that the D-Day mission was under way.

One striking photograph - of 9th Parachute Battalion veteran Frederick Glover watching a mass parachute drop near Ranville from a field of crops - appears in many papers, including on the Times's front page.

And the Daily Mirror hones in on another veteran, Jock Hutton, who - aged 89 - was among those parachuting into the fields surrounding the Normandy village, the first to be liberated on D-Day. The paper calls him the "O.A.Para".

One of his comrades, Cyril Cook, 90, tells the Independent's Kim Sengupta: "People often ask, 'Weren't you afraid?' What a stupid question! Of course we were afraid, but it was a job and you just got on with it and it was the right job to do."

Their airborne operation had been tasked with capturing Pegasus Bridge, from where the Guardian's Kim Willsher saw old soldiers "in wheelchairs, on sticks and supported by relatives" reunited.

"They stood to attention as straight as their creaking backs would allow and saluted briskly as a lone bugler high up on Pegasus Bridge played the Last Post. A minute's silence followed; the men bowed their heads, dabbed their eyes and remembered the fallen."

One 94-year-old, Neville Foote, tells the paper: "One of the reasons it's wonderful to be here is because everyone is interested in you. Back home, nobody is interested in us. We're just old people. I am sometimes asked to go to schools to talk, but the children don't know about the war."

Historian Max Hastings, writing in the Daily Mail, argues that modern Britons should retain an interest: "As a historian, I resist myth-making about our past. Not everything that happened between 1939 and 1945 deserved applause.

"But if I had to single out one moment of the struggle which represented the zenith of our national achievement, the finest of British endeavours in peace or war, then it must be what was done by millions of our people of all ages and both sexes to make possible the triumph of the landings in Normandy."

Meanwhile, the Independent's John Lichfield reports that - while world leaders will gather at Sword Beach later for a grand commemoration - some 150 members of the Normandy Veterans Association were at the same location on Thursday to complete what has become an annual pilgrimage for the final time.

Its national secretary George Batts tells him: "It is sad, of course it's sad, but this will be the last time that we meet here on 5 June. Our numbers are melting away."

'Battle for Europe'

The Times leads on a very different "battle for Europe" - the one to become president of the European Commission, the body that proposes new laws for approval by heads of member states and the European Parliament.

Prime Minister David Cameron has made clear his opposition to former Luxembourg premier Jean-Claude Juncker, who is the preferred candidate of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, on the grounds he is too federalist. And the Times sees Mr Juncker's complaints about Mr Cameron's stance - and attention from the British media - as "a sign of sharply increasing tensions between Downing Street and Brussels over the race for the top job".

The Guardian says it's not just the PM and the EU at loggerheads, pointing out that in staking a claim to the post Mr Juncker - the candidate of the international centre-right European People's Party grouping of MEPs - "has unleashed an increasingly vicious power struggle between the parliament and the EU's national leaders". The Financial Times records Mr Cameron's warning that Britain could "drift towards the exit" of the EU, unless other leaders help him "deliver a new deal, based on looser control from the centre".

With one eye on the D-Day events, Times cartoonist Peter Brookes pictures the PM and Chancellor George Osborne as Tommies "still fighting the last war". With shades of comedian Stan Boardman, Mr Osborne asks: "What kind of Fokker's that?" The PM's reply: "I'm afraid it's a Juncker, George."

The Independent's Dave Brown captures the rise of Euroscepticism by picturing UKIP leader Nigel Farage "leading the retreat from Europe". He makes his way to an evacuation ship stepping on the tin hats of Mr Cameron and Labour leader Ed Miliband, who are half-submerged in the English Channel. Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg's lifeless body floats nearby.

Express columnist Leo McKinstry complains it is the "completely unaccountable and unelected" institutions of Brussels that have led to the rise of nationalism and Euroscepticism. The irony, he argues, is that "the EU is creating the very climate of public discord that its establishment was meant to end".

'A rate mess'

"Europe's in a rate mess," says the Sun. This time it's the eurozone economy which is seen to be in trouble, with the paper pointing out that the European Central Bank (ECB) has reduced its "deposit rate" to -0.1% to prevent a new crisis - "meaning it will cost banks to park customers' cash with the ECB".

The Financial Times finds a mixed reaction among the continent's lenders, with some German banks complaining that "savers across Europe will be further alienated and asset values will be destroyed" and an Italian counterpart describing it as "bitter medicine" before adding: "If it helps growth then it is a good medicine."

Robert Priester, deputy chief executive of the European Banking Federation, tells the FT: "We do not see negative rates as an effective tool to boost lending. There still is a lack of demand for loans."

The Guardian explains that the bank is "fighting on four fronts" to boost access to cheap credit, in a bid to avoid a "damaging deflationary spiral". It says the bank is also cutting its main interest rate, providing 400bn euros of cheap loans to banks and ending the practice of taking money out of circulation to fund sovereign bond purchases.

The paper's economics editor Larry Elliott says ECB president Mario Draghi's move was "the right thing to do" but adds that more is likely to be needed in the form of quantitative easing.

Andreas Whittam Smith, in the Independent, reckons it hasn't happened soon enough. "Deflation has the characteristics of a doomsday machine. Once it takes a hold it is very difficult to stop," he writes.

"It all adds to the impression that the countries of the eurozone have constructed a sort of torture chamber for themselves - no growth, stubbornly high unemployment, periodic street protests and now the threat of deflation. Sooner or later they will break down the door and escape," he adds.

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