THE SUNDAY TIMES: Our greatest failure

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2022-07-31T07:46:40+02:00Sun, 31st Jul '22, 07:46|

From my article in The Sunday Times today: "A year after that inquiry, we have achieved nearly nothing of the recommendations of the inquiry. We still have no law to fight the mafia, no law against obstruction of justice, no law against abuse of power. We’re still ruled by the ministers who propped up Muscat. [...]

Daphne Foundation: “the government failed to implement inquiry recommendations save one”

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2022-07-29T09:02:02+02:00Fri, 29th Jul '22, 09:02|

A report published by the foundation set up by Daphne Caruana Galizia’s family found that  “five years after Caruana Galizia’s assassination and one year since the publication of the Public Inquiry report there has been hardly any concrete action or meaningful legislative proposal to provide an enabling environment for journalists.” “Without urgent action from the [...]

The Daphne Inquiry: a year after

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2022-07-28T08:38:10+02:00Wed, 27th Jul '22, 11:50|

The following is a summary of the recommendations that followed the conclusions of the Daphne Caruana Galizia inquiry published a year ago. The left column quotes extracts from the English translation of the recommendations prepared and published by the Daphne Caruana Galizia Foundation. The traffic light symbol in the middle categorises the state of implementation [...]

Bullet fee

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2022-07-25T14:54:48+02:00Mon, 25th Jul '22, 14:54|

Repubblika this morning challenged in court AG Victoria Buttigieg’s failure to prosecute Pilatus Bank’s owner and directors. In another courtroom her staff were being lambasted for “rushing” to prosecute the bank itself and a middle manager who worked at the bank, when prosecutors clearly have no idea what they need to do or what they [...]

Cowardice of conviction

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2022-07-21T10:54:05+02:00Thu, 21st Jul '22, 10:54|

PN MP Ivan Bartolo, who voted against the changes to the IVF law, made the observation in Parliament that the government gazette was claiming the president signed the bill adopted by parliament into law, when, Ivan Bartolo knew, George Vella hadn’t done so. The notice was pulled from the website, Times of Malta explained today, [...]

Judge Joe Azzopardi. Again.

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2022-07-21T11:07:07+02:00Thu, 21st Jul '22, 10:22|

The former chief justice, Joe Azzopardi, is growing into the role of the go to guy for the government when they need an inquiry to smooth things over, Humphrey Appleby style. He has just been given the job of looking into the acquittal of Charles Mercieca and Gianluca Caruana Curran who were let off after [...]

Blind spots

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2022-07-21T08:11:53+02:00Thu, 21st Jul '22, 08:11|

You would think that I am uploading this image to make fun of the national broadcaster for a typo. I would not do that. We all make mistakes. God knows I make plenty and typos are more of a regular occurrence on this blog than I'd like them to be. I'm using this image because [...]

Barons

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2022-07-21T07:56:17+02:00Thu, 21st Jul '22, 07:56|

No one suggests that retired prime ministers should do like the abdicating kings of old. They don’t need to join a monastery and live out their dying years in ascetic contemplation. But that clip yesterday of Joseph Muscat walking down a street in Oxford with developer Michael Stivala, president of the Malta Developers Association shows [...]

PODCAST: Justice denied

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2022-07-20T09:58:06+02:00Wed, 20th Jul '22, 09:57|

Manuel Delia · Justice Denied Robert Aquilina was in court yesterday pursuing a case started by Repubblika in 2020. The battle is drawn out, as court battles often are, and a bit like Douglas Adam’s computer that took 7.5 million years to compute an answer to a question that had by then been forgotten, by [...]

Joseph the Insufferable

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2022-07-19T13:40:45+02:00Tue, 19th Jul '22, 13:40|

I almost miss Joseph the Unvanquished in Castille. After resigning in disgrace, he went through a phase of Joseph the Barely Remembered. This Joseph the Whining Cunt of Burmarrad is positively insufferable. He grasps on whatever he imagines to be any opportunity to repair his entirely ruined reputation and screams from the rooftop of his [...]

OSCE observers with fresh proposals for electoral reforms, after most 2017 recommendations ignored by Malta government

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2022-07-19T08:44:00+02:00Tue, 19th Jul '22, 08:44|

Election observers from the Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe noted in a recent report that most of the recommendations from a mission observing the 2017 elections have been ignored by the Maltese authorities. They have repeated those recommendations and added new ones including in [...]

THE SUNDAY TIMES: Popcorn muncher

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2022-07-17T10:18:35+02:00Sun, 17th Jul '22, 10:18|

From my article in The Sunday Times today: "Robert Abela is a bit like the child who knows how to ingratiate himself with irate parents who have just punished their elder sibling. He flutters his lashes and rolls his doe eyes, projecting virginal innocence and making an unseemly effort to appear entirely different from his [...]

GUEST POST: Michelle Muscat: On Grief and Flippers

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2022-07-18T16:19:39+02:00Sun, 17th Jul '22, 10:10|

*WARNING* Contents Include Previously Undisclosed Secret Document Fresh from her claim that she was ‘more sorry’ than Daphne Caruana Galizia’s own family when the journalist was brutally assassinated, Michelle Muscat is now indulging in a public display of grief towards her ‘dear friend’, the wife of Shinzo Abe, the former prime minister of Japan who [...]

GUEST POST: Asylum seekers do not fully “belong”

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2022-07-17T10:02:05+02:00Sun, 17th Jul '22, 10:02|

Some of us look upon the people fleeing to our country as cheap – often illegal – labour, others as a nuisance. Many have got used to their presence, generally in some restaurant kitchen, doing the dishes, collecting rubbish, or working – often dangerously – on some building site. Very few actually concern themselves about [...]

The cynicism is truly astounding

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2022-07-15T15:17:17+02:00Fri, 15th Jul '22, 15:17|

This is what passed for coverage of yesterday’s court decision on the home page of TVM’s website. The report of the PN’s press conference includes a link to an earlier report published by TVM that summarises the court decision. They published that “fair” report hours after the decision was handed down, hours after all other [...]

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