The following are the top stories in the national and international press today.
Times of Malta says wardens along the Sliema-Gżira front were only issuing warnings after a local tribunal commissioner said that a bus lane in a two-lane road was “illegal”. In another story it says Enemalta has denied that a widespread power cut last week was caused by faulty settings at Malta’s end of the interconnector with Sicily.
The Malta Independent says the government is willing to take on the €450 million burden of building a new power station if the EU does not give the green-light to the security of supply agreement with the private consortium ElectroGas.
In-Nazzjon leads with a news conference given by Opposition leader Simon Busuttil yesterday during which he claims that Prime Minister Joseph Muscat placed his personal interests first in granting a €360 million guarantee to Electrogas.
L-Orizzont says the €360 million guarantee to Electrogas was temporary and would be withdrawn in 22 months.
International news
The Greek Parliament is due to vote on the latest €85 billion bailout deal this morning after a fractious 10-hour debate among MPs and shortly before the Eurogroup is due to convene in Brussels this afternoon. Kathimerini reports Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos defended the new loan program in Parliament yesterday. Eurozone finance ministers will have to choose between approving a three-year bailout for Greece or opting for a bridge loan.
Germany has criticised the Greek bailout plan. According to the Financial Times, Berlin circulated a document among its eurozone partners, with its objections to the third bailout plan, which the German government considers “insufficient”. It is not clear whether such a proposal will be revived at the Eurogroup today. Germany’s three main objections are: sustainability of the Greek debt, possible postponements to the reforms and the role of the IMF, which in the previous two bailouts contributed to the aid along with Brussels.
The Islamic State is reported to have threatened to use gas against people in Libya’s Sirte unless attacks against it stop. Parliamentarian Saleh Fhaima told the Libya Herald the ultimatum runs out at 6pm today. He said he and fellow member Zaid Hadia had been phoned by a contact in Sirte who had informed them that 38 members of the Ferjani tribe had been killed today by IS which had been shelling Sirte’s third residential district – the only one not under IS control. Among the dead in today’s mass IS offensive, he said, were two children and four elderly people, all killed as a result of shelling.
Xinhua reports more than 200 nuclear and biochemical experts from the Chinese military have been sent to the port city of Tianjin after two huge explosions killed at least 50 people and injured hundreds more. A team from the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Beijing environmental emergency response centre has also gone to the area. The explosions also disrupted the flow of goods in the key port city.
Air pollution is killing about 4,000 people in China a day, accounting for one in six premature deaths in the world’s most populous country. AP quotes a new study by physicists at the University of California, Berkeley, saying about 1.6 million people in China die each year from heart, lung and stroke problems because of incredibly polluted air, especially small particles of haze. Earlier studies put the annual Chinese air pollution death toll at one to two million, but this is the first to use newly-released Chinese air monitoring figures.
Avvenire, the daily newspaper of Italian Bishops Conference CEI, has taken aim at the Northern League on migrants, continuing a clash between the Italian Church and the right-wing party led by Matteo Salvini. On Wednesday Salvini said CEI Secretary-General Mgr Nunzio Galantino was being a “pain the neck” by intervening in this issue. In an interview, Galantino had criticised politicians who fuelled anti-migrant sentiments, calling them “cheap paddlers willing to say extraordinarily inane things just to get a vote”.
El Universal reports yet another journalist has been assassinated in the Mexican state of Veracruz. Juan Heriberto Santos, who worked for the local radio station Telever, was killed in the early hours of this morning in a bar in Orizaba, along with five other people. The latest attack brings the number of journalists killed in the last five years in Veracruz up to 10.
Al Ayyam says at least 76 people were killed and over 200 injured when a truck bomb exploded near a market in a predominantly Shia district of Baghdad. The extremist Sunni jihadist group ISIS has claimed responsibility for the attack.
Fifteen states are asking the Court of Appeals in Washington to temporarily block the Obama administration’s new rules that aim to limit the use of coal to slow climate change. Bloomberg reports the states are led by Virginia.
French President François Hollande faces pressure from both Nicolas Sarkozy’s and Marine Le Pen’s parties after French weekly Le Canard Enchaine revealed that the true cost of breaking the Mistral contract with Russia may be more than double the declared sum. The French government may end up paying between €2 billion and €2.4 billion for breaking the Mistral deal with Russia and not €1.2 billion.
Former Cuban President Fidel Castro, who turned 89 yesterday, has requested that the United States pay back the “many millions of dollars” owed to his country because of the 50-year-long old embargo. His article, in the official Granma newspaper, came on the eve of the historic reopening of the US Embassy in Havana as part of a restoration of diplomatic relations between the US and Cuba.
The Washington Times says the US has returned stolen Pablo Picasso’s painting “La Coiffeuse” (“The Hairdresser”) to France in a ceremony at the French Embassy in Washington. The painting was reported missing from a museum store in Paris in 2001. When the painting was shipped to the United States from Belgium in December 2014, “La Coiffeuse” was described as an “art craft” and “art craft toy” worth €30. In reality, the cargo contained the $15 million painting by Picasso. The US Department of Homeland Security seized the painting upon its arrival in the country.