The following are the top stories in the Maltese and overseas press.
Times of Malta says the EU has made a U-turn on migrant rescues and increased funding and resources.
The Malta Independent quotes the prime minister saying the EU is going after the people smugglers.
In-Nazzjon says there was no important breakthrough in tackling migration during yesterday's emergency EU summit.
l-orizzont says €9m a month will be allocated by the EU to tackle migration.
The overseas press
i24news announces Britain and France have agreed to seek UN approval for an EU military operation against people smugglers, in a bid to curb the soaring number of migrants dying as they seek a better life in Europe. At crisis talks in Brussels, EU leaders also decided to triple funds for the bloc’s maritime search and rescue operation, but they failed to agree what to do with migrants once they land on European shores.
Ansa reports an Italian scientific and cultural expedition has proposed the candidacy of the Mare Nostrum to the Nobel Peace Prize. Simone Perotti, creator of Project Mediterranean, said 200,000 people destined to certain death were saved by the Italian military mission and humanitarian operation notwithstanding its limitations. Without its work, he wrote, “there would have been an unprecedented massacre”.
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls has revealed to France Inter Radio that five terror attacks had been “foiled” in France in recent months. A 24-year-old Franco-Algerian IT student is being held by police investigating an alleged plot to attack a church near the French capital.
Blaming the “fog of war”, President Obama revealed yesterday that US drone strikes in Pakistan inadvertently killed an American and an Italian, two hostages held by al-Qaida, as well as two other Americans who had leadership roles with the terror network. Fox News reports Obama sombrely said he took full responsibility for the January CIA strikes and regretted the deaths of Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto.
CNN says Loretta Lynch has won confirmation as the US first black female attorney general from a Senate that forced her to wait more than five months for the title and remained divided to the end. The 56-43 vote installs Lynch at the Justice Department to replace Eric Holder.
Germany has condemned the massacre a century ago of 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman forces as “genocide”. According to Deutsche Welle, President Joachim Gauck said Germany bore partial blame for the event. It is the first time that Berlin has officially used the word “genocide” to describe the killings during World War I, and an unusually strong acknowledgement of the then German empire’s role in them. Meanwhile, Aravot says the Armenian Church has declared the victims as saints.
The death toll from the violence raging in Yemen since late March has now reached 1,080, including 48 children and 28 women. Le Courrier quotes the World Health Organization saying a further 4,352 people had been injured.
In a controversial new research paper, Chinese scientists have described how they were able to manipulate the genomes of human embryos for the first time, raising ethical concerns about this new frontier in science. First reported by Nature News, the paper appears in the little known online journal called Protein and Cell. In it, they describe how they edited the genomes of embryos obtained from a fertility clinic. The embryos were described as non-viable, and could not have resulted in a live birth.
USA Today reports former CIA Director David Petraeus, whose career was destroyed by an extramarital affair with his biographer, has been sentenced to two years’ probation and fined $100,000 for giving her classified material while she was working on the book. The sentencing came two months after he agreed to plead guilty to unauthorized removal and retention of classified material.
De Morgen reports a Belgian court has ordered Archbishop Andre-Joseph Leonard of Brussels to pay €10,000 in damages to a former choir boy subjected to sexual abuse by a priest. The plaintiff Joel Devillet, now 42, was raped by a priest in southern Belgium between 1987 and 1991. The earliest abuse happened when he was 14 years old and has left him with serious psychological problems.
Clarin reports an 18th-century book on the history of Saint Peter’s Basilica that was stolen last year in Rome has been recovered at a bookstore in Buenos Aires. The 1748 book, which was lifted from a private library in the Italian capital, had been offered for sale online at a price of $3,500. Authorities seized it after tracking it down at a bookstore in the Argentine capital’s upscale Recoleta neighbourhood.
Metro reveals bookmakers are holding that Britain’s second “royal baby” will be born tomorrow or Sunday. The main agencies have in fact lowered the odds while Kate Middleton could go into labour at any time.
Switzerland is the happiest country in the world, closely followed by Iceland, Denmark, Norway and Canada, according to a global ranking of happiness. The New Yorker says the 2015 World Happiness Report is the third annual report seeking to quantify happiness as a means of influencing government policy. Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden, New Zealand and Australia round out the top 10, making small or medium-sized countries in Western Europe seven of the top 10 happiest countries.