The following are the top stories in the Maltese and overseas press.

Times of Malta reports that evidence has been unearthed of repairs on the Mater Dei Hospital columns, which suffer from weak concrete.

The Malta Independent says Simon Busuttil has invited Marlene Farrugia to attend a PN event in Zonqor. She said she was prepared to accept as long as the PN guaranteed that a future PN government would not build outside development zones.

l-orizzont says the PN government had plans for a reverse osmosis plant in Zonqor when Ninu Zammit was still minister.

In-Nazzjon says lecturers are worried about plans for a new University at Zonqor.

The overseas press

Deutsche Welle reports Michel Platini, who leads Europe’s governing soccer body EUFA, has congratulated Jordan’s Prince Ali bin al-Hussein on a valiant run to unseat Sepp Blatter – and he managed to do so without mentioning the man who has presided over FIFA since 1998. Platini had twice urged Blatter to resign after several FIFA higher-ups were arrested Wednesday. Victorious, Blatter warned Europe that it faced losing influence on his executive committee.

Meanwhile, Euronews says a handshake between the representatives of Israeli and Palestinian football associations at the FIFA congress marked the end of the motion to get Israel banned from world football.  

Libya Herald reports forces supporting the Islamic State have taken control of Gardabiya airbase in Sirte, Libya’s largest airbase, after Misrata’s 166 Brigade retreated from its remaining positions. IS militants, which already control the centre of Sirte including its port, are reported to have taken control also of the Manmade River complex some 25 kilometres east of the town.  

According to The New York Times, interior ministers from members of the United Nations Security Council have voiced concern that some countries were not doing enough to prevent their citizens from travelling abroad and joining militant groups like Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. They said some countries did not provide other national authorities with advance passenger information while many had yet to criminalize attempts to join, aid or fund terrorism.  

Moscow has reacted heavily to EU sanctions and travel bans over Crimea and Ukraine. NPR says Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte told a weekly news conference that the Russians released a list of 89 names of EU politicians who would not be allowed entry into the country. The letter, confirmed as authentic to AFP, said Moscow had asked for the list not to be made public but Germany has demanded that Moscow make the list public as well as how to contest it.

Ansa reports the Italian coastguard said it had coordinated the rescue of more than 3,300 migrants sailing across the Mediterranean Sea, but also found 17 corpses on several of the rickety boats. Distress calls were made from 17 boats, and several other rescue operations were still underway off the coast of Libya.

Meanwhile, according to a statement posted on Facebook, Myanmar’s navy has seized a boat packed with 727 people off the country’s southern coast. Myanmar insisted it was not to blame for South-East Asia’s latest influx of “boat people” at a regional crisis meeting in Thailand, as the United States said over 2,500 vulnerable migrants remained adrift at sea and needed urgent rescue. More than 3,000 migrants have landed in Indonesia and Malaysia since Thailand launched a crackdown on human trafficking gangs this month.

NBC News reports a commercial aircraft en route to New York’s LaGuardia Airport narrowly avoided a mid-air collision with a drone yesterday morning. Shuttle America flight 2708 was travelling from Washington, DC and nearing its destination when it encountered an unmanned aerial vehicle. The pilot had to swerve upwards over Brooklyn’s Prospect Park to avoid a collision. The plane later landed safely. FAA officials have launch an investigation into the incident.

The Wall Street Journal says American Express president Ed Gilligan, 55, fell seriously ill and died yesterday on a flight home to New York. The plane was forced to make an emergency landing but it was too late. Gilligan devoted his entire career to American Express, starting as an intern 35 years ago and moving steadily up all the way to vice chairman in 2007 and president in 2013.

Fox News announces the creator of underground website Silk Road has been jailed for life for his role in creating and running the multi-million-dollar business used as a black market for drugs. Ross Ulbricht was sentenced by a US district court three months after a federal jury found him guilty of conspiracy to commit drug trafficking, money laundering and computer hacking. The 31-year-old had admitted to creating Silk Road, but denied wrongdoing. He is expected to appeal against the sentence.

Times of India reports police have detained a pigeon that flew into a village near the heavily militarised border with Pakistan on suspicion it was being used for espionage. They said they had X-rayed the bird to see whether it was carrying anything suspicious after a villager spotted a stamp under its feathers that bore Urdu script and the name of a Pakistani district. In 2013, Indian security forces found a dead falcon fitted with a small camera, and in 2010 another pigeon was detained over espionage fears.

Germany has become the country with the lowest birth rates in the world. Berliner Zeitung says the average German birth rate fell to 8.3 births per thousand inhabitants, little below the value recorded in Japan, far lagging behind, with 8.4 children per thousand inhabitants. In the EU, only Portugal (8.9) and Italy (9.2) have values close. Globally, the West African country Niger took the top position with 50 children born per 1,000 inhabitants.

London’s The Times reports one in five cancer deaths is caused by obesity, which is on track to overtake smoking as the main cause of the disease. The alert came at the world’s biggest conference on cancer, which sounded the warning that obesity was killing tens of thousands of people a year in the West.

Women who follow a Mediterranean diet reduced their risk of endometrial (uterine corpus) cancer by 57 percent according to a study funded by the Italian Foundation for Cancer Research (FIRC) and published in the British Journal of Cancer. A group of researchers assessed more than 5,000 Italian women for the relationship between adherence to the Mediterranean diet and the risk of developing endometrial cancer.

 

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