Most of today’s papers lead on the knife attack on children at a holiday club in Southport.
Many cite witnesses describing the scene as being like something from a horror movie. “Every parent’s nightmare”, is the headline for the Daily Mirror.
The Daily Telegraph says the suspected attacker was wearing a Covid-style face mask and a hooded top when he walked through the building’s front door, which the paper reports had been left unlocked for fire safety reasons. The paper says piercing screams followed with children running from the building covered in blood.
The Times describes firefighters and ambulance workers in tears after treating the injured children, with some sitting on the floor with their heads in their hands.
The Sun’s editorial says such brutality against young children is horrifying, and the motivation beyond comprehension.
The Financial Times leads on comments by Chancellor Rachel Reeves, saying she’s having to make “incredibly tough choices” to fill a £22bn fiscal black hole.
The FT, and others, claim that the single biggest cause of the funding gap is Ms Reeves’s own decision to give inflation-busting pay rises to public sector workers.
Writing in the Times, Paul Johnson from the Institute for Fiscal Studies says the chancellor revealed a “financial mess” beyond what was anticipated. He describes as “astonishing” the fact the six-billion pound cost of housing asylum seekers wasn’t budgeted for by the previous government.
The Daily Mail’s leader column says Ms Reeves’ speech was full of piety and faux-indignation as she treated the nation to a whopper.
The paper believes Labour needed a fall guy to renege on its manifesto commitment not to raise taxes, and it says middle-England will now pay a heavy rice.
The Guardian’s editorial says Reeves was right to paint a picture of Conservative economic incompetence in vivid, shocking colours.
But it says the hard part is what comes next. The decision to prioritise savings, and squeeze spending, the paper says, sits uneasily with the government’s resolve to kick-start economic growth.
Writing in the Sun, Reeves says these are not the choices she wanted, but they’ll make the paper’s readers better off.
The Times and others pick up on a study that suggests new weight-loss drugs may help smokers kick the habit.
Out of more than 200,000 people being treated for type 2 diabetes, those taking semaglutide – whose brand name is Ozempic – were slightly less likely to visit the doctor with smoking-related problems.
The researchers say more trials are needed to be sure the drugs do help.
And several of the papers report that lettuce leaves have proven to be a gem of a remedy for nettle stings.
A study published in the Journal of Emergency Medicine suggests they’re just as effective as dock leaves – which the Telegraph says were first mentioned as a salve for nettles by Geoffrey Chaucer, 600 years ago.
Both plants release a cooling sap when crushed, bringing, along with a possible placebo effect, a sense of relief.