The following are the top stories in the Maltese and overseas press.
Times of Malta carries exclusive comments from the foreign minister of the Tripoli-based Libyan government where he says Tripoli won’t allow the EU to bomb its coast to tackle migration.
The Malta Independent says Foreign Minister George Vella is critical of the EU’s 10-point plan on migration.
l-orizzont says Home Affairs Minister Carmelo Abela has insisted that burden-sharing on migration should not be voluntary.
In-Nazzjon says the Malta Olympic Committee bought hundreds of air tickets from Hamilton Travel by direct order.
The overseas press
Only 5,000 resettlement places across Europe are to be offered to refugees under the emergency summit crisis package to be agreed by EU leaders in Brussels later today. A confidential draft summit statement seen by London’s The Guardian indicates that the vast majority of those who survive the journey and make it to Italy will be sent back as irregular migrants under a new rapid-return programme co-ordinated by Frontex. More than 36,000 boat survivors have reached Italy, Malta and Greece so far this year.
Euronews says two further groups of 545 and 446 immigrants entered Sicily yesterday, having crossed Africa from countries like Sudan, Somalia and Eritrea. There were also reports that 115 people had been rescued from a small, inflatable boat some 70 kilometres off the coast of Libya.
AFP quotes the UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres saying that the migration crisis in the Mediterranean was a tragedy that needed a coordinated rescue response. At a briefing at the Organization of American States in Washington, he said,
“Our ability to save lives at sea has to be guaranteed, because the current situation is a tremendous tragedy.” He also called for “a very tough line” against people traffickers.
Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has advocated that EU governments must send officials to Africa to help prevent the trafficking of humans in a new slave trade. Bloomberg says that addressing lawmakers in Rome, Renzi called on Europe to “intervene in Nigeria, in Sudan and to the south of Libya”.
Meanwhile, Renzi declared that “not all those who are on the boats of smugglers are innocent families”. In a long editorial in The New York Times, he said, “We must continue the effort in North Africa to wipe out this threat and continue to work on the political and diplomatic for rapid reconstruction in Libya.”
Deutsche Welle reports Russia has called for compromise in an EU antitrust investigation into state-run petro-behemoth Gazprom. European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager accused Gazprom of extracting premiums in Central and Eastern Europe by hiking prices by as much as 40 per cent. She said that Gazprom had also insisted on contracts barring customers from selling gas across borders. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov dismissed the accusations as an “absolutely unacceptable”.
Tribune de Genève quotes WHO saying one-fifth of the world’s children are still not receiving routine life-saving vaccinations and efforts to ensure global immunisation coverage remain “far off track”. It said nearly 22 million infants, many living in the world’s poorest countries, missed out in 2013 on the routine vaccine against diphtheria, whooping cough and tetanus – and nearly half of them are in three countries: India, Pakistan and Nigeria.
A target of a zero-carbon world by 2050 was announced on Earth Day yesterday. Metro says more than a billion people and 192 countries used gestures and symbols to support a clean, green and more liveable earth. The Earth League, a group of international climate experts, urged the leaders of the world to take up the fight against global warming and end all greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. The UN Climate Change Conference in Paris next November would attempt to reach a reduction.
Spain’s former king, Juan Carlos, had an affair with German aristocrat Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein for the last 10 years of his reign. According to a new book about the monarch’s “double life” that is flying off Spanish bookshelves, the king also thought of divorcing his wife Sofia. Author Ana Romero, a former royal correspondent for El Mundo, said the pair met in 2004 but their illicit relationship ended shortly after his abdication. Her book, called “Final de Partida” or “End Game”, focuses on the last four years of Juan Carlos’s reign.
Still attractive at 50, Sandra Bullock has been named the world’s most beautiful woman in 2015, according to People Magazine. The actress said topping the list was “ridiculous”, adding she felt beautiful only in her role of being a mother to her son Louis, the black child she adopted in 2010.
El Universal says a 14-year-old Mexican girl, who was taken by authorities and sent screaming to live in the United States, was returned home after DNA tests showed she was not the daughter of the Houston woman who claimed her. The case of Alondra Luna Nunez drew international attention after a video of the distraught girl being forced into a police vehicle last week circulated in media and on social networks.
A Michigan woman was sentenced to between three and seven years in prison after firing her gun at a McDonald’s drive-through when her hamburger was delivered twice without bacon. According to ABC affiliate WZZM in Grand Rapids, Shaneka Monique Torres, 30, was convicted in March of carrying a concealed weapon, discharging a firearm into a building and felony use of a firearm. There were no injuries.