The following are the top stories in the Maltese and overseas press.
Times of Malta reports extensively how an engineer was accused of the Mosta animal kilings.
The Malta Independent says the police have 'nailed' the animal killer.
In-Nazzjon says the Labour-controlled Council of Marsaxlokk is not acting in favour of the residents.
l-orizzont says a man arraigned in connection with the Mosta animal killing is to undergo psychological evaluation.
The overseas press
Belgium’s Kanal 1 TV announces that the European Union has stepped up sanctions against Russia following the annexation of Crimea. EU leaders meeting in Brussels have added 12 more names to an existing list of 21 Russian and Crimean officials subject to visa bans and assets freezes.
Earlier, CNN reported President Obama announced new economic sanctions against Russian government officials, influential individuals and a Russian bank, threatening to come back with tougher penalties if Moscow does not de-escalate the crisis in Ukraine. Obama said the US was concerned that “Russia has positioned its military” in a threatening way.
A short time after Obama’s statement, Russia announced that it was imposing entry bans on nine US lawmakers and officials in retaliation for Washington’s sanctions over Crimea. RIA Novosti says the Russian Foreign Ministry’s list included House Speaker John A. Boehner and Senator Robert Menendez, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov described the EU-US sanctions as “illegitimate”.
Voice of Russia reports UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has told President Putin that he was “deeply concerned” about the crisis between Russia and Ukraine. Ban met Putin in Moscow, as the country’s lower house of parliament voted to approve a treaty to absorb the Ukrainian region of Crimea into Russia.
In other news...
ABC says search planes flew out of Australia today to scour rough seas in one of the remote places on earth for objects that may be from the missing Malaysia Airlines aircraft. In what one official called the “best lead” of the nearly two-week-old aviation mystery, a satellite detected two large objects floating off the southwest coast of Australia about halfway to the desolate islands of the Antarctic.
A court has convicted four men of gang raping a photojournalist in India’s financial capital of Mumbai last year. Times of India quotes Maharashtra state home minister R.R. Patil saying sentencing is expected today, with the men facing up to life in prison. The 22-year-old photojournalist was on assignment with a male colleague at an abandoned textile mill in Mumbai’s Lower Parel area on August 22 when they were approached by several men who offered to gain permission for them to shoot photos in the building. Once inside, the male colleague was beaten and tied up while the attackers took turns raping the woman.
The Guardian says a suspected pedophile Portuguese, 40-year-old Euclides Monteiro of Cape Verde, wanted by Scotland Yard for the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in 2007, died in 2009 in an accident on a tractor. Monteiro is suspected of assaulting five English girls in the Algarve, where Maddie disappeared. The man had worked up to six months before the disappearance of the child close to the Ocean Complex in Praia da Luz, where the McCanns were resident.
Il Gazzettino reports residents of Venice and the surrounding affluent Veneto region continue voting today in an extended on-line referendum to see whether they wanted to remain part of Italy or secede as an independent state.
Mail & Guardian says paralympic athlete Oscar Pistorius has put his house in Pretoria, where February 14, 2013 killed his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp, for sale. A statement posted on his website says the 27 year-old sprinter, whose trial began March 3, never went back to the house since the tragedy has occurred. And he “cannot contemplate going back to live there again”. He said he needed the money to cover the rising legal costs.
La Republica reports a massage parlour was discovered by police near the shipyard in Palermo. When agents entered the premises, the found three adult women – all mothers of young children . One of them, the former owner of a private kindergarten, said she had been pushed into prostitution after the closing of the school as mothers could not afford to send their children because of the region’s economic problems. The other two said they were unemployed and needed the money to feed their children.