At the elm

WELCOME to this week’s headline game, where participating newspapers are given a subject and asked to write a witty headline to place on their websites. As always, the most feeble contributions will be featured first, with the best reserved for last. This week’s subject is the elm tree. Despite being almost wiped out by Dutch elm disease, surviving saplings taken from a 200-year-old parent tree could herald a leafy future. I expect some pithy offerings . . .

Dead man flying

THE Liverpool Echo broke a story this week about two women who allegedly tried to smuggle their dead elderly relative through Liverpool’s John Lennon Airport onto an easyJet flight to Berlin. Gitta Jarant and her daughter, Anke Anusic, were arrested on Saturday when it transpired Kurt Willi Jarant, 91, despite having an easyJet ticket, was no longer with us. German-born Mr Jarant was in a wheelchair and wearing sunglasses when officials checked his pulse and found no life.

The story is now buzzing around the world and the Echo is taking credit for it. Not only that, Willi being German, dead, and about to take to the skies, it’s come up with this headline:

So what’s the name of the game?

THE Times and the Telegraph are going big on Abba. Will they get together again – or won’t they?

War: what is it good for? Headlines

FROM the Times story index, March 17, 2010:

You’ve completed your basic training, you wave Catterick Garrison goodbye

We’re not all right, Jack

RESEARCH reveals another upside down Union flag in the nation’s newspapers (or an UPSIDE DOWN Union flag, to use Sun-case), this time in the hallowed web pages of that noble British institution and bastion of all things conservative,

Party in Mayfair – get out of jail free

IT’S a class thing, innit? Depends on where yer live like. And just after Gordon Brown was accused of reigniting the class war in this