The following are the top stories in the national and international press today.
Times of Malta says pardoned oil trader George Farrugia told the Public Accounts Committee he and his brothers had donated a car to the Labour Party during the same period that they had given former Finance Minister Tonio Fenech a crafted clock. In another story it says that Malta’s citizenship scheme is set to be debated in the European Parliament in January.
L-Orizzont says Mr Farrugia told the committee he paid $400,000 in commissions, $100,000 of them to former Enemalta chairman Tancred Tabone. In another story, the newspaper says the lifeless body of a 22-year-old Dutch man found at l-Ahrax tal-Mellieha on Tuesday was only retrieved after nine hours because the Italian Military Mission did not want to take the risk of lifting the body at night even though he had not yet been declared dead.
The Malta Independent says that according to the nurses’ and doctors’ unions, the situation at Mater Dei could get much worse during the influenza season.
In-Nazzjon leads with a report about the amendments being proposed by the Opposition to the bill on civil unions.
International news
The New Yorker says the US State Department has warned it was considering economic action against Ukraine. A spokesperson said all policy options were on the table including sanctions.
Kyiv Post reports Opposition leaders in Ukraine have rejected President Yanukovych’s offer of talks, saying they would not sit down with him until he fires his government and releases all arrested demonstrators. And from her prison cell, former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko also urged her followers to demand Prime Minister Mykol Azarov’s resignation, to ask the EU and the US to impose sanctions to end the ‘authoritarian’ regime, and to demand an international investigation into corruption.
Time magazine has named Pope Francis as the most influential person of 2013. Time’s managing editor Nancy Gibbs wrote that in his nine months in office, “he has placed himself at the very centre of the central conversations of our time: about wealth and poverty, fairness and justice, transparency, modernity, globalisation, the role of women, the nature of marriage, the temptations of power”. It is third time a Pope has received the recognition from Time magazine. John XXIII was chosen in 1962 and John Paul II in 1994.
Berliner Zeitung says German Chancellor Angela Merkel will travel to Paris today to meet with President François Hollande and prepare next week’s European Council at which banking unity is expected to be approved.
Ansa reports Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta survived confidence votes in both the Lower House and the Senate, consolidating his power for a broad programme of economic and institutional reforms for 2014. He garnered 379 votes in favour and 212 against in the House and 173-127 in the Senate.
The International Herald Tribune says the United States and Britain have suspended non-lethal aid to rebel-held parts of northern Syria – a day after Islamists overran a border crossing in the snow-swept region near Turkey, broke into a depot and stole weapons sent to rebels.
Mail & Gardian reports Nelson Mandela’s body was taken back to Pretoria’s Military Hospital at Wednesday after nine hours lying in state at the chapel in the Union Buildings, the seat of the South African government.
Police used water cannon to break up a protest by female students at the tension-hit Al-Azhar University on Wednesday, Al-Ahram reports. The protesters marched in streets surrounding the campus shouting slogans against the security forces and tried to storm a road block leading to the university’s gates.
The Times quotes a new UNICEF report saying that 230 million children under the age of five have not had their births officially recorded, excluding them from education, health care and social security.
Sole 24 Ore reports the owner of a small Italian company selling care spare parts set fire to a bank in Brescia after being denied a loan. The man, 69, asked all employees to leave the bank, poured petrol he had brought with him in a jerry can and set the bank on fire. He then surrendered to the police, but collapsed and was taken to hospital suffering from a heart attack.