Newspaper headlines: 'Wake up zombies!' and 'Truss softens on handouts'

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By BBC News
Staff
PA Media

The cost of living leads most of Wednesday's front pages.

The Guardian highlights the claim by Boris Johnson that his successor is "absolutely certain" to give further support to households to help with soaring energy bills.

It says his "unexpected intervention" will add further pressure on the Tory leadership frontrunner, Liz Truss, to acknowledge that she would need to do more than simply offer tax cuts.

But the Daily Telegraph features a warning that the new prime minister could be "giving with one hand while taking with the other", after the Institute for Fiscal Studies suggested rising inflation would drag millions of people into higher tax bands, raising an extra £30 billion a year for the Treasury.

The Times reports that the consumer affairs champion Martin Lewis has urged both Liz Truss and her leadership rival, Rishi Sunak, to set out detailed plans this month on how they would tackle the energy price crisis. It says he's accused the Conservatives of neglecting a "financial cataclysm" that will push millions into destitution.

The Sun says energy giants face a tougher windfall tax "within weeks", with gas and electricity bosses set to be "hauled in for crisis talks" with the government on Wednesday.

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An investigation by the Times has found that a number of universities have withdrawn books from campus reading lists, or made them optional, amid fears that the content could upset or offend students.

The texts are reported to include the Pulitzer prizewinning novel The Underground Railroad, which has graphic depictions of slavery, as well as the play Miss Julie, which discusses suicide. Trigger warnings are said to have been applied to more than 1,000 other works.

The Times' leader column is unimpressed, warning that such practices have no place on undergraduate courses. "Students who take offence" should be told "civilly but firmly, that if their sensibilities need protecting then university is not the place for them," it says.

The Daily Mail focuses on official figures which show that, for the first time since records began, unmarried women gave birth to the majority of babies born in England and Wales last year.

It says the rise in babies born out of wedlock coincided with a period when Covid restrictions prevented marriage and civil partnership ceremonies from taking place.

The Sun notes that the Office for National Statistics also revealed that the average number of babies per mother increased slightly for the first time in a decade while birth rates for women under 30 "hit or stayed at record lows".