For those of us of a certain age, who grew up watching Italian television, the Capaci and subsequently the via D’Amelio bombings in 1992 that killed anti-Mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino loomed large in our psyche. They were events that shook us and glued us to our television sets long before the emergence [...]
As if by design, whenever Malta seems to be going through a difficult time (which is every day really now), up pops Michelle Muscat on her cloying Instagram account to remind the great unwashed that she's doing well in her filtered designer kitsch bubble, thank you very much. Last Wednesday was the start of an [...]
Since I have been told many times by the trolls that infest our social platforms that I need to ‘get a life’ because I am not a ‘mara simpatika mingħajr pretensjonijiet’, I decided to spoil the little life I’ve got and sit through the prime minister’s appearance on troll-central’s favourite television channel this morning. I [...]
In the pantheon of press conferences given by prime minister Robert Abela in the past year or so, yesterday’s presser was bonkers, even by his dire standards. The first rule of a leaders’ club is not to appear weak in front of the people you govern. I use the words ‘leader’ and ‘govern’ very loosely [...]
We all know that Owen Bonnici likes to document his puny, little life on Instagram like a pubescent boy trying so hard to get down with the kool kids. Arani, Ma! Here I am riding a Harley; here I am posing with a cup of coffee while gazing philosophically at the camera. Arani, Ma, here [...]
What is similar between the inaugurations of the President-elect of the United States in 1861 and the President-elect of the United States in 2021? Abraham Lincoln and Joe Biden both had to change their travel plans on the eve of their inauguration for security reasons. Biden was planning to travel on an Amtrak train from [...]
If you follow Michelle Muscat’s preferred media, my dear, you might think that Malta is the gold standard for a democratic country where “institutions are working” because the new Attorney General moved against Keith Schembri, Brian Tonna and his cabal in Nexia BT, where the Accountancy Board stripped Tonna and Karl Cini of their warrants, [...]
Image by Steve Bonello Art & Illustration. Never mind your facial pruning, but it takes some barefaced cheek to sit in the very building where the Constitutional Court declared that you are a persistent human rights violator, and shamelessly lie about the motive behind your decision to order the cleansing of our makeshift [...]
Whereas reading the newspapers has always been one of the enjoyable pastimes reserved for Sundays – poring over them after Mass over pastizzi and copious amounts of cappuccino, or in the afternoon after a gigantic Sunday lunch with family, happily hiccupping one’s way through digestion, they have rapidly become the dark cloud that remind us [...]
First a disclaimer: I have never been a fan of Xarabank; maybe in the very beginning when it looked new and bucked the trend of the usual fare on the national broadcasting channel: cooking shows, religious programmes and news bulletins interspersed with the ubiquitous teledrammi. These television dramas hooked an entire nation for years on [...]
It is said that Marie Antoinette never uttered these words but they were attributed to her by her enemies who were sick of her lavish lifestyle while the peasants of the city were trying to eke out a living in the sewers of Paris. Around lunch time on a hot, somewhat lowkey Santa Marija, the [...]
The pandemic is over. That’s the mantra repeated over and over by our loquacious Prime Minister for the past weeks. Yesterday we suffered through another priedka tat-tifel press conference by the new emperor-with-no-clothes Robert Abela to drill into us that the pandemic is just a figment of our imagination and so life must return to [...]
In the first week of April, my beloved Nanna Georgia turned 100. We had planned a big party because Nanna is a huge party animal and loves nothing more than to be surrounded by family on any given day, let alone on such a milestone birthday. But then Covid-19 hit and understandably so, the party [...]