The Times leads with the news that

Unemployment looms large as crunch bites deep

Mortgage lenders are continuing to raise their rates as fears grow of massive job losses in the City and on the high street.
Even as Gordon Brown appealed to bank chiefs to pass on interest rate cuts yesterday the Halifax, Britain’s biggest mortgage lender, announced that it would increase rates on some of its most popular deals by 0.5 per cent tomorrow.
And in the most dire forecast so far of the impact of the worldwide credit squeeze it was predicted that as many as 40,000 workers in the City could lose their jobs.

Defiant Gordon Brown defends economic record amid growing credit crisis says the Telegraph

As Britain’s biggest mortgage lenders snubbed his calls to cut the cost of borrowing, the Prime Minister gave a series of interviews to insist he was only "starting" the job. Amid criticism from opposition politicians and business leaders over his handling of the economy, Mr Brown disclosed that he had turned to his predecessor, Tony Blair, for advice on how to turn around his premiership.

The Independent meanwhile suggests

10 ways out of the crisis

Slash? Spend? Guarantee? Co-ordinate? We analyse the options for Gordon Brown as he heads for US talks on the credit crunch

US prepares a rapturous welcome for world leader. And the PM is there too reports the Guardian

He's been on the front pages of newspapers and the focus of fevered public attention for days. He will appear at baseball stadiums and address the United Nations.
But the world leader whose visit has America transfixed is not the man from Kirkcaldy. It's the cleric from Bavaria causing all the commotion, and it appears inevitable that he will upstage Britain's prime minister .
Gordon Brown flew into the US last night hours after Pope Benedict XVI arrived for his first visit.

The Telegraph reports that

Pope 'ashamed' of US sex abuse priests

He said on board his plane: "Paedophiles will be completely excluded from the priesthood. It is more important to have good priests than many priests.

and adds

If I read the stories of the victims, I find it difficult to understand how priests can have betrayed their mission to bring holiness in this way, to bring the love of God to children."
Benedict's US tour has been overshadowed by a row over his decision not to visit Boston, the centre of the sexual abuse scandal

The Guardian leads with

Migrant crime wave a myth - police study

A wide-ranging police study has concluded that the surge in immigrants from eastern Europe to Britain has not fuelled a rise in crime, the Guardian has learned.
The findings will be presented to the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, tomorrow when she meets chief constables to discuss the issue. Several of them had complained that they needed more money to deal with increases in migrant populations in their areas. However, the study prepared for the Association of Chief Police Officers challenges claims that up to 1 million people from EU accession countries have caused a rise in criminality.

Both the Telegraph and the Mail lead with the story that

Can vitamins do you harm? Scientists say supplements may even shorten your life

Vitamins taken by around a third of the population do not extend life and may even cause premature death, according to a respected group of international scientists.
After reviewing 67 studies involving more than 230,000 men and women, the experts say there is no convincing evidence that taking supplements of the antioxidant vitamins A, C and E can make you healthier.

says the Mail.

The Telegraph says

They warn healthy people who take antioxidant supplements, including vitamins A and E, to try to keep diseases such as cancer at bay that they are interfering with their natural body defences and may be increasing their risk of an early death by up to 16 per cent.

The papers focus on Italy after the elections,the Independent reporting

Berlusconi pledges to clean up Naples and save Alitalia

Italy's new prime minister Silvio Berlusconi promised a brisk return to power yesterday, saying he would name his new ministers within a week, as the final general election results confirmed the triumph of the media magnate and his right-wing allies.

The Guardian reports

Italians yesterday got their first taste of life under their new government as Silvio Berlusconi moved to appease the newly powerful Northern League with pledges of lower taxes, more police and camps for jobless foreigners.
"One of the things to do is to close the frontiers and set up more camps to identify foreign citizens who don't have jobs and are forced into a life of crime," he said in a TV interview. He added that Italy also needed "more local police constituting an army of good in the squares and streets, to come between Italian people and the army of evil".

Meanwhile Zimbabwe continues to attract headlines the Times reports

Thabo Mbeki will be taken to task by UN over crisis in Zimbabwe

Britain and other Western nations plan to use today’s United Nations summit to ambush President Mbeki of South Africa over the crisis gripping Zimbabwe.
Gordon Brown is expected to raise the election stand-off in Zimbabwe at a Security Council summit chaired by Mr Mbeki, even though it is not on the agenda.

