Press digest

The following are the top stories in the Maltese and overseas press:

The Times features the launching of a drive for safer playing fields, launched yesterday by Parliamentary Secretary Chris Said. It also says that a French couple facing extradition has requested the right to marry while under police custody in Malta.

The Malta Independent reports on a reform by the Church on admissions to secondary schools.

In-Nazzjon says a German cruise liner is to home port in Malta. It also says a man of Maltese descent drowned in Australia while trying to save his children.

l-orizzont says the US Ambassador has congratulated the GWU for seeking to educate migrants. It also reports new claims by the Ramblers' Association on Victor Scerri's property in Bahrija.

The international press:

The Washington Post reports the US wants to keep some 50 of the remaining 196 Guantanamo detainees locked up indefinitely because they are too dangerous to release and evidence against them is insufficient for a criminal trial. On the anniversary of President Obama's executive order to close the prison within a year, the daily said human rights organizations and legal experts have criticized Obama for keeping prisoners locked up indefinitely.

The Times says the threat to the UK from international terrorism has been raised from substantial to severe - meaning an attack is "highly likely". Home Secretary Alan Johnson said although the threat had increased there was no intelligence to suggest an attack was imminent. Specific details would not be made public.

USA Today quotes a top Haitian official saying that within days, the government will move 400,000 people made homeless from their squalid improvised camps throughout Port-au-Prince to new resettlement areas on the outskirts.

Al Jazeera quotes Hamas political leader Khaled Meshaal, living in exile in Syria, saying his group would not recognise Israel despite new pressures and would give priority to building resistance to the Jewish state.

Metro says Queen Elizabeth is to address the UN General Assembly in New York in July, following a nine-day visit to Canada with her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh. Her speech would be her first in more than 50 years. The last time the British monarch addressed the UN General Assembly was in 1957.

Many newspapers in the UK lead with the story of two brothers who have been sentenced to a minimum of five years in custody after they attacked two boys in a sadistic 90-minute ordeal of violence and sexual humiliation. In an interview with The Sun, the father of one of the tortured boys the perpetrators should never be let out of prison as he feared next time they would kill. The Daily Telegraph quotes Conservative party leader David Cameron claiming the case is evidence of Britain's 'broken society' while the Daily Mail proclaims the parents of the brothers who attacked the nine-year-old and 11-year-old boys should be brought to justice.

The BBC reports daredevil Felix Baumgartner is preparing for a life-threatening jump from the edge of space which will be captured by the BBC in a documentary on the channel, as part of the BBC's 2010 celebration of science. He intends to plummet 125,000 feet down to earth, which should see him break the sound barrier, with the aid of just a thin, parachute-like balloon. It is hoped that the historic jump - in the US later this year - will answer a number of important scientific questions.