The following are the top stories in the Maltese and overseas press.
Times of Malta says a fish farm tripled its operations without a Mepa permit while court proceedings drag on.
The Malta Independent reports how the EU asked Malta for another €13 million.
In-Nazzjon says there is anger among policemen as they have not been paid overtime arrears.
l-orizzont reports that the White Rocks rocks development attracted 11 proposals.
The overseas press
Britain’s national newspapers have turned on the European Union after it demanded €2.1 billion in backdated charges, but many questioned why furious Prime Minister David Cameron seemed so shocked by the claim. The Daily Express has it that Cameron conceded that Britain had been pushed closer to a European Union exit. The Daily Star quotes UKIP leader Nigel Farage claiming “the EU is like a thirsty vampire feasting on UK taxpayers’ blood”. The Times says Brussels could levy a penalty charge of €54 million a month on Britain.
Tribune de Genève quotes the World Health Organisation saying hundreds of thousands of Ebola vaccines would be ready in 2015. The news came as a two year-old girl in Mali in the first confirmed case of Ebola in that country. More than 40 people who had been in contact with here have been quarantined. A doctor who worked in West Africa with Ebola patients was in an isolation unit in New York after testing positive for the deadly virus, becoming the fourth person diagnosed with the disease in the United States and the first in its largest city.
RIA Novosti quotes President Putin saying the US was destabilising the global order by trying to impose its will on other nations and warned the world would face new wars if Washington failed to respect the interests of other countries. In a speech to political experts in Russia’s Black Sea resort of Sochi, Putin pointed to wars in Iraq, Libya and Syria as examples of botched US policies that have led to chaos. With visible emotion, he said Washington and its allies have been “fighting against the results of its own policy” in those countries.
AP reports new allegations have emerged that Islamic State extremists have expanded their arsenal with chlorine bombs and captured fighter jets – “weapons that could help the militants in Iraq and Syria”. Kurdish fighters in the key Syrian border town of Kobani have held off a month-long offensive by the Islamic State group with the help of a US-led campaign of airstrikes.
Sole 24 Ore expects as many as a million people, a thousand police officers, and a small number of dissident members of the governing Democratic Party to be present at a major rally in Rome called by Italy’s largest trade-union federation, CGIL, against Premier Matteo Renzi’s Jobs Act. The union will also use the rally to announce the date for the country’s first general strike in 26 years against the government’s labour-market reform plans.
Kyiv Post predicts a large majority of Ukraine’s 36.5 million eligible voters would cast their ballot in tomorrow’s snap parliamentary elections after President Petro Poroshenko dismissed the Verkhovna Rada last August.
According to O Globo, President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil has gained a significant lead over her run-off rival in the latest polls released ahead of the vote tomorrow. The survey gives Rousseff 54 per cent to her centrist opponent Aecio Neve’s, 43 per cent. It is the first time Rouseff has taken the lead opening up what had been a tight race.
Cairo TV announces Egypt has declared a three-month state of emergency in parts of the Sinai Peninsula after at least 31 soldiers were killed in two attacks there – the biggest loss of life in decades for Egypt’s army. President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi has declared three days of mourning in the wake of the suspected jihadist attacks. Egypt’s Rafah crossing into the Gaza Strip was also closed.
Fox News reports a gunman who allegedly killed two sheriff’s deputies and wounded another officer and a bystander in the Sacramento County area has been arrested. The police said Marcelo Marquez, 34, who also allegedly tried to steal two vehicles, was taken alive from a home in Auburn.
Meanwhile, NBC News says a Washington State high school “homecoming prince” opened fire in the cafeteria, killing a girl and wounding four other people before fatally shooting himself. A hospital official said three patients were in “very critical condition” with head wounds. The motive for the shooting was unclear, although he had posted a series of tweets that suggested a rocky romance.
The parents and ex-husband of a Bangladeshi woman went on trial in Italy yesterday for selling their daughter into marriage for €30,000. Ansa says the marriage to a 36-year-old man took place in the spring of 2006, when the victim was 12 years old. She eventually managed to escape her violent, abusive and alcoholic husband, finally reporting him and her parents to police in 2011.
Female peace activists in South Sudan have proposed a nationwide sex strike to end the country’s civil war. The activists want women to support the strike in the hope that it encourages men to seek a peaceful settlement to the conflict, the Sudan Tribune reports. The idea came about at a meeting of more than 90 women activists, including several MPs, in South Sudan’s capital, Juba.