The following are the top stories in the Maltese and overseas press.
Times of Malta reports that it is now clear Martin Galea was abducted. It also features a migrant father's plea to be reunited with his infant son.
The Malta Independent gives prominence to Martin Galea's comments praising consul Marisa Farrugia.
l-orizzont says medical tests on Martin Galea show no sign of violence or anything unusual.
In-Nazzjon leads with comments by former Police Commissioner John Rizzo that his successor never spoke to him about the John Dalli investigation.
The overseas press
AFP quotes US Secretary of State John Kerry saying Israel would keep up “defensive” operations against tunnels during a 72-hour truce in Gaza.
Meanwhile, Haaretz announces Israel has called up 16,000 reservists to bolster its military effort in Gaza. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said his country was “determined to complete” its mission, “with or without a ceasefire”.
The New York Times reports the United Nations has said almost 24 per cent of Gaza’s population have fled their homes, as the US warned Israel the number of civilian casualties was “too high”.
Al Ayyam says a six-day-old baby rescued by emergency Caesarean section by Gaza doctors from her dead mother’s womb last week has died due to complications and power cuts affecting the intensive care unit where she was treated.
Deutsche Welle reports Manila has begun preparing to evacuate citizens from Libya amid mounting violence after a Filipino worker was beheaded and a nurse gang-raped. Greece sent a warship to pick up citizens, while Spain removed embassy staff. The US and Canada have closed their embassies in Tripoli, while countries including Britain, France, Germany and Egypt over the weekend advised their nationals to leave immediately.
The European Union must do more to support sea rescue programmes, rather than leaving the burden on Italy, the speaker of the Lower House said. Ansa quotes Speaker Laura Boldrini saying conflicts were generating mass migration. For the first time last year, the number of refugees in the world reached 52 million – the highest level since the Second World War.
Kyiv Post reports an international team of investigators in eastern Ukraine has for the first time reached the crash site of the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. Fighting along the route to the wreckage site between government troops and pro-Russian separatist rebels had for several days kept the delegation from reaching the area.
A mother-of-two who faced a death sentence, later overturned, over claims she converted to Christianity in Sudan has arrived in the US to start a new life. Meriam Ibrahim, her husband and children arrived in Philadelphia on a flight from Rome and then took another flight to Manchester, New Hampshire, where her husband, South Sudanese-American Daniel Wani, used to live. Ibrahim was convicted of apostasy and adultery despite claiming she had always been a Christian, having been raised by her Ethiopian mother while her Muslim father had left when she was young.
The Washington Post says the CIA’s insistence that it did not spy on its Senate overseers has collapsed with the release of a stark report by the agency’s internal watchdog documenting improper computer surveillance and obstructionist behaviour by CIA officers.
Freetown Daily News reports the death toll from the worst recorded Ebola outbreak in history surpassed 700 in West Africa as security forces went house-to-house in Sierra Leone’s capital looking for patients and others exposed to the disease. Fears grew as the United States warned against travel to the three infected countries, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, and Sierra Leone’s soccer team was blocked from boarding a plane in Nairobi, Kenya, that was to take them to the Seychelles for a game on Saturday.
The Daily Express says David Cameron announced Britain’s cutting-edge research in the fight against cancer with a £300 million (€378 million) funding boost. British scientists are to map 100,000 complete DNA code sequences in a project that will make the country a world leader in genetic research on cancer and rare diseases. The mapping project, predicted to be complete by 2017, will sequence the genetic codes of about 75,000 patients with cancer and rare diseases, and those of their close relatives.