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

The Times of Malta reports how an 88-year-old man is contesting an eviction order. It also gives prominence to the court acquittal of two soldiers accused of the involuntary homicide of a gunner during a training exercise.

The Malta Independent says Joseph Muscat discussed illegal immigration with the UN Secretary General.

In-Nazzjon leads with a feature on Laurent Coleiro, the man who introduced Braille in Malta, saying nothing disheartens him.

l-orizzont reports how prickly pear is being used as a relief for the side-effects of chemotherapy.

The overseas press

Sydney Morning Herald quotes three UN diplomats saying the world's major powers have agreed on the core of a draft resolution on destroying Syria's chemical weapons. However, Russia denied such an agreement and insisted work was “still going on”. The development came after the foreign ministers of the five permanent members of the council met over lunch with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon earlier in the day. A draft resolution could be presented to the 15-nation Security Council soon, and the five permanent members would also meet on Friday to discuss a proposed Syria peace conference in Geneva.

The Associated News reports experts from the United States, Britain, Germany, Canada and Interpol have began working near bodies crushed by rubble in a bullet-scarred, scorched mall, fingerprint, collecting DNA material and making ballistic analysis to help determine the identities and nationalities of victims and al-Shabab gunmen who attacked the shopping centre, killing more than 60 people. A gaping hole in the mall's roof was caused by Kenyan soldiers who fired rocket-propelled grenades inside, knocking out a support column. The soldiers fired to distract a terrorist sniper so hostages could be evacuated.

In the UK, the Daily Star announces that the sniper at the centre of the Princess Diana murder probe has fled to Thailand in fear of his life. Soldier N, who claimed the SAS assassinated Diana, disappeared before authorities could speak to him. The probe into the Princess’s car crash was reopened earlier this year after Soldier N’s family told investigators of his claims that Special Forces agents caused the smash which killed the Princess by shining a light into her driver’s eyes.

Dawn says rescuers are struggling to help thousands of people injured and left homeless after their houses collapsed in a massive earthquake in south-western Pakistan, as the death toll rose overnight to 328. The magnitude 7.7 quake struck, which also left some 400 people injured, prompted a new island to rise from the sea just off the country's southern coast.

The Washington Times reports that declassified documents reveal the US National Security Agency eavesdropped on civil rights icon Martin Luther King and heavyweight boxer Muhammad Ali as well as other leading critics of the Vietnam War in a secret programme later deemed “disreputable”. The intensity of anti-war dissent at home led President Lyndon Johnson to ask US intelligence agencies in 1967 to find out if some protests were fuelled by foreign powers. The programme, which continued after Richard Nixon entered the White House in 1969, was shut down in 1973, just as the Nixon administration was engulfed in scandal.

According to Pravda, President Putin has said Greenpeace activists held after trying to scale an offshore oil platform were not pirates, but he defended the action saying Coast Guard officers had no way of knowing who they were. Two members of the group were detained after they tried to climb the Arctic platform. The coast guard seized Greenpeace’s ship the next day and towed it with 30 activists aboard, to Murmansk, where they are being questioned by investigators considering piracy charges.

Avvenire reports Pope Francis has advised Catholics that it is “better to bite your tongue than badmouth someone”. Speaking to an audience of some 80,000, the Pope said “people don't realise how much badmouthing hurts. It is better to bite your tongue: when you do that, your tongue swells up and you can no longer talk”.

The Daily Mirror says a UK police officer who found the mummified body of a four-year-old boy as he searched a house has told a jury today that he was so shocked that he could not stop his hand shaking. Acting Sergeant Richard Dove said he was one of a number of officers who went into the home of the victims' mother Amanda Hutton, in Bradford, West Yorkshire, in September 2011. He told Bradford Crown Court how the body of Hamzah Khan was found in a travel cot in Hutton’s bedroom. But Hutton told detectives it was not her who starved him because “he would starve himself” as he failed to eat properly.

A man in China has been sentenced to death for killing a toddler by hurling her to the ground in an argument with her mother over a parking space. Xinhua reports Han Lei, 39, grabbed the two-year-old from her pram and threw her to the ground in Beijing in an incident that horrified the Chinese public. A second man who drove him away from the scene was given five years for attempting to cover up a crime.

Women do 66 per cent of work, produce 50 per cent of food, but receive a mere 10 per cent of income and own a mere one per cent of property around the globe. Capital Daily quotes a World Bank report saying that when laws impose different rights for men and women, less women have their own business, while the gap in income is larger. Removing barriers towards women’s economic opportunities would reduce global poverty, it concludes.

Richard Gere and his wife, the former model-actress Carey Lowell, reportedly have separated after 11 years of marriage and one child. People magazine said Wednesday that the couple had been living apart for some time, last seen together publicly on June 10. Gere and Lowell married in November 2002 after dating for about seven years. Their son, Homer James Jigme Gere, was born in February 2000.

 

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