Friday's papers

Quantitative easing is over many of the papers this morning.The Telegraph calls it a £150b leap into the dark by the Bank of England after it has taken as taken an historic "step into the unknown" by pledging to create £150 billion of cash and pour it into Britain's stricken financial system.

The Bank said that it would pump £75 billion into the economy as it halved interest rates to 0.5 per cent in a last-ditch effort to combat the slump. It added that there was no limit to how far it could go down this untried route of quantitative easing.

says the Times

The Express call it a gamble that has to work.

The Guardian leads with a story that is set to dominate the headlines today.It reports that more than 40 major British companies face legal action for allegedly buying secret personal data about thousands of workers they wanted to vet before employing them.

The companies are in the consruction sector and the information commissioner, Richard Thomas,who will today publish a list of the companies says that the firms, including Balfour Beatty, Sir Robert McAlpine, Laing O'Rourke and Costain, have, for many years, covertly bought details of workers' trade union activities and their conduct at work.

The news that a teminally ill couple made the trip together to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland is on many of the front pages.The Times says that Peter and Penny Duff, from Bath, are the first Britons to die at the controversial clinic since the Lord Chief Justice signalled that anyone helping a terminally ill person to organise an assisted suicide abroad would not be prosecuted.

The Independent leads with the headline that gambling is a bigger threat than doping.The paper says that it has learnt

In the past 17 months, the industry watchdog the Gambling Commission has investigated 47 cases of alleged match-fixing and illegal betting on British sporting events. The governing bodies of football, tennis, cricket, horse racing and other sports are discussing with ministers plans for tough new regulations which they hope will stamp out what they consider to be "as great a risk to the integrity of sport as doping".

According to the Mail,

The number of offences committed by youngsters aged ten to 17 in the last year was 277,986 - more than one every two minutes.

The paper blames the government which it says has created a'decade of juvenile delinquency' .