The following are the top stories in the national and international press today.
Times of Malta says that Finance Minister Edward Scicluna indicated to the Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee of the European Parliament in Brussels that the controversial citizenship-for-cash scheme could be in for a general overhaul.
In-Nazzjon and The Independent also lead with a report of Prof. Scicluna’s address.
L-Orizzont leads with George Farrugia’s testimony in court yesterday in which he alleged that businessman and former ambassador Tony Debono threatened to destroy him and his business.
International news
The death on Thursday of South Africa’s liberation leader and first democratic president Nelson Mandela triggered an unprecedented worldwide chorus of awed respect. AFP says that never had one man united such global unity in honouring his passing. Foreshadowing the guest list of what will surely be the most important funeral of recent decades, world leaders queued up to issue solemn tributes to the 95-year-old anti-apartheid leader.
The Jerusalem Post quotes US Secretary of State John Kerry insisting that Israel’s security as a top priority for Washington, both in nuclear talks with Iran and peace talks with the Palestinians.
Kerry is in Israel for a day of talks with Israeli and Palestinian leaders aimed at driving forward peace negotiations which appear to have made little headway since they began under his patronage in late July. But Iran was also high on the agenda when he met for more than three hours with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in what was their first face-to-face meeting since a fallout over the Iran nuclear deal.
Yemen’s state news agency Saba says the death toll of a suicide bombing and gun attack on the defence ministry complex in Sanaa on Thursday has surged to 52. Yemen’s supreme security committee said 167 others were wounded in the brazen daylight assault, nine of them seriously.
AFP says its reporters saw almost 80 bodies found lying in a mosque and its surrounding streets in the Central African capital Bangui on Thursday after overnight violence. At the PK 5 mosque, 54 bodies with what appeared to be knife and gun wounds, were laid out in the prayer hall and the courtyard. In the streets nearby, journalists counted 25 abandoned corpses.
The Lancet reports the number of people suffering from dementia worldwide is set to explode in the coming decades as the population ages, trebling by 2050. Some 44 million people already live with the disease, according to the report by Alzheimer’s Disease International (ADI), with this figure set to rise to 135 million by 2050. The number of sufferers has risen 22 percent in the past three years alone, ADI said.
VOA News says 35 pilot whales stranded in a remote part of Florida’s Everglades National Park have headed toward deeper waters, raising hopes that they could be saved. Eleven whales have died since the mass stranding was first reported Tuesday after an additional carcass was found. Four of them had to be euthanized. Six others that went missing overnight are feared dead and their bodies may have sunk to the bottom of the ocean floor. It remains unclear why they strayed into water less than a meter deep, in the southern part of the Sunshine State.