Press digest

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

The Times quotes EU reports that Malta will avoid euro recession. It also says that three policemen and a bouncer will face new charges after having been acquitted  from previous charges because of mistakes on their charge sheet.

The Malta Independent reports that tourists from Israel have increased by 30,000. It also reports on Adrian Vassallo’s criticism of Joseph Muscat.

In-Nazzjon reports that the prime minister yesterday met representatives of taxi owners and the farmers.

l-orizzont says Malta has the worse rate of school leavers at age 16. It also reports the passing away of Vincent Esposito, a veteran trade unionist.

The overseas press:

Kathimerini announces that a third attempt to forge a coalition in Greece has failed as Alexis Tsipras, leader of the Radical Left Coalition or Syriza, refused an invitation to joint rule. Committed to a complete revision of the country’s critical EU bailout, Tsipras said his presence in the proposed coalition was merely being sought by more established, pro-bailout parties as a “Leftwing accomplice”. Evangelos Venizelos, the leader of the socialist Pasok party, admitted the talks had failed and said he would return his mandate to form a government to the president later today. A slim chance remains that an emergency “national unity” government could be formed if the president can convince the parties to work together.

La Tribune says French President-elect François Hollande has suggested that the government of outgoing leader Nicolas Sarkozy underestimated the country’s budget problems and has ordered a new audit of France’s books. However, Hollande – a Socialist elected Sunday to lead the world’s fifth-biggest economy – said that wouldn’t hurt his ability to fulfill campaign pledges, including higher taxes on the rich, thousands of new teaching jobs and freezes some government spending. He also stuck to his own deficit-reduction goals despite new European Union figures released Friday that paint a bleak picture for France and the whole eurozone.

CNN reports that a jury in Chicago has convicted Oscar-winner Jennifer Hudson’s former brother-in-law of murdering her mother, brother and seven-year-old nephew in what prosecutors’ described as an act of vengeance by a jilted husband.  Hudson, who expressed her undisguised disdain for William Balfour and endured weeks of excruciating evidence about the October 2008 killings, was visibly overcome with emotion as the verdict was read. Balfour, 31, who faces a mandatory life prison sentence, showed no emotion.

Syrian soldiers have reportedly foiled a suicide bombing, the day after two bomb blasts killed scores of people in Damascus. State television RTV says authorities at Aleppo, in Syria's north, killed a man whose car was carrying 1,200 kilograms of explosives. The report coincides with tens of thousands of Syrians taking to the streets despite continued gunfire and rallying against the government of President Bashar al-Assad. Opposition activists dismissed the reports of a foiled bomb plot as a lie, saying it was not in their interests to stage attacks on a Friday.

Dagbladet reports that the brother of one of the Norwegian teenagers killed by Anders Behring Breivik threw a shoe at him during his Oslo trial. Some of the people in court clapped as the man of Iraqi origin, whose brother was one of the people Breivik killed on July 22 on Norway's Utoeya island, was ushered out. The black shoe hit one of his lawyers, Vibeke Hein Baera, who sits between the accused and the onlookers. Throwing shoes is seen as a form of protest and public insult in many countries.

AFP quotes a top UN envoy saying Joseph Kony, one of the world's most wanted men, is having to move nearly every day as hunters close in on the African guerrilla leader who may now be in Darfur. Kony, who launched his rebellion in Uganda 25 years ago, is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes and his global notoriety increased this year after the release of an internet video. A multinational force, led by Uganda and helped by 100 United States Special Forces, has been chasing Kony in Uganda, Central African Republic, South Sudan and Democratic Republic of Congo.

Valérie Trierweiler, the partner of France's newly-elected president François Hollande, has vowed to continue her career as a TV presenter and journalist. The soon-to-be new first lady of France has come under the scrutiny of the international press for her unmarried status, marking the first time an incoming French presidential couple are not legally man and wife. The 47 year-old Trierweiler, who has covered plenty of political campaigns as a journalist for the glossy weekly magazine Paris Match, has made clear that she would like to maintain her previous “working mom” lifestyle as much as possible. The twice-divorced mother of three has refused to give up her career, telling the French weekly Femme Actuelle that she didn't want the state to pay for the children she had before moving with François Hollande.

Reuters quotes Anish Kapoor, the artist behind the controversial spiralling red tower on London's Olympic Park, saying Britons would grow to love the piece, just as people had come to appreciate the Eiffel Tower. The 115-metre-tall structure, higher than London's Big Ben and New York's Statue of Liberty, has divided opinion, with some describing it as resembling a carnival slide or a water pipe. The $35 million tower, or orbit, is Britain's biggest piece of public art and some critics have said it is a waste of money at a time when the country faces severe spending cuts and has just returned to recession. The bulk of the funding has come from ArcelorMittal, the world's largest steel manufacturer, after a brief discussion in at the World Economic Forum in Davos, in 2009, between the company's chairman and chief executive Lakshmi Mittal and London mayor Boris Johnson.