USA Today focuses on Elkhart, a town in Indiana chosen by President Obama to highlight the need for support for his stimulus plan. The area’s unemployment has reached 18 percent and residents are braced for worse to come. It's shot up from 4.7 percent in 2007.

The Figaro in France picks up on Obama's choice of town, and says the president has changed his tone in the face of Republican opposition to his plan. It says that Obama was not expecting - and has severely underestimated - the Republicans capacity to block the plan.

Obama has brutally changed his tone and language, calling the crisis a ‘catastrophe’, the ‘worst disaster since the great depression’ and talking of Washington’s ‘paralysis’.

Israel is at the polls today, and its neck and neck.

Haaretz focuses on today's elections and the journalist gets theoretically into candidates' heads.

Netinyahu must be asking himself how he could lose so much support in the last two weeks. No-one expected it to be this close. Livni must be asking herself what alliances she’ll have to make if she wins.

Libération takes a look back at the campaign and essentially says how rubbish and lacking in substance it was, and that there is little to choose between the candidates.

All have played on fears on security and all have leant towards the right as the campaign has gone on.

We’ve heard the horrifying stories of death and panic in Australia, how arson could be behind some of the recent fires – now it’s the backlash. The government is coming under fire for poor advice – ‘stay and defend’ - and a poor warning system. One town received a warning saying: if you haven’t left already it's too late. In some areas there were no warnings at all. There’s strong criticism of the government who some say failed to make people realise how serious the fires were.

The Times have got hold of a list being sent round to businesses in Zimbabwe from zealots in the Zanu PF party. They are soliciting ‘donations ‘ for Mugabe’s 85th birthday to pay for the following:

Last year's birthday bash cost around 1.2 million dollars. If businesses don’t stump up money their lives will be made difficult by the government.