Press digest

The following are the top stories in the Maltese and overseas press:

The Times quotes the finance minister saying Malta did not deserve the new Moody's rating. It also reports that 60 children ended up in a nursing aide's personal photo album.

The Malta Independent leads with the launching of the new tourism masterplan.

MaltaToday leads with reactions to the Moody's downgrade. It also highlights Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando's view that Malta should halt the ACTA ratification process.

In-Nazzjon reports how Mosta local council awarded a direct order to a Labour candidate to run a latrine. It also reports on the reaction to the Moody's downgrade.

l-orizzont says the MCESD will today discuss the current political situation following a request by the GWU. The newspaper also quotes a university academic, Earnest Cachia saying there is no place for ACTA in the current world.

The overseas press

Bloomberg reports that Asian stocks rose this morning while the euro weakened against most of its major peers as European leaders demanded stronger commitments from Greece to implement budget cuts. European finance ministers cancelled a Brussels meeting slated for today and would hold a teleconference instead to prod Greece to do more to clinch a €130 billion aid package. Le Soir quotes Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, head of the group of eurozone finance ministers, saying the Greeks had failed to meet conditions set by lenders. Eurozone finance ministers would meet for previously scheduled talks in Brussels on Monday.

Meanwhile, a Greek government official told Kathimerini the leaders of Greece’s two biggest political parties would send written commitments tomorrow to the so-called troika – the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund – to guarantee the austerity measures. The Greek parliament had approved €3.2 billion in cuts but eurozone partners want a commitment in writing from politicians who face an election in April.

The People’s Daily reports that Chinese premier Wen Jiabao told EU president Herman Van Rompuy and European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso in Beijing that China was ready to increase its participation in Europe’s effort to resolve the debt crisis. Wen said he wanted to see Europe – China's biggest trading partner – "maintain stability and prosperity".

Meanwhile, US president Barack Obama has held his first meeting with the man who is expected to be leading China by the end of the year. The Washington Times reports that Obama told Chinese leader-in-waiting Xi Jinping that China must play fair in international trade, and vowed to keep pressing China to clean up its human rights record. As he sat side by side with Xi in the Oval Office, Obama sought to reassure him that Washington welcomed China's "peaceful rise" while also signalling frictions would remain in a growing economic and military rivalry between the two countries.

According to Al Ayyam, Gaza's only power plant has ground to a halt after running out of diesel because of the shortage of fuel entering the Gaza Strip. The power plant, which supplies around a third of Gaza's electricity, suffers frequent outages, leading to daily blackouts across the Hamas-run territory.

Fuji TV says seismologists from Japan and China have urged the operators of the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan to improve safety measures, warning that a dangerous seismic fault has been re-activated near the site. In the seven months after last year's magnitude 9 earthquake, more than 24,000 aftershocks were recorded in the city of Iwaki, in Fukushima prefecture.

Corriere della Sera reports that prosecutors have asked Italy’s highest criminal court to reinstate the murder convictions of Amanda Knox and her former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito for the murder of British student Meredith Kercher. Prosecutor Giovanni Galati said he was “very convinced” that Sollecito and Knox are responsible for stabbing to death 21-year-old Miss Kercher, who shared an apartment with Knox in the university town of Perugia.

For the first time in 20 years, Zurich outranked Tokyo as the world's most expensive city. The latest survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit has found that next in line are Geneva and Osaka Kobe. The survey compared the price of more than 400 items, including food, clothing, rent, transport, utility bills and recreational costs. At the other end of the scale, the report found Karachi, Mumbai and Tehran as the least expensive cities in the world.

The Washington Post quotes the results of a survey which shows that more than 1.8 million dead Americans remain listed as active voters. The new study describes the US voter registration system as "plagued with errors and inefficiencies". The research conducted by the non-partisan Pew Centre on the State also revealed one in every eight voter records contains inaccuracies, and at least 51 million eligible voters are not registered to take part in elections. The study comes as the United States prepares for presidential and congressional elections in November.

Saudi Arabia's religious police have arrested more than 140 people for celebrating Valentine's Day. The BBC quotes the Organisation for Promoting Virtue and Discouraging Evil they were saving women from "deceiving men", who used the day to give the fake impression that they loved a woman while pretending to be "harmless lambs". The religious authorities say Muslims who took part in Valentine's Day were weak, lacking imagination, and far removed from the "sublime and virtuous" objectives of their religion. The organisation has also confiscated all red roses from shops.

La Gazzetta dello Sport announces that Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti has vetoed Rome's application to host the 2020 Summer Olympic Games saying his government would not support the bid. Rome mayor Gianni Alemanno had asked Italy'’s un-elected government would pay billions of euros in case the capital ran into financial difficulty. Monti told reporters in Rome the government did not think it would be responsible to guarantee the bid, when it had asked the people to make sacrifices to stave off a €1.9 trillion debt load.