There’s been a positively apoplectic reaction to the Film Awards’ host’s quip that Malta is famous for tax evasion. Judging by videos of the event the audience received the line with stunned silence. Not that there was raucous laughter at most of his other jokes, mind you. Most of it went over everyone’s head. Which [...]

It’s easy to be impressed because this guy was a former prime minister. But this is what anyone feeling the noose tightening around their fate does. Consider the Degiorgio brothers who are facing court appearances for the rest of their lives as they are called to answer for the murders, they’re allegedly involved in that [...]

I didn’t think it would have been possible to up my goggle-box watching, but since COVID, I’ve managed. So, when it was proposed that instead of the usual Saturday evening movie (one becomes more of a creature of habit as age increases) we would watch The First Ever Malta Film Awards, I didn’t kick up [...]

From my article in The Sunday Times today: "Firstly, the government is careful not to improve conditions of media freedom still reeling from the killing by car bomb of a journalist they described as their harshest critic. Reform bills in parliament are kept off the floor for years. An inquiry’s set of recommendations are still ignored. [...]

In H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds the narrator of the events is a journalist, perhaps not the first thing that might strike the average reader in a novel about invading blood-drinking Martians. At the risk of suggesting a slight hint of self-praise, in the context of a story about Martians told by a journalist, [...]

Today, remember the victims. Inevitably, you will think of the perpetrators, the leaders who plotted and organised the murder of millions of children, women, and men for the crime of being born with a name and a race chosen for hatred and death. You do not recall the names of the millions of victims. You [...]

An Appeals Court presided by Chief Justice Mark Chetcuti overturned a lower court’s decision and ordered the government to pay a former presidential aid money owed to her when her job ended because her boss’s term ran out. Marika Mizzi was President George Abela’s press secretary engaged as a person of trust on a contract [...]

All those hours of listening to Konrad Mizzi’s vacuous, irrelevant, opaque, and interminable “opening statement” filibustered over something like three months proved, predictably, to be an entirely wasted consumption of mind-meltingly boring time. I look with some half-hearted sympathy at Beppe Fenech Adami and his colleagues on that committee. I think what it must feel [...]

The Appeals Court has today ruled that it-Torċa sought to damage the reputation of Occupy Justice activist and Repubblika founder Pia Zammit when the Labour-leaning newspaper repeatedly printed a backstage photo taken 10 years earlier of the actress in an 'Allo! 'Allo! costume. A lower court had dismissed Pia Zammit libel suit against it-Torċa’s editor [...]

Photo: REUTERS/Darrin Zammit Lupi Why do Joseph Muscat and his henchmen hate Repubblika so much? Why are they making Robert Aquilina one of a short-list of national hate figures, public enemies of Labour’s cause for a perpetual monopoly on power? Because Robert Aquilina is a leading figure in the effort of the few [...]

To justify his very public assault on the inquiring magistrate who ordered a search in Joseph Muscat’s home and officer, Glenn Bedingfield refers to past criticism of Judge Consuelo Scerri Herrera and Judge Giovanni Grixti by people like the author of the blog you’re reading. He specifically refers to me writing about Magistrate Charmaine Galea [...]

People who have read too much history for their own good cannot escape the sadness that the present events must cause them. Glenn Bedingfield took the floor in Parliament yesterday for a 15-minute rant of scapegoating hatred identifying targets for the enmity of his party’s followers. He named the enemies of the people du jour [...]

Earlier I wrote about the Opposition sleeping on the job, not being alert enough to oppose a motion by the government appointing Rosianne Cutajar to Parliament’s health committee. In its defence the Opposition called it a motion by stealth. That was a weird way to describe anything moved in Parliament because all motions are read [...]

Malta Today reported that while police were searching Joseph Muscat’s Burmarrad home their colleagues were also rummaging in a Sa Maison office held in Joseph Muscat’s name. Joseph Muscat has an office and doesn’t always work from home. OK, no need to blink so far. If you’re going to bill people €500,000 for investment advice [...]

And I’m glad it was Therese Comodini Cachia. On Twitter she shared Times of Malta’s report of the scene in court when its journalist Julian Bonnici was being questioned by the politician who brought a lawsuit against him, Adrian Delia. Do you find the questioning of a journalist by an MP in his own case [...]

UPDATED: 11:05 with PN statement Rosianne Cutajar admitted receiving €9,000 in cash as a “birthday gift” from Yorgen Fenech, the man charged with killing Daphne Caruana Galizia. She admitted she didn’t declare the gift. The record shows she spoke in Yorgen Fenech’s defence in Malta’s Parliament and at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of [...]

Read this Lovin Malta report of another point brought up by Robert Abela yesterday. He told business owners being “terrorised be institutions” to speak to him directly over WhatsApp or some other way that would avoid a paper trail so that he could defend them from the government of which he is chief executive. I [...]

This is my article in the current Winter edition of the Index on Censorship Magazine. This is a link to subscribe to the magazine.

Robert Abela has declared his intention to vote against and to instruct his MPs to vote down a draft law introducing anti-mafia legislation in our statute books. He’s only spoken in the negative about some of the other proposals and said nothing good about the rest of the package transposed by the Opposition from the [...]