Updated: 12:52 The European Parliament awarded for the first time today the Daphne Caruana Galizia Prize for Journalism. The prize went to Forbidden Stories for their work on The Pegasus Project. A team of independent judges hailing from the journalistic and media sectors chose the winner, after a period of submissions earlier this year. Representative of [...]
https://youtu.be/_R-O6MST4-M
It is said that Josef Stalin once ripped all the feathers off a live chicken as a lesson to his followers. He then sat the chicken on the floor a short distance away. The chicken was suffering immensely but yet when Stalin tossed some wheat toward it, the chicken followed him around. “This is how [...]
This was the first in a series of debates organised by Repubblika, #occupyjustice and this website as part of the events marking four years since the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia. Other discussions, including a debate yesterday organised by PEN Malta, will be uploaded on this website in the coming days.
Just last week Clyde Caruana sounded like he knew what he was talking about. He was launching the national employment strategy, a subject on which he has considerable background having run Jobsplus before he was co-opted to Parliament and made finance minister. Read this report of his speech at the time. The general gist is [...]
There is little doubt the budget speech seals the Labour Party's lease extension on political power. It was designed to do that no matter how aggressive the assumptions and doubtful their plausibility. What we can't forget now is that the issue on the lease on power is secondary. The crooks fully expected the election result [...]
Yesterday's budget speech was designed to irritate no one and please everyone. On the back of barely spoken bold assumptions of pumping economic growth, the government told itself and everyone it could afford to be generous. And so it was. An economist would want to examine those underlying assumptions. They would look at the numbers [...]
The headline item from yesterday’s budget speech is the news that a year from now bus fares will be scrapped for residents. Tourists will continue to pay. The finance minister estimates that for a regular bus commuter that uses public transport to go to work everyday this will amount to a saving of some €300 [...]
No government, however hard-pressed, will want to face the electorate with bad news on the eve of a general election. Yesterday’s budget speech was bound to be a bonanza of gift-giving because no matter what we say about our democratic maturity we still think of the government as some form of Father Christmas and the [...]
The Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights is visiting Malta this week for meetings with the local authorities and civil society. Dunja Mijatovic will have quite an agenda. Malta is not the most complicated country for human rights in the Council of Europe. Her conversations in Russia, Turkey, and Belarus are bound to be [...]
From my article in The Sunday Times today: "Daphne was right, on the hospitals, the passport sales, Dalli’s games and corruption in energy. Yet, none of those she had exposed has yet faced any consequence. She deserves justice. On Saturday, October 16, at 7pm, join the vigil in Valletta demanding just that." Read the full article here.
Photo: STR/AFP This is the first time in my life that someone I have once met and spoken with has won a Nobel prize. I don’t expect that will ever happen again. Maria Ressa has been awarded the Nobel peace prize jointly with Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov. The Nobel prize committee said the [...]
The developers’ association reiterated its proposal that political parties should be funded by the state to remove what they describe as the “wrong perception” that businesses fund political parties to get favours in return. Let’s not quibble about how wrong the perception may be. Yes, we need political parties funded by the state so let’s [...]
When the Pope cancels a dinner appointment with you. And when the traffic management authority thinks it is a good idea to remove a speed camera thereby reducing the deterrent and the means to enforce the law intended to prevent excessive speeding and like incense and the sacrifice of milk-fed lamb burnt at the altar [...]
Take a look at all the pulp sales promoting the idea of a metro in Malta. There are exhibitions, websites, videos, and graphics that probably cost what it would cost to buy Thomas the Tank Engine and pay the Fat Controller for a year. What exactly is this campaign achieving? I don’t think we need [...]
Konrad Mizzi is exercising yet another right to dodge questions he’s uncomfortable answering. At the Daphne inquiry he said a hundred times “I choose not to answer” which was his right because no witness can be forced to incriminate themselves. Today he announced he’ll miss the meeting of the Public Accounts Committee which has called [...]
Current affairs producers on TVM these days are rarely inconvenient to the government. Anyone with a shred of independence has been pushed out and replaced. The internal memo exposed by Times of Malta that instructs producers to give management two-week notice does not just reveal control-freakery and partisan bias at the national station. We knew [...]
John Dalli has fully graduated to the status of nasty grand uncle that must be avoided even on Christmas. He is, to begin with, grotesquely predictable. If only one prominent indigenous name was going to emerge in a worldwide leak of secret off-shore accounts, it would have had to be his. That was certainly predictable. [...]
The way Robert Abela enables Rosianne Cutajar is nothing short of a disgrace. The prime minister and his government seem to be in no doubt that not only is she an embarrassment, but her conduct is entirely and altogether unacceptable. They implicitly acknowledged yesterday that an independent committee of European MPs with no stake in [...]
