Commissioner for Standards in Public Life George Hyzler has found the actions of the Foreign Minister’s private secretary Alessandro Mangion “particularly reprehensible” when he called an international human rights campaigner a “biased shit-hole.” The incident occurred in December last year when Alessandro Mangion rebuffed PEN International campaigner Sarah Clarke at a UN migration meeting. Ms [...]

Dutch daily Nederlands Dagblad spoke to Matthew and Andrew Caruana Galizia in Strasbourg on the sidelines of the Council of Europe meeting where they sat in front of Owen Bonnici who avoided looking at them like Lot feared to look back at Sodom. Here’s Matthew Caruana Galizia: “‘The murder was my fault, they said. I [...]

The Herman Schiavone Kristy Debono incident of this week has all the hallmarks of a trap. Someone appears to have relied on clear vulnerabilities to cause embarrassment and harm, though the list of vulnerabilities and the list of people who benefited from this mess are so long, it is impossible to be sure of the full [...]

Photo: Joanna Demarco Dutch daily newspaper Trouw carried a detailed feature on Daphne Caruana Galizia including interviews with her son Matthew and sister Corinne Vella. From the article: "Caruana Galizia is, to a certain extent, still present everywhere in Malta, although the government prefers to close the chapter immediately. That government would rather speak [...]

German daily Die Welt reported on Owen Bonnici's abysmal performance in Strasbourg this week. "Owen Bonnici tried all he could this Tuesday morning to convince those present that in his home country everything is in order and that the investigation into the murder of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was being seriously conducted. 'We have left [...]

In case you missed it, a few days ago DW carried a feature about the aftermath of the killing of Daphne Caruana Galizia and Jan Kuciak in their respective countries. From that piece: "Unlike in Slovakia, little has changed on Malta and the same persons Galizia investigated remain in positions of power. Three arrests have [...]

Sent in by someone I know. 2019 The biggest issue on a Sunday in a quaint island in the middle of the Mediterranean is not the fact that there are serious environmental health concerns with people hospitalised in increasing numbers to breathe through a mask. Nor is there a discussion related to the fact that [...]

Peter Grech this morning was an even worse spectacle than his boss, Owen Bonnici. We have come to expect politicians to be utterly bereft of decency. But Peter Grech embodies the moral collapse of our public service which, ironically, he represented so accurately and ineloquently today. In the four years of the past crisis, in [...]

If you watched the Council of Europe session this morning you will have seen Owen Bonnici play his act again of the benevolent absorbent of any criticism cheerfully and indecently agape like a Venus flytrap. ‘We are a reformist government,’ he tells people in the audience who have written or at least read the reports [...]

When Adrian Delia asked for the Greco report to be debated with “some” urgency in Parliament, Chris Fearne told him his side would be happy to discuss money laundering any time. Of course the Greco report was not about money laundering. That’s the Moneyval report and that’s still a few months away. But it didn’t [...]

Listen to this recording of a meeting held today in Strasbourg on the margins of the plenary session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. The meeting was headlined “Impunity in Malta” and discussed the state of play 18 months after the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia. The meeting is chaired by Thomas [...]

Jacob Borg's tweet is factual and elegantly sarcastic. Turning up with a begging bowl outside 17 Black owner's office does not hurt PN's fight against corruption, Opposition leader thinks https://t.co/Dl0UYmwSqu pic.twitter.com/9C1C1QzGIj — Jacob Borg (@BorgJake) April 8, 2019 But you know, Jacob? Adrian Delia is right. There's nothing Herman Schiavone or Kristy Debono or frankly [...]

Sent in by someone known to  me: The more I think about this, the stronger is my belief that this country is politically (for lack of a better term) fucked. PNPL or PLPN are more and more morphing into the same arrogant, filthy, greedy, corrupt, assholes - who instead of fighting for the common good [...]

Read first this rundown on The Shift News of the aftermath of a speech given by Matthew Caruana Galizia at the Perugia journalism festival. The story itself includes a link to the speech. La Repubblica described Matthew Caruana Galizia as the great discovery of the journalism festival. “Bel lavoro, Daphne”. Another job well done by [...]

The attempt at clemency on grounds of naivety in an effort to explain Kristy Debono and Herman Schiavone’s meeting with Yorgen Fenech revealed by this morning’s The Sunday Times is itself naive. Nobody is that stupid. This was not some clumsy faux pas. Herman Schiavone in this Facebook chat with party stalwart Boris Xerri said [...]

Sent in by someone known to me. Sitting in an airport on my way to Malta I noticed one thing in my recent weeks of travel. We are so poor, we are such a poor country, and it has nothing to do with wealth, it has nothing to do with the money we have in [...]

Daphne Caruana Galizia was methodical in her work. As a seasoned investigative journalist, she knew that when something appeared suspicious there was often a mound of rot behind it. She felt that it was so important to inform her readers in a timely manner that sometimes she published her intuitions as soon as she observed [...]

Adrian and Robert Farrugia The anti-mafia trial starts on Tuesday of local veteran football managers Robert and Adrian Farrugia who along with several others are charged with match-fixing and corruption in the Calabrian town of Lamezia. Adrian Farrugia resigned from the role of Mosta FC team manager after the “Dirty Soccer” investigation named [...]

St Paul, or so the story goes, arrived in Malta in 60 AD. Blown by the shipwrecks of fate, it’s widely believed he brought Christianity to these shores.  Good job he arrived before he’d have been jeered off the island with taunts of ‘Go back home to your own country!’ We should be grateful, too, [...]