The following are the top stories in the Maltese and overseas press.
The Times of Malta, l-orizzont and the Malta Independent lead with the proposals made by the Law Reform Commission.
In-Nazzjon says €7,000 were spent on a trip abroad by the Minister for Gozo.
The overseas press
The European Union on Monday has launched a new border surveillance network aimed at protecting migrants, after nearly 400 drowned in October in two shipwrecks in the southern Mediterranean. Euronews reports the Eurosur network will detect and rescue migrant boats in distress and will help prevent people and drugs trafficking. The network will enable EU countries and the bloc's borders agency Frontex to share surveillance data from satellites and other monitoring systems. It will give priority to vulnerable people such as children, and to ensuring that nobody is sent back a country where they face persecution.
Il Tempo says Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta has expressed his “profound concern” over the situation in Libya. Speaking after the Italian-Israeli summit, Letta said both countries shared the same concern that one could not leave Libya in the state it was in at the moment.
Avvenire says Pope Francis urged a “just and lasting” peace in the Middle East during talks with Netanyahu, who invited the pontiff to visit Jerusalem. Netanyahu's wife Sarah an interpreter and a small delegation was also present at the 25-minute meeting between Francis and Netanyahu at the Vatican. The Vatican said the talks focused on “the complex political and social situation in the Middle East, with particular reference to the reinstatement of negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians.”
ABC reports UN human rights chief Navi Pillay has said evidence implicated the highest levels of the Syrian government, including President Bashar al-Assad, in war crimes and crimes against humanity. It is the first time the UN's human rights office has so directly implicated Mr Assad. Pillay said her office held a list of others implicated by the inquiry. The UN estimates more than 100,000 people have died in the conflict.
Twelve nuns from the Santa Tecla Christian convent north of Damascus was taken hostage at gunpoint on Monday, the papal nunzio to Syria told Adnkronos International (AKI). The state news agency Sana reported the Syrian government was “concerned” at the storming of the convent by “jihadists”. Social affairs minister Kinda Al-Shammat held “terrorist groups and those countries who finance them” responsible for the nuns' safety.
Ukraine's President Viktor Yanukovich has asked European Commission president, José Manuel Barroso for negotiations on certain necessary topics to be resumed in order to come to an association and commercial agreement. Le Soir says a European Commission statement has said that a Ukrainian delegation will be received at “the appropriate level”.
Thai Post says a criminal court in Bangkok has issued a new arrest warrant for the opposition's leader of current anti-government protests in Thailand, Suthep Thaugsuban, now accused of sedition. In a defiant speech late yesterday, he called on his supporters to take over the police headquarters in Bangkok.
L’Osservatore Romano reports Pope Francis told Dutch bishops visiting the Vatican to show compassion towards them. He called on the bishops to keep offering support to vicitms and their families “in their painful and courageous journey to recovery”. The Vatican in 2010 adopted stricter norms on paeodophilia in the wake of a n international sex abuse scandal that rocked the Catholic church in several continents and plunged it into its worst crisis in decades.