There is nothing in Owen Bonnici’s statement of yesterday that suggests the government is doing anything but consolidating its grip on power. It will rely on a compliant opposition to do so because many of the changes proposed, or rather the vague hints that were dropped at yesterday’s press conference, will require a two-thirds majority [...]
Image from disruptive telephony.com It’s a good thing our court administration is not handling the next lunar landing. Let’s just accept things at face value for a minute. Witnesses who wanted to testify that Neville Gafa’ solicited and accepted bribes for medical visas trudged through war-torn Libya at personal risk to a court-room [...]
Those videos yesterday of the prime minister answering journalists’ questions on the state of play of the investigations into the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia are profoundly disturbing. This one is from Lovin' Malta's YouTube channel. https://youtu.be/INSY1ymfyPk This is really not the occasion for the prime minister to give us all a patronising, knowing [...]
Helena Dalli’s husband is not accepting the Appeal’s Court decision that Caroline Muscat did not libel him in her Times of Malta investigations on works on his property. A decision by the Court of Appeal ought to have been the final word on the matter but Helena Dalli’s husband won’t take no for an answer. [...]
John Philips, veteran Rome correspondent for British newspapers who now writes for Italian English-language newspaper The Italian Insider was in Malta this weekend to cover the vigil marking 17 months since the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia. Here's a link to his piece. Look at this choice quote: "In a miserable measure recalling the practices [...]
A 69-year-old man was standing in the water in Pretty Bay, Biżebbuġa. He was holding a lilo on which he had his three cute dogs. The dogs attracted the attention of some children who were playing nearby. They went to get a closer look and play with the dogs. Most of the children were boys, [...]
Il Tirreno is the newspaper of record of Tuscany. On Sunday it carried this summary of a presentation I gave in Livorno last week. They introduce me as a Times journalist presumably because my Sunday Times articles come up on Google. It's far from the worst thing I've ever been wrongly described as.
The attempted frame-up of David Casa shows all the hallmarks of what Joseph Muscat’s supporters wanted the Egrant case to be like. It was cooked up in the middle of the night at the desk of a propagandist who describes himself, wholly undeservedly, as a journalist, quoting a source who is a fantasist mired in [...]
Ranier Fsadni made a very important point last Sunday writing on The Shift News. He said he was not sold on the idea that the protest at the Great Siege memorial in Valletta was removed every day because of some naive ambition on the part of the government to get people to forget the matter [...]
I met Zachary Balde in Livorno a few days ago. He is a 30-year old man from Senegal who has been living in Italy for four years. He told his story in fluent Italian which I am translating here. This is a long read. My name is Zachary Balde and I was born on the [...]
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From my article in The Sunday Times today: "Christ-like, the sacrifice of Falcone and Borsellino proved cathartic. They were as unwilling to be killed for their mission as Jesus in the Gethsemane. But they were as determined to bear witness and did not walk away from their own end. When Falcone died, mafia boss Tommaso [...]
A few Maltese pupils joined protesters of school age from across the world to protest inaction in fighting climate change. The whole point of the protest is to tell people in power they must get off their butts and somehow halt the inexorable dive towards catastrophe that we seem so collectively keen to indulge in. [...]
Facebook, YouTube and Twitter were under fire throughout today because their automatic filters and their human monitors failed to block a video filmed by one of the terrorist attackers in the New Zealand massacre of last night. The big social media networks scrambled to reverse the error and take down the video and to remove [...]
Catholic lay organisation, the Communita' di Sant'Egidio, yesterday marked the 17th month since the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia expressing "gratitude for the truth she revealed". Her memory was marked at the annual Sant'Egidio conference on 'the soul of Mediterranean cities' that is meeting this week in Livorno. I had the privilege of speaking at [...]
