The following are the top stories in the Maltese and overseas press.
Times of Malta says that according to advice given to the government, paying to rig meters is unlikely to constitute bribery.
The Malta Independent asks why prosecution is being ruled out in the Enemalta smart meters scandal.
MaltaToday says the government is trying to avoid the headache of charging 1,000 for Enemalta bribery.
l-orizzont says that in 2006, minister Austin Gatt had imposed a Lm100 penalty on those who stole electricity, without any other charges.
In-Nazzjon says the government has no authority to waive court action for those who rigged electricity meters.
The overseas press
Following some of the worst violence seen in Ukraine – which has left more than 20 dead and a thousand injured – one of the main opposition leaders has said talks with President Viktor Yanukovych had failed to lead to any agreement. Vitaly Klitschko, leader of the opposition Udar Party, told Ukraine’s Hromadske TV that the president had given the protesters only one option: leave the Maidan (Independence Square) unconditionally and go home. A tense standoff continued through the night between thousands of demonstrators and riot police who tried to evict them.
Libya Herald reports Prime Minister Ali Zeidan has announced that a “compromise” had been reached and “wisdom prevailed” among institutions and Libyan militiamen who had issued an ultimatum to MPs to resign, under penalty of arrest. The prime minister did not provide further details of the agreement reached. Meanwhile, the private Libyan TV station Al-Aseema has been hit by a rocket propelled grenade that has damaged the building but caused no injuries. The station is linked to Mahmoud Jibril, the former Libyan prime minister who created the National Forces Alliance to challenge the Islamist party.
Ansa says the Italian navy has rescued more than 1,000 people at sea between Saturday and Monday after the end of a period of bad weather led to a resumption of migrant crossings. Over 4,000 migrants have already arrived on Italian shores this year. In the first 30 days of 2013 some 217 migrants landed on Italian coasts, while this year the corresponding figure was 2,156. Since the beginning of Operation Mare Nostrum on October 15, its ships have rescued and taken ashore 10,403 migrants.
Italian Foreign Minister Emma Bonino has told Rai News Italy would pull out all the stops in pressing India to deal rapidly with the case of two Italian marines accused of killing two fishermen while on anti-piracy duty. Officials and the families of marines Salvatore Girone and Massimiliano Latorre were frustrated when India’s Supreme Court announced the latest in a series of delays in the case that has been dragging on without charges for two years. Bonino said she would be urging a range of allies, from the NATO military alliance to the United Nations as well as the European Union, to press the Indian government to deal with the situation. The case is “not bilateral” but has international importance and thus, requires a coordinated response, she said.
Gazete Oku says Turkish President Abdullah Gul has enacted a controversial law on control of the internet after the government has assured him that it would present some amendments on points of concern. Commissioned by Prime Minister Erdogan, the law has been labelled by the opposition as “the gag law” and criticized by the EU, the US, the OSCE and the Council of Europe. Initially Gul had admitted that the law posed “problems”.
Globovision reports at least five young opposition protesters have been injured by gunfire in Valencia, Venezuela’s third largest city, when a group of armed men attacked an anti-Chavez march in the centre. The injured were between 16 and 23 years, and the most serious is a girl who was hit by a bullet to the head. Meanwhile, opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez,has surrendered to the police after President Nicolas Maduro accused him of being responsible for the violent protests in which three people died last week. Before surrendering Lopez made a speech at a rally in Caracas following two weeks of protests organised by students
Corriere della Sera says a court in Monza on Tuesday finalised the divorce between former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and his second wife Veronica Lario. However, this does not end a dispute over Berlusconi’s alimony payments to Lario. Last year the ex-premier managed to get her monthly alimony reduced to €1.4 million from a previous award of €3 million per month set in December 2012. Berlusconi, 77, is engaged to Naples-born Francesca Pascale, a woman almost 50 years his junior who he announced in 2012 that he intends to marry. It would be his third marriage.
Euronews reports a gigantic asteroid has whizzed close to Earth –a year after another exploded over Russia, injuring 1,200 people. The space rock, which measured around 270-metres wide, raced past the planet at about 43,000kph around 3 a.m. CET on Tuesday. It came within about 2.6 million kilometes of Earth.
Huffington Post says an 84-year-old nun has been handed down a three-year prison sentencefor breaking into a nuclear weapons complex and defacing a bunker holding bomb-grade uranium – a demonstration that exposed serious security flaws at the Tennessee plant. Two other peace activists who broke into the facility with Megan Rice were sentenced to more than five years, in part because they had much longer criminal histories of mostly non-violent civil disobedience.
When life gets stressful, Asian elephants help their pals feel better by trumpeting sympathetic noises and using their trunks to touch their friend’s private parts. According to new research published in the journal PeerJ, animal behaviourists observed 26 captive elephants in a sanctuary in northern Thailand, recording a number of elephant behaviours that they concluded were specifically intended to comfort distressed herd members. These included touching the distressed elephant’s genitals with their trunks, putting their trunks in the distressed elephant’s mouth, or making a high-pitched “chirping” noise.