The following are the top stories in the national and international press today.
Times of Malta publishes shocking photos of bodies washed up on the beaches of Tripoli and recovered by Libyan rescuers as spring turns into an unprecedented crisis of migrants crossing from Africa to Europe. In another story it says the first recorded hunting illegality this season occurred yesterday morning when a protected cuckoo was shot down in Manikata, leading to a backlash against the Prime Minister on social media.
The Malta Independent says people’s assessment of the Opposition has improved over the last few months mainly as a result of a greater proportion of persons who are undecided about its performance.
L-Orizzont says that the new drugs law, which does not put in prison people who cultivate drugs for personal use, came into effect yesterday.
In-Nazzjon reports about the shooting of a protected cuckoo on the second day of the spring hunting season.
International news
The United Nations and campaign groups have lashed out at the EU for scrapping rescue operations in the Mediterranean, saying it had endangered the lives of thousands of desperate migrants making perilous journeys across the sea. The Daily Mail says the criticism came as Italian coastguards said no more survivors had been found from a shipwreck off the coast of Libya on Sunday which may have killed 400 people. Amnesty International warned that “European governments’ ongoing negligence towards the humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean has contributed to a more than 50-fold increase in migrant and refugee deaths since the beginning of 2015”.
Le Soir says European Parliament President Martin Schulz has urged EU member countries to find a political solution to prevent future loss of life in the Mediterranean. Schulz said in Brussels, “We cannot react with indifference to the latest tragedy. We must act with urgently and find a comprehensive solution.”
Meanwhile in Germany, divisions emerged in the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel over whether Europe’s most populous nation should accept more refugees. Volker Kauder, parliamentary leader of Merkel’s conservatives, told Bild that Germany could welcome “significantly more refugees”. But Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere later told ZDF that Germany had already accepted more than 100,000 refugees from Syria and Iraq since 2011, compared to some European countries who had taken in a few hundred.
ABC reports the European Parliament has backed a motion calling the massacre a century ago of up to 1.5 million Armenians a “genocide” and urged Turkey and Armenia to renew diplomatic relations. The vote came days after Pope Francis used the same term. Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan said Ankara would disregard the resolution.
AFP says Standard and Poor’s has cut its long-term credit rating for Greece by one notch to CCC+, a level at which borrowers are considered as being vulnerable to default, saying it needs further reforms and help. Negotiations between Athens and its EU-IMF creditors are hurtling towards an April 24 deadline as the Greek government’s coffers are emptying fast.
Euronews quotes a UNICEF report which highlights that more than 12 million children in the Middle East are not being educated despite advances in efforts to expand schooling. The figure does not include children forced from school by the conflicts in Syria and Iraq, who would bring the total not receiving an education to 15 million.
France Televisions says hackers have bypassed safeguards to make off with data on 100,000 contacts held on its computers. The data heist was especially embarrassing as it came just a week after TV5Monde, an international French-language network based in Paris, was forced off the air and the Internet for 18 hours by an IS attack, said to be “unprecedented in the history of television”. However, the hack on France Televisions was believed to be criminal in nature, with the aim of selling the data.
According to Al Ayyam, Islamic fighters have largely withdrawn from a Palestinian refugee camp in Yarmouk. For two weeks the camp had been under fire from both Syrian regime troops and IS fighters.
O Globo announces police in Brazil have arrested the treasurer of the governing Workers’ Party as part of their investigation into the corruption scandal at the state-controlled oil company Petrobras. His detention brings the controversy even closer to the inner circle of the Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, which has always denied responsibility.
Four complete skeletons of two men, one woman and a child, thought to date back some 5,000 years, have been discovered in an ancient village in the northern India. Archaeological teams from India and South Korea have been digging since 2012 in an area of Haryana state where an ancient Indus Valley civilisation was thought to have been located. Project co-director Nilesh Jhadav told Hindustan Times pottery with grains of food and shell bangles were found near or around the skeletons.
Fox News announces a Texas woman has given birth to the first set of all-girl quintuplets in the US, says a hospital. The sisters were born prematurely at 28 weeks. Danielle Busby and her husband Adam already have a daughter, Blayke. They have been named Olivia Marie, Ava Lane, Hazel Grace, Parker Kate and Riley Paige. The five baby girls are also thought to be the first quintuplets born anywhere in the world since a UK delivery in 1969.