The following are the top stories in the Maltese and overseas press.
The Times of Malta says that Brussels has been brought in after a protest on the forced exit of the former chairman of the Malta Communications Authority. The chairman insists his forced resignation is in breach of EU law.
The Malta Independent says Gianluca got a hero’s welcome. It also reports on the foreign minister’s comments after a bomb exploded outside a Benghazi Catholic church.
In-Nazzjon says vindictive transfers have started. It mentions the health sector and the police. The newspaper also reports on the welcome given to Gianluca Bezzina.
l-orizzont says policemen are hoping for gradual payment of overtime worked a long time ago.
The overseas press
Some of Britain’s most successful and eminent business leaders have accused Eurosceptic MPs of putting “politics before economics” and abandoning the national interest in their calls for Britain to leave the European Union. In a letter to The Independent, the group warned politicians who have argued that Britain’s economic interest would be better served outside the EU, that to Britain, membership was estimated to be worth between £31 billion and £92 billion a year in income gains.
Libya Herald reports Minister of Defence Mohammed Mahmoud Al-Barghati visited has Benghazi after a fresh bout of violence gripped the city. He told a meeting of city officials and civil society organisations that assaults on hospitals and the city centre were “unbearable” and called for firm action against anyone who took up arms to try to destabilise the country.
Assabah says a 27-year old man has been killed and 11 policeman and three protesters injured in Tunisian in clashes between Salafis and security forces in Ettadhamen, a poor neighbourhood on the western edge of Tunis. The clashes came after the Salafist movement Ansar al-Sharia told its followers to gather for its annual congress, a move which defied a government ban. Hundreds of Salafists erected barricades in the streets and threw rocks at police, who fired back tear gas canisters at the demonstrators.
AFP reports that for the first time in decades, the Algerian government censored and blocked two newspapers from publication. The francophone daily Mon journal and its Arabic affiliate Djaridati were planning on publishing extensive news on President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s “declining” health, with the claims that he had returned to Algeria and was in a “comatose” state. Bouteflika has not been seen since he was admitted to a Paris hospital late April.
According to al bawaba, Syrian tanks and war planes have shelled the strategic rebel-held town of Qusair near the border with Lebanon, killing at least 30 people. The town has been under seige for weeks by pro-regime forces backed by Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. As the United States, Russia and the United Nations push for an international peace conference next month, President Assad has said he would negotiate with anyone who does not bear arms. Meanwhile, the Arab League will convene on Thursday, May 23 in Doha to discuss the conflict in Syria
Dawn reports a series of protests against the murder of a senior Pakistani politician in former cricket star Imran Khan's Movement for Justice Party kicks off today in Karachi. In a video message released in Lahore, Khan said the protests would extend nationwide on Tuesday, and in Islamabad on Friday. Earlier Khan blamed the British government for not doing enough to prevent the murder of Zahra Shahid Hussain. He tweeted that he had warned Britain about Altaf Hussain, the head of Karachi's MQM party who lives in self-imposed exile in London, and whom he held directly responsible for the killing.
France 24 reports that a 48-year-old divorced Briton, locked in a bitter custody battle, has confessed to the murder of his two young children by slitting their throats in the central French city of Lille. The bodies of the five-year-old girl and 10-year-old boy were discovered in the man's apartment after he was entrusted with them for the first time since separating from his wife. The man was taken into custody after his former wife arrived at the building to find him on the stairs wearing blood-stained clothes.
Al Watan says a Saudi man has averted a sentence of paralysis for stabbing and paralysing another man after the victim's family agreed to accept compensation instead through retribution. The Saudi legal code provides for the perpetrator of crimes to be sentenced to suffer a similar fate, in what has been described as an “eye for an eye'” system. The case had garnered international attention and an appeal from Amnesty International to the Saudi government not to carry out the sentence.
Metro says London's Freud Museum has launched an appeal to raise thousands of pounds to pay for repairs to the pioneering psychoanalyst's famous couch. The museum, which is based in Sigmund Freud's final home in Hampstead, says it needs €6,000 to restore the famous piece of furniture brought with him to London after he fled Austria in 1938. After more than a century of use, the couch is in need of re-stitching now that the seams have split.
Musical Express announces that a custom-made electric guitar played by Beatles John Lennon and George Harrison has sold at a New York auction for €318,000. The rare VOX guitar, which was the centrepiece of the sale, was previously expected to fetch between €156,000 and €234,000. Harrison practiced the Beatles’ hit I Am The Walrus on the instrument, while Lennon used it in a video session for the song Hello, Goodbye. Both songs were on the 1967 album Magical Mystery Tour.