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

The Times reports how rebel MPs were condemned by the PN’s Executive last night.

The Malta Independent says businesses are set to benefit from Sunday’s England-Italy match.

In-Nazzjon leads with the opening of a childcare centre, saying the government is investing more in the family.

l-orizzont reports how a Maltese doctor shocked the British NHS yesterday when he said that 130,000 dying patients were ‘killed’ early to make beds available.

The overseas press

O Globo reports that UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has opened the Rio+20 summit in Brazil with a warning that time was running out to act on climate change.  But he said he was confident an agreement on sustainable development could be reached. Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff welcomed delegates from 193 countries, including 86 heads of government, to Rio de Janeiro amid criticism that the three-day summit was already falling far short of its promise to establish clear goals for sustainable development.

The state-owned daily Al-Ahram says Egypt was facing "the most critical 48 hours in its history" after the election authorities announced the results of the presidential run-off had been delayed because it needed more time to study appeals from the two rival candidates. Both Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Morsi and former prime minister Ahmed claimed to have won. The election commission said it was looking into appeals from lawyers of both candidates into alleged campaign violations and disputed vote counting. News of the delay came as thousands of people massed in Cairo's Tahrir Square to protest against the country's ruling military council.

Kathimerini leads with the swearing-in of Antonis Samaras as Greece's new prime minister after the country's pro-austerity parties struck a deal to form a coalition government. The 61-year-old former foreign minister has vowed to keep Greece in the euro but faces the daunting task of revising an unpopular EU-IMF bailout that has imposed harsh austerity conditions on many Greeks. The coalition is broadly committed to the EU bailout programme, but wants to renegotiate its terms. European leaders have already said there is limited room to manoeuvre.

Bloomberg announces that the US central bank has cut its forecast for growth this year, saying the pace of recovery in the country has slowed. The US Federal Reserve said the US economy was still growing moderately but t cut its growth forecast from 2.9 per cent to 2.4 per cent, saying the nation’s economy faced significant risks from the financial crisis in Europe.

In a new confrontation with President Obama, a Republican-controlled Congressional panel has voted to charge his Attorney-General Eric Holder with contempt of Congress. The Washington Times says the White House had earlier invoked the rarely-used executive privilege to withhold documents from the panel. They relate to an investigation into a failed operation to tackle gun-running across the Mexican border.

A Brazilian prosecutor has requested that the government pay an indigenous tribe, evicted from its ancestral lands, 170 million reais (€63 million) in damages. O Dia reports the prosecutor argued that the Guyraroka community in western Brazil must be compensated for moral and material damages. They would need the money to make their environment sustainable after decades of destruction by cattle ranchers and farmers.

The BBC says the Ecuadorian authorities would decide later today whether to grant asylum to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Police in the UK have said that they were ready to arrest him after he broke one of his bail conditions – to stay at his bail address between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. – by seeking asylum inside the Ecuadorean embassy in London last Tuesday after exhausting most legal avenues to avoid extradition to Sweden. Prosecutors there want to question him over alleged rape allegations by two women. Assange, who says sex was consentual, argues he has no assurance that he would not be extradited from Sweden to the United States, where a grand jury “was working on finding angles to prosecute him”. Ecuador's Foreign Minister Ricardo Patiño told ABC he was considering whether Assange could be executed for espionage if he was sent to the US.

Adevarul says former Romanian Prime Minister Adrian Nastase has attempted to commit suicide by shooting himself in the neck. The incident occurred when police arrived at Nastase's house to take him to prison, local media reports say. Hours earlier Romania's highest court had upheld a two-year prison sentence against Nastase on corruption charges. Nastase, who held office between 2000 and 2004, was convicted for illegally amassing about €1.5 million for his 2004 election campaign.

Tribune de Genève quotes the Red Cross saying both the Syrian government and opposition fighters have agreed to a temporary truce to evacuate wounded and trapped civilians from the city of Homs. It says its teams are ready to enter the city but they have not yet been able to do so and it is unclear whether the heavy shelling and gunfire which has been taking place over the last 10 days has stopped. The ICRC described the situation in the city as critical and said it was essential it be given immediate access.

Sky News reports that a bride who stole £168,000 (€208,000) from her employer to help pay for a lavish wedding has been jailed for 20 months. Kirsty Lane fraudulently siphoned large sums from the company where she worked, but her boss Peter Sutton was a guest at the wedding and his suspicions were raised by the sumptuous nature of the event. When he returned to the office, where the newly-wed bride worked as a part-time accounts clerk, he discovered that she had falsified invoices and instead of paying suppliers she had diverted money into her own account. She was arrested at home and was unable to go on honeymoon to Mexico. Mr Sutton said her "unbridled greed" almost ruined the firm.

 

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.