The crisis in the prison has now been “politicised”. I use that word with the meaning it has acquired in the local context which is not what the word properly means. An event in Malta is said to be “politicised” the moment it becomes impossible to persuade anyone to change an opinion they feel is [...]

Joseph Portelli’s interview with Times of Malta’s Mark Laurence Zammit raises a number of questions. Let’s be clear from the outset. I’m going to take quotes out of their proper context and jumble them together in ways Joseph Portelli did not mean them to be. So the charge of unfairness and perhaps even the risk [...]

That must be awkward. The judgement he’s most known for is the one when he accepted an appeal by the Panama Gang against an order of a lower court to start an in genere inquiry on the back of Simon Busuttil’s argument that the Panama Papers gave enough indications of the existence of a crime [...]

This set is by Jon Borg

Josette Schembri Vella, known by readers of this website as Mrs Prince of Darkness, was today, at long last, charged with money laundering. A company she part-owns was also charged. Through the noice in the courtroom while bail was debated there was talk of a small number of euro with several zeroes at the end [...]

Perhaps like me you’ve sometimes wondered how they manage to do it. Consider Robert Abela yesterday spraying his shorts with that stupid political o face as he received an envelope from EU taxpayers with a cheque for several hundred million euro to help us with the covid recovery. I know it’s not exactly a new [...]

They say it's 2021, but we're back to 1984. A water polo player has been suspended for 10 games and fined €960 after the association’s disciplinary commissioner found him guilty of threatening to kill an official of the aquatic sports association that organises the water polo league. You’d think it’s an ordinary story for the [...]

This set is by Darrin Zammit Lupi

Read the interview the grieving father of the last suicide in Kordin prison gave Matthew Xuereb. Two warders are being charged with involuntary homicide in the case. The parent’s version of the story is different from the official story in a number of respects. Officially the prison authorities say they had no reason to suspect [...]

A report in an Italian newspaper says that local entrepreneur Paul Hili discussed with an intermediary speaking for Milan-based Banca Generali transferring Yorgen Fenech’s 17 Black money from Dubai. The report in today’s La Stampa says that an Italian entrepreneur with interests in Monaco, the UAE, Albania, and Turkey, Mirko Albertazzi, informed Paul Hili that [...]

There are small questions like which is the next restaurant I must try. There are greater questions like will my salary last till the end of the month. Will I have a job next month? Who will win the next election? Will Daphne’s killers get what they deserve? Where is the next terrorist attack going [...]

Now that prosecutors have opened a case against prison warders for culpability in the suicide of a prisoner in their custody, the question of political responsibility needs to be addressed. This country is in a perpetual state of election fever. Even four years away from a general election the government are too afraid of losing [...]

She calls it multi-tasking. But really our Ambassador in New York, Vanessa Frazier, is posting on her Instagram account her contempt for the General Assembly of the United Nations. So she gets bored and switches football on her phone letting ambassadors from the rest of the world mumble on while she ignores them. As the [...]

I am not referring to the MP who allegedly slept with Yorgen Fenech, the man accused of masterminding the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia. She says that’s a private matter. I beg to differ but that’s for another time. I am not even referring to a sitting minister who had, and maybe still has, a [...]

At her state of the EU speech yesterday Ursula von der Leyen had words of praise for Malta’s judicial reforms of last year. She was talking about the changes to the way Malta chooses its judges. Labour trolls somehow took this as a club to bash in the heads of the government’s critics. ‘Do you [...]

The strides that have been made should encourage us to continue even if the temptation is to stop. There's still much to learn and justice is still a long way off. And they won't happen without our continued effort. A vigil gathers in Valletta tonight at 7 pm at the Great Siege Square in Valletta [...]

From my article in The Sunday Times last Sunday: "There, without qualification and reservation, were the words we’ve been saying all along. But, this time, someone from the Labour Party was saying them. And that matters. It matters because when truth is shared across tribal divides we can live together as a nation. "Miriam Spiteri [...]