The following are the top stories in the Maltese and overseas press.
The local media is dominated by the bomb blast outside a police inspector's house yesterday.
Times of Malta says there are few clues on the possible motive.
In-Nazzjon and l-orizzont also focus exclusively on the bomb explosion.
The Malta Independent also reports that an Eritrean mother of three is struggling to live on €300 a month.
MaltaToday says the PN wants answers on the double casino concession.
The overseas press
The European Court of Auditors has failed, fort the 19th year running, to give a clean bill of health to more than €128 billion of spending by Brussels. According to the court’s annual report, seen by London’s Daily Telegraph, €7 billion of the EU budget last year was misspent because of controls on spending that experts deemed to be only “partially effective”.
Ansa reports European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker has snapped back at Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, saying the EC was not a “gang of bureaucrats” but “an institution that deserves respect (and is) no less legitimate than the governments” representing its member states. Renzi promptly replied that Italy “won’t go to Brussels hat in hand, to be told what to do”, adding the Commission should “resolve problems, not create them”.
European migrants to the UK were not a drain on Britain’s finances and pay out far more in taxes than they receive in state benefits. A University College research, published in the Economic Journal, shows European migrants made a net contribution of €25.2 billion to UK public finances between 2000 and 2011.
The Daily Mail says hundreds of Libyan army cadets, invited to the UK for military training, were being sent home amid claims of rape, drunkenness, fighting and theft. The men – hand-picked by the British Army – were supposed to be given leadership skills to help their war-torn country. The whole training programme may be axed.
France has warned that the international coalition fighting the Islamic State must save Syria’s second city, Aleppo, as moderate rebels face destruction by attacks from forces loyal to President Assad as well as jihadi militants. In a column in French daily Le Figaro, The Washington Post and pan-Arab Al-Hayat, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said the city, the “bastion” of the opposition, was almost encircled and abandoning it would end hopes of a political solution in Syria’s three-year civil war.
Kyiv Post reports Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko has called on the country’s National Security and Defence Council to scrap a law giving “special status” to the east of Ukraine. It comes after separatists wanting independence held their own elections in the Donbass region at the weekend. Poroshenko also ordered additional troops be sent to the area.
Euronews says the European Court of Human Rights has barred Switzerland from deporting a family of Afghan migrants back to Italy, saying its well-being could be at risk.
AGI reports Fabiola Gianotti, an Italian, has became the first woman to head the CERN particle-physics lab in Geneva. Gianotti, 52, was one of the leaders of the team that discovered the Higgs boson, the long-sought building block of the universe.
Goncheh Ghavami, the British-Iranian woman who received a one-year jail sentence after attempting to watch a volleyball match in Teheran last June, is on hunger strike for the second time her mother has told the BBC. Ghavami is protesting against her “legal limbo”: the judge still needs to confirm the accusation of “propaganda against the regime”, but the 25 year-old law graduate has already been sentenced to a one-year jail term.
Nigerian Tribune says Boko Haram has imposed strict Sharia law in the north east of Nigeria carrying out public beheadings and amputations. In Mabi, the second largest city in the state of Adamawa, conquered a week ago, jihadists cut off the hands of 10 people and beheaded two imams they dragged out of a mosque and accused of having prayed against their radical sect.
Extremists warned the Christians living in Mubi that they must leave the city, convert to Islam, or die.
Meanwhile, the prosecution of Christians by Islamists continues as a young couple was burnt alive by a mob of Muslims from five villages south of Lahore who accused them of having committed blasphemy for burning pages of the Qur’an. The Catholic agency Fides says the two, who worked in a clay factory, were kidnapped and held hostage. After two days, they were pushed into the kiln, where bricks are baked, and burnt alive.