Good morning. Today we remember the deaths of Hildegard von Bingen, and, centuries later, Laura Ashley; and today’s birthday girl is Tessa Jowell.

Two big stories

A surprising number of newspapers seem to be leading with a story about how soon, we will all have the right to register with any GP we choose. I struggle to see why that’s made so many front pages.

Instead, my picks are the Independent’s story about racism in the US, with President Carter weighing in on opposition to President Obama’s current policy platform:

After lurking near the surface of political discourse in America for months, awkward questions about race and bigotry burst into the open yesterday after Jimmy Carter forthrightly suggested that “an overwhelming portion” of the more violent opposition to President Barack Obama and his policies has to do with the colour of his skin.

Meanwhile closer to home, the Telegraph is finding new ways to use numbers to scare us:

In his 2000 Budget, Mr Brown described money spent on debt and welfare as “the costs of failure” and lauded Labour’s record in reducing those payments. He said: “Our promise was to reduce the costs of failure – the bills for unemployment and debt interest – in order to reallocate money to the key public services.” Now, Mr Brown’s own figures reveal how those costs are set to grow dramatically. Already the largest single item in the budget, by 2013/14 spending on social security will dwarf every other item of Government expenditure.

2 must read blog posts

Mary Reid writes about the party’s new policies for women:

Back in 1917 the ‘perfect’ woman was 5ft 4in and nearly 10stone. 100 years later, and girls aspire to be very tall and very, very thin.

And whilst much of the post is about the airbrushing proposals, there’s also a handy summary of some of the other aspects of the policy too.

Secondly, Mike at The Atomium Blog has some scathing words on tax credits:

But seriously, if you were asked to come up with a way of doing this, could you have ever designed a more clumsy, inefficient or convoluted system than the one which the Labour government, under Gordon Brown as chancellor, managed to create?