From today's UK papers

Financial Times

Leicester University and the British Geological Survey have discovered the oldest known crustacean fossils in Shropshire.

Guardian

The confidence of school leavers from the girl power generation is about to be shattered by glaring inequalities in the jobs market, the equal opportunities commission warned yesterday in its annual report.

The Royal Photographic Society and the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television yesterday announced a new partnership that will make Bradford the permanent home of one of the most important photographic collections in the world.

Independent

Providing students with free dental care, eye tests and prescriptions would cost the taxpayer more than £50 million a year, the Government said yesterday.

A planned overhaul of secondary education to get rid of the "bog-standard comprehensive" is a "recipe for chaos", according to Labour MP David Chaytor, who has been appointed to the Education Select Committee.

Oxfam has launched a bitter campaign in Delhi against the world's biggest pharmaceutical company, Pfizer, claiming that the company "has consistently pursued policies that are detrimental to the interests of the world's poor".

The world is 90 per cent certain to experience potentially catastrophic global warming over the next century caused by man-made emissions of green-house gases, scientists from the National Centre for Atmospheric Research and University of East Anglia say.

Robert Fisk, The Independent's Middle East correspondent, has won a prestigious prize for his investigation into the 1915 massacre of Armenian Christians by the Turks.

Daily Mail

The Black Death was caused not by rats but by an infectious virus that could re-emerge at any time, according to research from Liverpool University.

Daily Telegraph

A conservative US senator came out in support of government funding of research into foetal stem cells yesterday, deepening President Bush's dilemma on the issue.

Times

The Office for National Statistics says that the number of couples getting married has fallen by a quarter in ten years.

According to this year's Norrington Table, Balliol College has returned to the top of Oxford's academic league table for the first time in more than 30 years.

Miscellany

The Treasury yesterday published the National Asset Register, the first valuation of all the government's property, ranging from aid trucks in Nepal to weather satellites in space. ( Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, Guardian, Daily Mail )

Women taking newer third-generation contraception pills are at an increased risk of potentially fatal blood clots, a study by the University Medical Centre, Utrecht confirms today. ( Guardian, Daily Telegraph )

Plans to charge employees for bringing cases before employment tribunals, and to reduce the awards to those who refuse conciliation with their employers, will today be announced by Alan Johnson, the employment relations minister. ( Financial Times, Times )