Press digest

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

The Sunday Times says an investigation is underway into a flight delay caused as the pilot awaited the arrival of the head of the pilots’ union.

The Malta Independent on Sunday quotes the president of the doctors’ union saying the union always sought a level playing field in personnel appointments. It also says Franco Debono is considering court action over the statute of the PN, which he views as possibly illegal.

MaltaToday says comments on illegal immigration by Labour MP Michael Falzon have raised eyebrows. It also says that the Curia has dispelled claims that the Archbishop’s health was threatening his control.

KullHadd also says that the executive’s decision against Franco Debono is being considered illegal by the MP. 

It-Torca says Malta National team player Kevin Sammut is to appeal the UEFA 10-year ban against him. 

Il-Mument reports that Labour wants changes to Malta's treaty with the EU and that tomorrow marks the fiftieth anniversary since George Borg Olivier requested Independence for Malta.

Illum says Gozo Channel stayed silent and took no action after its operations manager was accused in court of causing damages to captain Mario Grech.  

The overseas press

Australian broadcaster ABC reports that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is expected to speak publicly this afternoon for the first time since taking refuge last June at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. It remained unclear if he would leave the building and, if he did, how he would do so without being arrested by British police stationed outside the embassy, ready to pounce on him he left the building. Despite Ecuador granting him political asylum, Britain is determined to extradite him to Sweden to face sexual assault allegations. Assange fears he would be sent from Sweden to the US, and Australasia's leading media company Fairfax Media has obtained declassified diplomatic cables which suggest the US is intent on doing just that.

Ultima Hora quotes President Rafael Correa saying Ecuador had never argued that Assange should not answer to the Swedish Justice system but he had only called for a guarantee that there would be no subsequent extradition to a third country. Since this had not happened, he had decided to grant Assange asylum. In his national address, President Correa criticised the British government for its threat to enter the Ecuadorian embassy in London, calling it an intolerable and explicit threat.

Cesky Noviny says the police in the Czech Republic have charged a man suspected of planning attacks similar to those by Anders Behring Breivik in Norway. The 29-year-old man was charged with unlawful possession of weapons and endangering public. Weapons, explosives and police uniforms were found in his flat in the city of Ostrava and detectives say he was using the name Breivik on the internet.

Japanese nationalists have landed on one of a group of uninhabited but disputed islands in the East China Sea despite Chinese objections. A journalist from the French news agency AFP, was aboard a flotilla of boats which sailed to the islands, said about a dozen men of a right wing group swam ashore. Japan's controls the archipelago but it is also claimed by China and Taiwan. A group of pro-China activists landed on the islands earlier this week, enraging Japanese nationalist groups.

The President of the Eurogroup Jean Claude Juncker has told Tiroler Tageszeitung of Austria that Greece would not leave the eurozone. He admitted this was this was '"technically possible" but not conceivable in terms of the "political" standpoint. Juncker, who next week meets the Greek leaders in Athens, said he was confident Greece would double efforts to fulfill its obligations.

The family of the mother of Moors Murders victim Keith Bennett has vowed to continue the fight to find his body and give her son a Christian burial. The Sunday Express says Winnie Johnson, 78, died at a hospice following a battle against cancer for a number of years. Ian Brady, the killer of her 12-year-old son, has always refused to say where he buried him on Saddleworth Moor above Manchester despite decades of pleading from his victim’s grieving mother. Brady, 74, and his partner, Myra Hindley, who died in jail in 2002 aged 60, were responsible for the murders of five youngsters in the 1960s. Most of their victims were sexually tortured before being buried on Saddleworth Moor, with Keith’s body the only one yet to be found.

Newsday reports Mark David Chapman, who shot and killed former Beatle John Lennon 32 years ago, would have his seventh parole hearing this week. He has come up for parole every two years since 2000 and has been turned down each time. Ahead of that hearing, the parole division received dozens of letters arguing against Chapman's release, including one from Lennon's widow Yoko Ono, who said she believed Chapman posed a risk to her, Lennon's two sons, the public and himself.

Ace Showbiz says China’s Yu Wenxia has won this year's Miss World competition on home soil. The 23-year-old aspiring music teacher is China's second Miss World winner. Miss Wales Sophie Moulds, 19, came in second, while Australia's Jessica Kahawaty, a 23-year-old law student, finished third. Around the world an estimated one billion people watched as Ivian Sarcos, last year's winner from Venezuela, handing over her crown.

CNN reports the veteran American swimmer Diana Nyad has began a new attempt to become the first person to swim from Cuba to Florida in the United States without a shark cage. Last year she was forced to stop her 166-km swim after being badly stung by jellyfish. Nyad, who turns 63 on Wednesday, hopes to complete her quest by Tuesday.

France 24 says a French swimmer who lost all four limbs in an electrocution accident has completed a swim that linked five continents. Using tailor-made flippers, Philippe Croizon braved strong currents and near-freezing temperatures in a roughly four-kilometre swim between the US island of Little Diomede and Big Diomede in Russia that he said took about one hour and 20 minutes. In the past three months he has swum between Papua New Guinea and Indonesia to link Oceania with Asia, across the Red Sea to link Africa to Asia and across the Strait of Gibraltar between Europe and Africa.