The following are the top stories in the Maltese and overseas press.
Times of Malta reports that Carmelo Grech, arrested in Libya for the past two weeks, had been carrying €300,000.
The Malta Independent says Mr Grech could be held by militias.
In-Nazzjon reports a PN statement that Joseph Muscat's silence on the visas controversy raised questions.
l-orizzont says the Gozo whistle blower feared that everything he owned could be arsoned.
The overseas press
Time reports that long before 41-year-old Vester Lee Flanagan filmed himself gunning down a TV reporter and cameraman during a live broadcast yesterday, he had a twisted and volatile career path that saw him fired from at least two stations for conflicts with co-workers on the pretext that he had been discriminated against. His former WDBJ station director Dan Dennison told Hawaii News Now, a thorough investigation could not find any evidence to substantiate the claims.
USA Today says Colorado court Judge Carlos A. Samour Jr. imposed 12 life sentences in prison to James E. Holmes, who fatally shot 12 people in a movie theatre in the Denver suburb of Aurora three years ago and wounded 70 others. The judge also imposed 3,318 years in prison on Holmes for his nonlethal crimes, including attempted murder. Judge Samour said, “The defendant will never be a free man again – ever.”
Pope Francis has called for prayers to overcome “the ecological crisis that humanity is living” and told thousands of pilgrims and tourists that mums and dads deserve the Nobel prize for finding time to run busy family lives. L’Avvenire says the pontiff was speaking to a crowd of 10,000 people in his weekly general audience, the 100th such audience he has held since his election.
Xinhua announced this morning that Chinese police have arrested 12 people suspected of involvement in the massive explosions in the city of Tianjin that killed 139 people and devastated the port area. Among those arrested were the chairman, vice-chairman and three deputy general managers of the logistics company that had been storing the chemicals that blew up. Yesterday the authorities sacked its work safety regulator for suspected corruption.
European leaders are meeting in Vienna today for the second Western Balkans summit. AFP predicts Europe’s raging migrant crisis will hijack the summit as the “western Balkans route” has now become one of the main ways into the European Union for the several hundreds of thousands of migrants entering the bloc this year in Europe’s worst refugee crisis since World War II. Some 102,000 migrants entered the EU via Macedonia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, Montenegro or Kosovo between January and July this year.
According to Spiegel Online, German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere plans to reduce the number of asylum seekers in Germany through a series of legislative changes. Under the 11 proposed, asylum seekers would stay at an initial reception camp for six months instead of the current three.
Meanwhile, Italian Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni rebuked Germany and France for criticising Italy’s migrant policy, saying, “Italy does what it has to...and much more, saving tens of thousands of human lives and welcoming refugees”. Speaking to Corriere della Sera, Gentiloni said the Dublin agreement was out of date and new rules are needed on migrant flows, EU asylum and repatriation.
And the UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres has called on European countries to do more for desperate migrants fleeing war-torn Syria and other countries, telling France 24 there is not enough coordination between European states. He said that compared to the population of the European Union (508 million), the 290,000 Syrians that entered Europe by sea, would be “perfectly manageable if there is goodwill and if there is a joint European response to the crisis”.
Libya Herald reports internet, landline and Libyan mobile telephone communications have been cut between east, west and south Libya because of damage to a cable at Sirte. Sources close to the Libyan Post, Telecommunications and Information Technology Holding Company believe the damage was done deliberately by Islamic State (IS) forces in the town.
CBS announces the death of Marcy Borders, who became known as the “dust lady” from a defining picture of her covered in ash and grime on September 11, 2001. She was 42. Borders told The Jersey Journal last year she was suffering from stomach cancer, the latest in a string of hardships that she experienced after the collapse of the towers. She also struggled with depression and drug addiction, and was having trouble paying her medical bills which left her unable to take medication in the prescribed dosages.
The Washington Post says Washington’s National Zoo says one of its two newborn panda cubs has died after three and a half days. Its mother, Mei Xiang, did not give much thought to it. If both cubs had survived, they would have been the 17-year-old panda’s third and fourth surviving offspring.
L’Osservatore Romano has paid homage to Ingrid Bergman’s beauty, an icon of European cinema, on the 100th anniversary of her birth. It was also the 34th anniversary of her death. The Vatican newspaper recalled “the tiny describing dimples on her cheeks which have enchanted, and still enchant, generation of movie lovers”, them as an expression of a mixture “of intriguing charm, sweetness and class, paired with the disarming skill of interpreting a wide range of roles”. It said these turned Ingrid Bergman into “one of the most remarkable icons of cinema, an icon unaffected by time passing”.