The following are the top stories in the Maltese and overseas press:
The Times reports Opposition leader Joseph Muscat urging the government yesterday to ‘stop taxing the people dry.’ It also features the launch of an offenders register. Justice and Home Affairs Minister Carm Mifsud Bonnici said that child abuse claims must be reported to the police.
The Malta Independent also leads with the Bill for the introduction of an offenders’ register.
In-Nazzjon quotes the Prime Minister saying that Joseph Muscat in his two-hour speech yesterday said nothing about job creation. It also says that there is local and overseas interest in the building and management of Corporate Village.
l-orizzont leads with the final words of Joseph Muscat’s speech yesterday where he promised a country which the children deserved.
The overseas press
The Wall Street Journal leads with the US mid-term elections that could determine the effectiveness of the remainder of the Obama presidency. Democrats are widely expected to lose at least 40 seats and their majority in the House of Representatives, where all 435 seats are on the ballot. Also up for grabs are 37 seats in the 100-seat Senate and governorships in 37 states.
Al Jazeerra reports that a number of countries have announced changed security procedures after the discovery of two parcel bombs in US-bound air cargo. Britain has banned unaccompanied cargo freight to the UK from Yemen and Somalia, while Germany said it was extending its ban on cargo aircraft from Yemen to include passenger flights. The Netherlands and Canada also suspended all cargo flights from Yemen.
London’s The Guardian leads with the new measures announced by the Home Secretary concerning flights from Yemen after the cargo plane bomb plot, including a ban on air passengers carrying printer cartridges in their hand luggage. Metro leads with reports that the two bombs at the centre of the failed plot contained much more explosive than was needed to bring down a plane.
Meanwhile, Reuters reports from Athens that Greek police intercepted a booby-trapped parcel addressed to French President Nicolas Sarkozy, after another package exploded at a courier company in Athens, slightly wounding a female employee. Shortly after the explosion, police arrested two suspects and detonated two more makeshift parcel bombs they carried and a third one found at another deliver company.
The Daily Express says a new cost-cutting initiative could see British troops under the command of French military chiefs as both countries are set to commit to share troops, aircraft carriers and nuclear testing facilities later today.
Corriere della Sera reports three people have been killed in mudslides as heavy rain wreaked havoc in northern and central Italy for a third day on Monday. A 39-year-old mother and her two-year-old son died when a mudslide hit their home near the Tuscan town of Massa Carrara on Sunday night and a 38-year-old man was killed after another landslide hit a nearby village.
Jeune Afrique quotes the electoral commission in the Ivory Coast saying that turnout in Sunday’s presidential election was about 80 per cent – a figure it called “historic”. The UN said it was one of the highest election turnouts ever seen in Africa.
Granma reports the Roman Catholic Church in Cuba says the government has agreed to release three more political dissidents from jail. More than 50 have accepted exchanging a Cuban jail for exile in Spain.
The BBC reports UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has been criticised by Human Rights Watch for failing to discuss human rights in China during a meeting with President Ho Jintao in Beijing yesterday. The campaign group had urged Ban to publicly express concern about the imprisonment of the Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo.
Ansa says that a phone call from Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi's office to get a Moroccan teenage dancer out of a scrape in May was at the centre of a 60-minute encounter yesterday between former Milan police chief Vincenzo Indolfi and Prosecutor Ilda Boccassini, a prominent investigator in several cases regarding the premier. Berlusconi last week appeared to confirm reports that he called the station in person to ask for preferential treatment for the girl. Italian dailies have published wiretap transcripts apparently showing it was Berlusconi who made the call.