The following are the top stories in the Maltese and overseas press.
The local newspapers all carry reports on the Eurovision Song Contest.
In other stories:The Sunday Times reports how the National Bank could have been rescued by Dom Mintoff.
The Malta Independent says lawyers have claimed that minister Chris Said was unfair on the profession in comments about court failures . It also quotes Franco Debono saying he was treated worse than labour as his motion on justice and home affairs has not been debated.
MaltaToday says 41% agree with same-sex marriage. It also reports how the PN will be holding a ‘Be a Prime Minister for a day’ contest.
It-Torca reports on poor conditions at the prisons including an absence of medicines. It also features by Adrian Vassallo that he has no differences with the Labour Party.
Il-Mument says a flight to Libya was delayed because of a member of Joseph Muscat’s delegation. It also says that Evarist Bartolo as Education Mintister had stopped the process for the new Mcast.
Illum asks if a man was sacked for defending migrants.
KullHadd leads with the statements of loyalty by Adrian Vassallo. It also reports that accrual accounting has still not been introduced by the government.
The overseas press
The New York Times reports that the United Nations has demanded that Syria stop using heavy weapons in populated areas after the killing of more than 90 people, including 32 children, in the town of Houla. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and the international envoy for Syria, Kofi Annan, condemned the killings as “a flagrant breach of international law”. According to CNN, the White House said it was horrified by the “brutal attack”. The Obama administration said the attack was a vile testament to an illegitimate regime. UN military observers at the scene of the killings said they had found evidence of tank and artillery fire.
Meanwhile, calls have been mounting for the international community to take urgent action on Syria. The Sunday Times says Britain was in urgent talks with allied countries on "a strong international response" while Le Monde quotes the new Foreign Minister saying France was making plans to host a Friends of Syria meeting following the latest deadly violence. UN activists reported a massacre by President Bashar al-Assad's forces on Friday, one of the bloodiest episodes in the 14 months since his regime launched a brutal crackdown on opponents. The UN mission chief in Syria, Major General Robert Mood, condemned what he described as a "brutal tragedy" in Houla,
A series of opinion polls published in today’s Irish newspapers show the Yes side leads the No side in the final phase of the EU fiscal treaty campaign. Separate polls in The Sunday Times, The Sunday Independent and The Sunday Business Post indicate that undecided voters could still sway the outcome of the referendum on Thursday. When undecided voters are excluded both the Sunday Times and the Sunday Independent polls show that 60 per cent of voters intend to say Yes, with 40 per cent saying No. However the SBP poll shows a reduced lead for the Yes side, with four per cent of voters having switched their intentions from Yes to No in the past week.
Vatican magistrates have formally charged Pope Benedict's butler with illegal possession of secret documents and said a wider investigation would take place to see if he had any accomplices who helped him leak them. Avvenire reports that Paolo Gabriele, 45, is suspected of leaking highly sensitive documents, some alleging cronyism and corruption in Vatican contracts, in a scandal which has come to be known as "Vatileaks". The Pope was said to be "pained" that someone in his domestic household had betrayed him. Gabriele lived in the Vatican with his wife and three children. Commentators in Italian newspapers said they doubted that Gabriele could have acted alone and some speculated that he might have been a pawn in a larger, internal power struggle.
Al Ahram reports that the third runner-up in Egypt’s presidential race has called for a partial vote recount, citing violations. Early results show that Hamdeen Sabahi came in third by a margin of some 700,000 votes, leaving him out of next month’s run-off between the two leading candidates. Results from the first round of voting have shown that the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate Mohammed Morsi and Hosni Mubarak’s last prime minister Ahmed Shafiq will face each other in a June 16-17 runoff.
Le Matin says 60 members of Parliament in Algeria have walked out of the inaugural session in protest against “fraudulent elections” two weeks ago. The members of the Green Algeria Alliance and several smaller parties say the results were fixed in favour of the governing FLN and its coalition partner.
La Tercera announces that the health authorities in Chile have begun evacuating nearly half a million pigs from one of the largest meat processing plants in Latin America. Pigs started dying at the site after local residents, angry about the foul smell, rioted and blocked access. The government has ordered the plant to be closed and all the animals to be removed to prevent a potential health disaster. The evacuation of the surviving animals is expected to take six months.
Deutsche Welle says Klaas Carel Faber, the Nazi war criminal who escaped from a Dutch jail after the war and evaded all attempts by the Netherlands to get him back has died at the age of 90 in Germany. Fabel, who was second on the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's list of Nazi criminals still at large, died on Thursday in Ingolstadt in Bavaria, where he had lived for decades. German prosecutors said in January they had appealed to a court in Bavaria to make Faber serve the life sentence handed down by Dutch authorities for murdering 22 Jews.
The California Chronicle says the beach shown in Marylin Monroe's film "Some Like it Hot" has been nominated "US 2012 best beach". Coronado Beach, on the San Diego Bay peninsula, ousted Siesta Beach in Florida from the much-yearned title awarded by "Dr. Beach", Professor Stephen Leatherman. The ranking has been drafted for over 20 years on the basis of the environmental characteristics and the safety for swimmers. Coronado Beach features a stretch of beach 2.5 km long which glitters because it contains mica, a mineral. It offers a Mediterranean climate and postcard-style ocean bed.