What exactly is George Vella waiting for?

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2023-03-20T09:56:53+01:00Mon, 20th Mar '23, 09:56|

I am reproducing the first two paragraphs of a Times of Malta report about George Vella’s brisk and brusque response to the question as to whether he feels he has any share of responsibility in the hospitals privatisation which a court ruled was the product of fraud. President George Vella brushed off questions on whether [...]

(Allegedly) raped on a police sergeant’s couch

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2023-03-18T08:45:19+01:00Sat, 18th Mar '23, 08:45|

Think how unlikely a woman who has been raped might think it is that she may be believed when she reads about a woman police officer raped twice inside the police station and ignored for months before she's made to face a gruelling trial alongside her alleged rapist. At one point, the alleged rapist appears to [...]

GOAT

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2023-03-17T14:35:09+01:00Fri, 17th Mar '23, 14:35|

I have overcome deep set qualms to share this video with you. It’s filmed off a screen, a brief extract of a TVM program intended to provide health education to the masses, which seems to mean for TVM that supremely qualified doctors are to be locked up in a room with the most utterly incompetent, [...]

Comparisons are not always odious

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2023-03-16T07:41:41+01:00Thu, 16th Mar '23, 07:41|

A few days ago, I wrote about the Lawrence Gonzi litmus test comparing the governance standards since 2013 with standards we all expected before that. I got some flak for that because, I was reminded, the Gonzi years were far from perfect and his faults and the faults of those times may fade in my [...]

The king’s blue passport

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2023-03-15T07:02:57+01:00Wed, 15th Mar '23, 07:02|

It emerged yesterday in Parliament that Joseph Muscat is allowed to use a diplomatic passport and “other protocol facilities ... as part of his severance package”. There’s no suggestion this privilege has a time limit. It appears that Joseph Muscat has been appointed diplomat for life merely because, for 7 years, at one point, he [...]

Have the government tried governing?

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2023-03-13T07:51:33+01:00Mon, 13th Mar '23, 07:51|

Read this report in Times of Malta of a court decision ordering the state to pay compensation to the owners of a warehouse that rented it out in 1976 and have since collected a pittance in rent until the tenant stopped paying them. As a result of 1979 laws, that still needed to take into [...]

Now he wants to shut the stable door

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2023-03-13T07:07:33+01:00Mon, 13th Mar '23, 07:07|

After days and weeks of ignoring the question hoping it would go away, Robert Abela, perhaps shaken to his core by yesterday’s Malta Today poll, undertook to get out of Steward the money they were paid to repair the hospitals which they didn’t spend as they promised. The fact it took him so long to [...]

It’s the corruption, stupid

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2023-03-12T08:13:36+01:00Sun, 12th Mar '23, 08:13|

For 10 years Joseph Muscat worked on the assumption people would not care about their politicians’ corruption as long as the going was good. You see, here’s how Alfred Sant’s logic on The Sunday Times is upside down. In his effort to excuse his party, on which, incredibly, he still depends to keep his job [...]

THE SUNDAY TIMES: End of the socialist affair

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2023-03-12T07:16:00+01:00Sun, 12th Mar '23, 07:16|

From my article in The Sunday Times today: "Socialism and the socialist tradition do not have the monopoly of concern for the public good. The notion of public space and collective interest is older than monarchies, let alone socialism. But I’m not going into a debate here about the nuances of political history. The point I [...]

The cartel decade

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2023-03-10T07:36:22+01:00Fri, 10th Mar '23, 06:52|

Bernard Grech was spot on yesterday. The 10th anniversary of Labour’s coming to power marks a decade where the basic rules of conduct in government were systemically ignored and where politics stopped being a process of driving change in the interest of the public good and became instead a process of serving the interests of [...]

Signs of life

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2023-03-07T08:05:26+01:00Tue, 7th Mar '23, 08:05|

This is a place where you come to mourn democracy. Like Orwell’s Benjamin the donkey I bray about my memory of earlier times, when I was younger and the sun shone brighter, though it got less hot. When I speak of political violence I was vaguely aware of in my childhood and of the EU-membership [...]

manueldelia.com co-production wins Best Editorial in IĠM Awards

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2023-03-05T05:37:24+01:00Sun, 5th Mar '23, 05:37|

'When They Come Undone', a 2020 co-production of Repubblika, #occupyjustice, and manueldelia.com, was awarded the Best Editorial or Opinion Piece Award at the first IĠM Awards to be held in three years recognising the best journalistic works between 2020 and 2022. The jury panel which selected the film that won this category reported that "there [...]

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