The following are the top stories in the Maltese and overseas press.
Times of Malta leads with yesterday’s fatal traffic accident in Sliema. It also says hunters are mulling their campaign strategy for the spring hunting referendum.
The Malta Independent also leads with yesterday's fatal traffic accident. Separeately, it features comments by Labour MP Marlene Farrugia that Godfrey Farrugia's appointment as Labour whip would not stop her criticising the party where necessary.
l-orizzont asks if a major investment from Oman may be imminent. The investment is being eyed by a bank which is interested in financial services, aviation services and real estate.
In-Nazzjon gives prominence to yesterday’s press conference by Simon Busuttil, who said the Opposition needed to make a difference in the people’s everyday lives. It also features comments by the MUMN about a crisis at Gozo hospital.
The overseas press
France 24 reports that in an act of defiance, the satirical newspaper where 12 people, including the top editor and cartoonists, were gunned down by Islamist gunmen on January 7, announced it would put a cartoon of Prophet Mohammed on its new front page appearing tomorrow. Late yesterday, the website of Liberation, which has been hosting the Charlie Hebdo staff, posted an image of the next cover of the satirical weekly. It featured a cartoon of a bearded man in a turban with a tear streaming down his cheek, and holding a sign: “Je Suis Charlie” – “I Am Charlie”. Overhead was the phrase: “All is forgiven”.
Le Parisien says French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian has announced the unprecedented deployment of 10,000 soldiers to boost security, including at Jewish schools. Five thousand other security officers were also part of the reinforcements.
Meanwhile, French police continue to look for potential accomplices of the gunmen who attacked Charlie Hebdo as well as police officers and civilians. The Associated Press quotes a French police spokesman saying as many as six members of a terrorist cell involved in the Paris attacks might still be at large. This included a man who was seen driving a car registered to the widow of one of the gunmen who is now reported to have fled to Syria.
Ansa reports Italian Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni has told the Senate “there are no specific terror threats to Italy” in the wake of last week’s bloody attacks in France. His statement came as authorities beefed up security measures in Rome’s Jewish quarter and around the city’s Jewish schools, embassies, monuments, places of worship and news media offices.
Meanwhile, the Daily Mail says British Prime Minister David Cameron has put SAS troops on standby in the wake of the ‘fanatical death cult of Islamist extremist violence’. The elite soldiers will undergo training drills recreating last week’s horror in Paris. According to The Times, Britain is on high alert for a beheading attack after jihadists were detected discussing plans to murder members of the armed forces, police officers and people working in the intelligence services.
Haaretz reports a large number of people is expected to turn up in large numbers later today for the joint funeral of the four French Jews killed in the Islamist attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday said he had agreed to a request from the families that the victims be buried in Jerusalem. Police said free buses would be provided from a car park about two kilometres away while access to the site would be closed to private traffic.
The Washington Post quotes the US Central Command saying its operations military networks were not compromised when its Twitter and You Tube accounts were hacked by a group claiming to act for the Islamic State, ISIS. The Cyber Caliphate posted a list of names and phone numbers of military personnel. The US authorities confirmed no classified information had been released.
Colombo’s Daily Mirror says Pope Francis was bringing a message of inter-religious and inter-ethnic harmony to a Sri Lanka still recovering from the wounds of a brutal, quarter-century civil war and on the heels of new international religious tensions over the Paris attacks. Hours before Francis departed for his weeklong Asian pilgrimage, he told Vatican-based diplomats that fundamentalist terrorism was the result of people becoming enslaved by “deviant forms of religion” and using God as an ideological pretext to perpetuate mass killings.
Libyan jihadists, linked to the Islamic State, said they were holding 21 Christian hostages. The claim was posted along with photos on jihadist forums on line. The hostages are believed to be Egyptian copts. Al Ahram says the Egyptian Foreign Ministry has confirmed 20 Egyptian citizens had been abducted in two separate incidents in Libya.
ABC reports the cockpit voice recorder from the AirAsia plane that crashed into the Java Sea last month has been recovered, taken to an Indonesian navy vessel and was expected to be sent to Jakarta for analysis. The black box was found near where the flight data recorder was retrieved on Monday. The analysis of the recorder is likely to provide an explanation as to what happened to the ill-fated flight.
The Daily Telegraph says London's commuters have been warned that they faced rush hour chaos as a thousands of bus drivers walked off the job. The downing of tools by 27,000 workers began at 4 a.m. and would last 24 hours. The dispute centers on the pay disparities between the London’s different bus companies.
Les Pays says members of Bukin Faso’s parliament have decided to cut their salaries by half. The move came in response to heated exchanges in social media after it was revealed that MPs were paid more than $3,000 a month while the average salary in the country amounted to $150 a month.