The following are the top stories in the Maltese and overseas press.
Times of Malta leads with comments by Frontex that human traffickers have abused Italy’s Mare Nostrum rescue operation.
MaltaToday says a Romanian escort was forced into prostitution. It also says that the US government is holding a conference on Libya in Malta.
The Malta Independent says repeat school absentees will get inspections at home.
In-Nazzjon focuses on the life of a young woman without effective kidneys who says she is the luckiest person in the world.
l-orizzont says a new tourist project is set to transform Bugibba.
The overseas press
The Washington Post reports President Obama would be ready to authorise aerial bombing in Syria as part of a broader campaign to defeat the Islamic State.
A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows the US is on edge in the wake of brutal beheadings of journalists by Islamic extremists – with 47 per cent of Americans saying the nation is less safe now than at any point since 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Ansa quotes Interior Minister Angelino Alfano telling the Italian parliament that the threat from the Islamic State militants was real, even if there was not, as yet, any “investigative evidence of terrorist plans”.
The Washington Times says US lawmakers have criticised President Obama for failing to notify Congress before releasing five Taliban operatives from Guantanamo in exchange for an American POW.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has expressed the hope that China and the US worked more closely together “as the international situation continues to see fundamental and complex changes”. Xinhua reports Xi met with US National Security Advisor Susan Rice in Beijing and called for more strategic trust between the two countries.
Sky News says the leaders of the UK’s three main political parties will head to Scotland today to campaign against independence.
VOA News reports a court in Minnesota has convicted a former nurse of assisting a suicide by encouraging a man in the UK to hang himself in front of his webcam so that he could watch on the internet.
The bodies of five children who disappeared from a South Carolina town have been found in Alabama. A law enforcement official told the Los Angeles Times their father was suspected in the grisly slayings.
Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere reached a record high in 2013 as increasing levels of man-made pollution transform the planet. The World Meteorological Organisation’s latest Greenhouse Gas Bulletin, says the gas blamed for the largest share of global warming rose to global concentrations of 396 parts per million – the biggest year-on-year change in three decades.
Florida Post reports a lesbian couple in their nineties have finally tied the knot after 72 years together. Vivian Boyack and Alice ‘Nonie’ Dubes married at First Christian Church in Davenport. Miss Boyack, 91, and Miss Dubes, 90, sat next to each other in wheelchairs during the ceremony.