The following are the top stories in the Maltese and overseas press:
The Times says that the Israeli company which did not get the tender for the power station extension is not excluding embarking on a court case if the European Commission concludes that conditions have been breached. In another story it reports Foresta 2000 vandals have been charged.
The Foresta 2000 story is also given prominence in The Malta Independent and In-Nazzjon . Both newspapers report that work on the new oncology centre has been embarked upon. The latter also gives prominence to Finco’s reply to the Valletta Fund Management’s reply to its judicial protest.
Malta Today says that the Administrative Law Enforcment is being investigated following investigations that one of its members gave in to corruption by a hunter. It says that the superyachts investigation is continuing.
l-Orizzont continues on to report on services being given at a cost at Mater Dei Hospital.
The overseas press
The influential Italian Catholic weekly Famiglia Cristiana has taken a second swipe at Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, saying he had split the Catholic vote "down the middle". The magazine also accused Berlusconi of character assassination, saying his "method" was: "anyone who dissents is to be destroyed". Il Giornale, a conservative daily owned by Berlusconi's brother, has been running a series of front-page stories and editorials slamming House Speaker Gianfranco Fini, who recently broke with Berlusconi, for an allegedly shady real estate deal in Monte Carlo.
Asia Observer says the UN has said it needed at least 40 more helicopters to help reach an estimated 800,000 people who have been cut off by the floods in Pakistan. The disaster was also raising concerns about exacerbating social unrest and political instability, as the nation struggled with an ongoing insurgency. President Zardari has defended the government's much-criticised response, saying anger at the government in the coming months was inevitable given the scale of the disaster.
China Daily reports a Chinese airliner crashed and burst into flames while attempting to land, killing 43 people on board. Some 50 survivors were taken to hospital for treatment for broken bones. The cause of the crash was still unclear and work teams searched through the wreckage for the plane's black box flight data recorder.
Jamhuuriya says Somali Islamist militants, disguised as government soldiers, have gone on a shooting rampage in a Mogadishu hotel, killing 30 people including six MPs, before blowing themselves up. The brazen attack by two rebels from theAl Qaeda-inspired Shebab movement a stone's throw from the presidential palace marked a new escalation on the second day of clashes in the capital that had already left 29 civilians dead.
The New York Times reports UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has sent a top official to Democratic Republic of Congo after a mass rape of women by rebels. One aid group said many of the 200 women and children were gang-raped by between two and six armed men. Ban has made protecting civilians and combating sexual violence, especially in Congo, central themes of his stewardship of the world body.
All British nationals carry on their front pages the news that British Prime Minister David Cameron's wife Samantha has given birth to a baby girl. The Daily Express said the baby, weighing 2.7 kilos, was delivered by Caesarean section. It had been due next month. The couple already have a daughter, Nancy, six, and a four-year-old son, Arthur. Their first child, Ivan, who had cerebral palsy and severe epilepsy, died suddenly in February last year, aged six.
El Universal says the Chilean government has asked NASA for advice on how to keep the 33 miners trapped for the last 19 days deep in a Chilean mine, healthy with space mission-like rations and help them deal with the extended stay in a confined space. Engineers were preparing to install a big drill to rescue them and would send down games to help them cope with a wait that could last four months. They hope to start drilling the escape shaft by the weekend.
Meanwhile, El Nacional announces a collapsed tunnel at a gold pit in south Venezuela has killed seven people and injured another two. But miners' representatives put the Venezuelan death toll higher than the official version.
USA Today says Americans have been warned the country's salmonella outbreak was likely to get worse. More than half a billion eggs have been recalled so far as experts estimated the outbreak could see one in 20,000 eggs infected.
Metro reports that according to DNA research, Hitler had Jewish and black ancestors. Investigative journalist Jean-Paul Mulders was able to get hold of Hitler’s DNA after taking a serviette dropped by the dictator’s great-nephew Alexander Stuart-Houston, 61, from New York. Using this, Mulders and historian Marc Vermeeren traced 39 of Hitler’s relatives and took saliva samples from them. Vermeeren told news magazine Knack they contained a chromosome which was not common in Austria or Europe in general, but was widespread, among the Berbers of Morocco in Algeria, Libya and Tunisia as well as among Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews.