Paper Monitor
12:05 UK time, Thursday, 15 December 2011
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
If ever there was a story the Times was born to write, it is this.
The terrier of Tehran returns in a crate
Diplomatic pooch on French leave after attack
It's the tale of Pumpkin, a Jack Russell-Norfolk Terrier cross, posted to Iran with the British ambassador, Dominick Chilcott, shortly before hundreds of protesters stormed the embassy compound.
"The ambassador scooped up Pumpkin and took refuge in an office on the top floor of the chancery building with nine other staff. 'She [Pumpkin] hates noise, and the last thing I needed was for her to bolt for cover and disappear,' Mr Chilcott, 52, said."
What follows is a tale of daring-do, of a silk tie fashioned into a makeshift leash, and of a minor diplomatic scuffle between friendly embassies - all against a backdrop of the breakdown in relations between Iran and Britain.
It is a follow-up to last week's story in the Times, headlined , which recounted how Pumpkin had been stranded for lack of a crate as embassy staff hustled out of the country.
"She is the subject of another minor diplomatic controversy, with a number of diplomats from different embassies competing to care for her," Mr Chilcott told the Washington Post at the time. "We hope to repatriate her soon."
It is unclear which nation won that particular skirmish.
"Tehran is not a good place to be a dog. Last year Grand Ayatollah Nasser Makarem, 86, issued a fatwa declaring them to be unclean under Sharia, and condemned Iranian dog owners for 'blindly imitating the West'."
Pumpkin the dog enjoys her freedom
A crate has been found, and Pumpkin reunited - barring a spell in quarantine - with her owners in France.
The Sun, too, has a . A blonde divorcee. A recently deceased national treasure. The words "love" and "child". All this, and and a punning headline:
GENES WILL FIX IT - Test my DNA... but it's not about money"
And that's just the page five headline. As you may have surmised, it's about a woman claiming Sir Jimmy Savile is her dad, saying the "womanising DJ" carted her waitress mum off to his campervan in the 1970s.
It's time to deploy the Sun's front page effort:
I'm Jimmy Savile's Love Child - 'OWZ ABOUT DAD THEN!
(PS: Spell-checker just suggested substituting "Macrame" for Makarem. Not wanting to spark a diplomatic incident, your humble columnist clicked the IGNORE ALL button.)
The 
