Both of these splash headlines are true. Yet neither tells the truth.
Yes, the NHS is to fund a sperm bank for lesbians - and for heterosexuals and bisexuals and transexuals. In fact, for any woman in need of the service. That includes, as the Mail on Sunday's sister paper tells us today, single women.
It will also be open to all ethnicities, so we could just as accurately have had the heading "NHS to fund sperm bank for Muslims" or "NHS to fund sperm bank for gay Jews".
We could even (in much smaller type and probably not on the front page because it's so inoffensive)  have "NHS to fund sperm bank for young white widows of our brave boys serving in Afghanistan".
Except that in that instance, the implied outrage would be that only £77,000 had been set aside from the £100m NHS budget to help such women - and that they would be expected to pay £300 for the privilege of using the service.
It's the way they tell 'em, as Frank Carson would say.

Over at Gatwick airport, a woman arriving on a flight from Sierra Leone collapsed and died after disembarking. There is an ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone. There are fears that the virus could find its way into Britain. So yes, there's a scare (terror's a bit extreme) and yes, there was a death.
The woman in question did not, however, die of ebola.
It's the way they tell 'em, as Frank Carson would say.

Why are we lying to our readers like this? Why are we setting out to shock and alarm them? Do we think it will sell more papers?

After all, that's all we care about, isn't it? "You're only in it to sell papers" is the insult routinely thrown at journalists. Proprietors like Murdoch are interested only in profits and power. 

Well no, actually. Journalists have an inherent and insatiable hunger for news. We chase and write stories because we are interested and we think others will be interested. We are compulsive gossips with a capacity for absolute discretion. We always, always want to be the first to relate a snippet of news, yet are often the most impossible people to get to talk.
When we have gathered up our goodies, we want to lay them out on a wonderful table for others to feast on; for our effort and skills to be appreciated and savoured. Newspaper proprietors provide that table and some - including Murdoch - share our delight in setting out the best china, the shiniest cutlery, the ripest fruits. 

Alas, newspapers are not charities run for the public good. They are businesses. They have to make money to survive - and that means attracting paying customers to our restaurants of news. 
So we should always be aware that If we put prime steak on the menu and serve reconstituted mince, we will lose our customers and our reputations and ultimately go out of business.

It's not much of a joke. Perhaps it's the way I tell 'em.

'Why are we wasting money on this when we could be spending it on that?' is a favourite argument of the partisan. It's usually spurious. But this collection of front pages does make you wonder how the Press came to be the arch-villains of the unholy trinity of politicians, police, Press. And that in turn prompts further questions about the extent and expense of the phone-hacking inquiry.
First we have two peers (one Labour, one Conservative) under suspicion for rape. Then there is the disappearance of 114 files from a 1983 dossier alleging that a number of public figures were involved in child sex abuse. And finally we have more allegations against Rolf Harris, who was jailed for sexual assault on Friday.
Putting Operation Yewtree and celebrity sex predators aside for a moment, let us remember that we also have the Cyril Smith allegations rumbling along in the background - thanks almost entirely to the Daily Mail - and suspicions about a minister in the Blair government that are being brought to light by the Daily Mirror. 
Those with short memories might also be reminded of the MPs' expenses scandal and the men who drained moats with our money, the women who declined to pay for their own bath plugs, the flipping and flopping of houses to avoid capital gains tax. We know about them thanks to the Daily Telegraph.
These are the people running our country; the people who decided that the law wasn't strong enough to keep the Press in line, that a £5m public inquiry, followed by a royal charter, to set new parameters of behaviour was required.
MPs accepted after the expenses scandal -  without the benefit of a public inquiry - that they couldn't be trusted to police themselves, so an independent parliamentary standards authority was created. It's made a huge difference. In 2009, the year of the scandal, MPs' expenses totalled £95.4m. In the year to last September, the total was £98m.
The police, particularly the Metropolitan force, meanwhile remain mired in corruption allegations that any number of public inquiries and new brooms at the top have been unable to stamp out. They have failed properly to investigate murder, wholesale sexual abuse and assorted other crimes - including phone hacking at the News of the World. Stephen Lawrence's killers were finally brought to justice not through dogged detective work, but  in large part because of the law-breaking bravery of Stuart Steven when editor of the Mail on Sunday
Eight out of ten of today's front pages* are devoted to historic crimes and alleged crimes involving men in high places abusing vulnerable women and children; offences dating back to the 60s, 70s and 80s; crimes and alleged crimes that were widely known about, yet which troubled neither police nor politicians until very recently.
Police operations looking into old  journalistic misdeeds are ongoing, and the Daniel Morgan inquiry is unlikely to do anything other than give sections of the Press an even worse name, but SubScribe has not so far heard any suggestion that journalists were involved in sex abuse rings or systematically defrauding the taxpayer.
Those who believe that the state should play any part in determining how the Press is regulated  might care to show how police behaviour has improved since the establishment of the IPCC in 2004 and how MPs have curbed their excesses since IPSA was set up in 2009.
There are chancers and criminals in every walk of life, but they tend to gravitate mostly towards areas of power, influence and money. So a few police officers are corrupt, a few MPs are criminally greedy, a few celebrities are sex abusers, a few journalists are unethical. It's all a matter of proportion.
If the Press is allowed to do its job, if good people are attracted to public life, and if the law is allowed to function, we'll come out on the right side - eventually. Then we can work together to defeat the financial sharks who rob us all.
*The other two focus on terrorism;  it's Serious Sunday.

