The following are the top stories in the Maltese and overseas press:
The Sunday Times leads with the ‘despair’ of soldiers working in the ‘obscene’ Safi detention centre. It also says that a stalemate looms as the political parties gear for a long campaign.
The Malta Independent on Sunday says that Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando has pledged to find a positive way forward. It also reports that the Council of Maltese Abroad has been officially established.
MaltaToday reports that it was a PN official who passed the Mistra contract to the Labour Party three days before 2008 election.
Il-Mument says the government remains focused on the needs of the family.
It-Torca says the Nationalist Party was never as humiliated as at present. It also reports that Selmun Palace Hotel may be converted into a medical rehabilitation centre.
KullHadd says the coalition has taken the PN 50 years, when it was last in a coalition.
Illum quotes former minister Michael Falzon saying Lawrence Gonzi does not have the right leadership qualities.
The overseas press
CNN quotes the police in the American state of Colorado saying bomb squad officers had managed to disable many of the booby-trap devices and removed the major threats at the apartment of the man believed to have shot dead 12 people and injured 58 others at a cinema at the town of Aurora. The flat had been booby-trapped with trip wires and explosives. A robot was used to make many of the devices safe and a controlled explosion was carried out. The suspect, John Holmes, is expected to be arraigned in court tomorrow. The Washington Post says President Obama was preparing to visit Aurora later today to attend a memorial service for the victims.
Huffington Post says memorial services are to be held across Norway later today to mark the first anniversary of the mass killings carried out by Anders Behring Breivik. The car-bomb in Oslo designed to kill the leadership of the country, and the shootings on the island of Utoeya designed to destroy the next generation of Labour party politicians, left 77 people dead, the majority of them teenagers attending a Labour Party youth camp. It was one of the worst acts of terrorism the world has witnessed in recent decades.
Reuters reports that hundreds of unemployed Spaniards, who had walked hundreds of kilometres to Madrid, joined protests against Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy's government and its handling of an economic crisis. Demonstrations have swollen across Spain since the centre-right government announced new spending cuts amounting to €65 billion two weeks ago.
Meanwhile European Parliament president Martin Schulz has warned that Spain's economic crisis could spark a "social explosion" across Europe because of the high unemployment rate among young people. In an interview with Bild, he called for the rapid implementation of "new European programmes to finally create more jobs for this generation". The Social Democrat said however that Spain was better placed than Greece to weather the crisis, since it "has a solid industrial base and a well-organised public administration".
al bawaba says that while government forces claimed on Saturday to have largely quelled resistance in Damascus, fierce street battles erupted in Aleppo, home to three million people and Syria’s main northern commercial hub. At least 90 people, 41 of them civilians, were killed across the country. Thousands of civilians are reported to be fleeing from a district where rebel fighters were facing bombardments by government forces.
Voice of America quotes a White House spokesman saying the US is very concerned about Syria’s stockpile of chemical weapons and was consulting Syria’s neighbours about the need to secure them. He was responding to allegations by a senior military defector that President Assad’s forces were moving chemical weapons for possible use against rebels.
Two Syrian brigadier-generals fled to Turkey overnight, part of a group of about 10 people that included colonels and other military officers, a Turkish official told Reuters on Saturday. The latest defections would bring the number of Syrian generals taking refuge in Turkey to 24. A 16-month uprising in Syria has unleashed a refugee crisis in Turkey and its other neighbours. More than 43,000 Syrian refugees are registered as living in Turkey.
Meanwhile, Baltic Times reports that UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, visiting Slovenia, said on Saturday that he was sending Undersecretary General for Peacekeeping Operations Hervé Ladsous to Syria to assess the situation. Ban's remarks came a day after the UN Security Council approved a 30-day extension for an unarmed observer mission.
The New York Times says that after more than a year of scandal in his British newspaper empire, media mogul Rupert Murdoch has resigned his directorships in a string of companies that control titles that include The Sun tabloid, The Times and The Sunday Times. The move has fuelled speculation that he might be preparing to sell the newspaper group. He also quit from some of the media company's subsidiary boards in the United States.
L’Avvenire says the Vatican has said that Pope Benedict’s butler has been released from detention and placed under house arrest pending a ruling whether he should stand trial for leaking confidential papers. Paolo Gabriele was detained in May in connection with the theft of documents.
An Air Force instructor has been sentenced to 20 years in prison after being convicted of all 28 charges of rape, aggravated sexual contact and multiple counts of aggravated sexual assault in a sweeping sex scandal that rocked one of America’s busiest military training centres. The Global Post reports a military jury at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio heard Staff Sgt. Luis Walker between October 2010 and January 2011, sexually assaulted or had improper sexual or personal contact with at least 10 female recruits.
France 24 reports that the International Olympic Committee would not punish anyone ahead of the London Games over allegations that some national Olympic officials were breaking strict rules on selling tickets for the Games. The IOC Ethics Commission has been investigating claims made in the Sunday Times newspaper that national Olympic committees and authorised ticket resellers had been caught selling thousands of top tickets on the black market for up to 10 times their face value. The British broadsheet said it had found "widespread corruption" reaching across 54 countries and had passed its evidence to the IOC, which in turn pledged to take the "strongest sanctions" possible if members were found to have broken the rules.