No doubt there will be a splendiferous, neck-cracking, jaw-aching, retina-burning, ear-drum-shattering spectacle at the opening of the Valletta Capital of Culture festival and may the thousands that will flock to it have a great time. There's always the risk of conflating culture with spectacle but the program is long and intense and the variety wide [...]

Members of  national parliaments from 47 European countries meeting in Strasbourg in the next few weeks will be receiving appeals from several individuals and organisations asking for the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe to appoint a special rapporteur to monitor the murder investigation, investigate the broader circumstances surrounding Daphne Caruana Galizia’s death, and [...]

Sections of the Cypriot media are now connecting Pilatus Bank whistle-blower Maria Efimova with the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia. The outrageous notion was reported today by Cypriot news sites SigmaLive.com, Offsite.com.cy, Kathimerini.com.cy and 24sports.com.cy. I discussed this reporting with Cyprus Business Mail journalist Stelios Orphanides who told me “some Cypriot media are owned by [...]

Requests made to Interpol for the international arrest of fugitives sought by member countries are published on their website. It shows pictures of drug lords and terrorists, child abductors and slavers, and all sorts of unsavoury characters. But running a search for warrants requested by Malta and Cyprus, and a search for all the Marias [...]

The makeshift memorial for Daphne Caruana Galizia around the Great Siege Memorial in Valletta is the target of the hive of Labour trolls who believe it should now be 'cleaned up'. Look, by way of example, at the tactful Emanuel Cuschieri who dares to call others 'hate bloggers' when he is probably  individually most responsible [...]

Pilatus Bank have been trawling the specialist press on a saccharine self-promotion exercise mouthing inanities about transparency, ethical banking and compliance intended, without irony, to present this boutique launderette as the paragon of monetised virtue. They must be acting on some primordial advice from some pre-google manual of self-help public relations. Industry journal bankingexchange.com published [...]