For Kate's bump, read Kate's bumpy ride.
If you had suffered morning sickness as badly as the Duchess of Cambridge did when she was expecting Prince George, would you go bouncing down the river in a jet boat?
If you were regarded as an international role model for motherhood, would you be photographed drinking wine when pregnant?
I think we can assume that the Duchess will not be producing a sibling for George within the next nine months.
Yet this morning the Star has a white-on-purple ROYAL WORLD EXCLUSIVE above the splash heading  "Wills: baby no2 is on the way". 

On the way, that is, in the sense of perhaps there'll be another baby sometime. There is no attempt to hold up the  "Kate's expecting"  pretext  conveyed by the heading beyond the front page. 
The third of the three pars on page 1 says: "It's the clearest clue yet that Wills and Kate are already trying for a brother or sister for eight-month-old George".
The hint came in a remark the Prince made to a woman who made a shawl for George: "You might have to make another one soon" - and the "soon" is disputed. 

Eight words are enough to drive Fleet Street into a frenzy.  Far from being exclusive - as the Express, Mirror and People also claimed - the "story" appears almost everywhere. Only the Independent on Sunday and Observer ignore it. Kate is the front-page picture for the Telegraph and Sunday Times - and both refer to the hint in their captions. 

In the end, they all accept that the most they've got is a hint. So why go so far over the top with the headlines? And why claim as exclusive a story that patently isn't? If Kate had been pregnant and the Star had got the story to itself, would it have diluted the front page with the promise of a free box of Maltesers and four other puffs (one of which points to yesterday's Sun splash)?
If it was exclusive, why did the Mirror make its readers wait until pages 14-15 for the story, the Express to page 5 and the People to pages 12-13? 
Hats off here to the Sun, which didn't even make it a page lead, but used it as a picture story on 15.

The Independent on Sunday may shun the royals, but it, too, comes a cropper on the exclusive front. Its splash on GPs is shared with the Telegraph, and its leak from the UN's latest climate report is not only shared with the Observer, which leads on the story, but less detailed and doesn't even include its title. It's a shame, because the paper is looking good in spite of its shortage of resources.

The People boasts of an exclusive not only on the baby that isn't, but also on Peaches Geldof and on its splash "Violent rages of Costa killer".
(By the way, the quotes are not necessary on the word killer, since Mayka Kukucova has admitted shooting the so-called King of Bling Andy Bush, but claims that she was acting in self-defence).
In this story Bush's 19-year-old daughter Ellie describes Kukocova as obsessively jealous, like a child who couldn't control her anger. Nick Dorman reports that on a shopping trip Kukocova had been upset that Bush wouldn't buy her things she wanted. “She went into a blind rage, screaming and threw a handbag at him.  She did it to purposefully hurt him and then stormed off. We didn’t see her for a few hours, it was a common thing.”
 “She stamped all over his laptop, then put it underneath a tap and put it back in the case. When we got back to England he realised but he tried to ignore it. He thought he could change her."

But look here, at pages 24-25 of the Mail. Ben Ellery in Spain and Nick Craven in London write about Ellie Bush and her opinion of Kukucova. She's like a child, apparently, and can't control her anger. There was a shopping trip and a thrown handbag, and a laptop held under a tap. And it's not only the quotes that are  virtually identical: both papers illustrate the story with the same photograph - although the Mail flips its version (naughty!) 
If this was a catch-up job, it was a supremely slick operation even by the Mail's high standards.