South Africa's ruling African National Congress has split publicly over the still-undeclared presidential election result in Zimbabwe, where President Robert Mugabe is accused of defying the verdict of his own voters.

says the Independent

The Mirror heralds the

Bravery of Britain's oldest frontline casualty Gary Thompson killed in Afghanistan blast on its front page

He was a middle-aged dad of five who gave up a successful career to fight the Taliban and bring freedom to the women of Afghanistan.
Inspired by his love for his five girls, ducting boss Gary Thompson, 51, returned to the RAF as a reservist 28 years after quitting the force

The Express leads with the menace of new speed cameras

THE war on motorists is being stepped up with Big Brother speed cameras that track every inch of a car journey, campaigners warned last night.
The hi-tech traps calculate a driver’s average speed over several miles, unlike the current cameras that only snap at a specific spot.
Critics say the new machines would lead to a huge number of drivers amassing penalty points.

Many of the papers report that

A couple were killed yesterday after they were struck by a train at 80mph while "tussling" with each other on the tracks.
Witnesses described hearing "raised voices" in the seconds before the incident, leading to speculation that they had been arguing.
In the aftermath of the tragedy, the woman's mother is believed to have rushed to the station, where she told staff: "That's my daughter".

says the Mail

Royal 'gay sex tape' blackmail jury hears claims reports the Telegraph

A married member of the Royal Family was subject to an attempted blackmail by two men over claims he had performed a sex act on one of his senior male aides on a kitchen floor, a court has heard.The Royal, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was issued with a demand for £50,000 by Ian Strachan and Sean McGuigan - who warned that they were considering selling their material to a newspaper, the Old Bailey heard.

The Sun reports

The employee also told how another royal “flashed his willy in his face” in a toilet, the Old Bailey was told. Socialite Strachan and his chum spent five months making a total of eight hours of tapes — most of them while the flunky was drunk, the court heard.

The paper has an exclusive on its front page

JAILED rocker PETE DOHERTY stares vacantly in his cell — amid revelations he is shooting up heroin in the prison’s DETOX unit.
The junkie singer, 29, has been injecting smack smuggled into London’s tough Wormwood Scrubs slammer.
Doherty, jailed for snubbing rehab orders, is paying for the drugs by begging credit from fellow lags and writing IOUs.

A poll in the Times reveals

Labour is heading for its worst results in local elections for 30 years and could be forced into third place on May 1, local government experts predicted yesterday.
The party is bracing itself for an even lower share of the vote than 2004, when it polled 26 per cent.
Then Labour was facing a backlash over Iraq and the party lost hundreds of seats in its metropolitan heartlands as voters switched to the Liberal Democrats. Today’s gloomy economic climate looks likely to do more damage to Labour’s prospects.

The Independent meanwhile reports

Boris leads in race for mayor that is all about personality

The Blond Bombshell is dismissed as "a joke" by his Labour and Liberal Democrat opponents in the race to be Mayor of London. But at a lively hustings at Reuters in Canary Wharf yesterday, Mr Johnson did both funny and serious.

T5 fiasco proves terminal for BA bosses as Walsh takes personal charge reports the Guardian

As the bags piled up by their thousands in the basement of Heathrow's Terminal 5 the contrite boss of British Airways, Willie Walsh, stood before the media in the £4.3bn building and accepted personal blame for the shambles.
Yesterday the 46-year-old Dubliner appeared to realise he had made another error and in fact it was two senior colleagues who were responsible for the fiasco. Gareth Kirkwood, director of operations at BA, and David Noyes, head of customer relations, were fired as Walsh took personal charge of running the terminal. Analysts said the move increased the pressure on the chief executive, who has no one else to blame if there are further problems at T5 under his watch.

The Mirror reports that

The prime suspect in the hunt for Rhys Jones' killer was behind bars last night.
The arrest over the murder was one of 12 yesterday as 100 officers, many of them armed, swooped on 10 addresses in co-ordinated dawn raids.
Armed police kicked down the door of a semi-detached house at 6am and led away a 17-year-old in handcuffs.

Finally the Independent reveals that

Cheap rivets blamed for massive loss of life as 'Titanic' sank

The Titanic might have gone down more slowly and more of its passengers could have been rescued if the shipyard that built it, Harland & Wolff in Northern Ireland, had not skimped on the quality of the rivets holding its hull sections together, say US researchers.
The authors of a book, What Really Sank the Titanic, claim the shipyard over-reached in attempting to build three new liners at once for the White Star Line