In spite of the invitation I got to visit the prison, the government hasn’t properly addressed my repeated requests made since last November. No journalist is allowed to visit migrant centres, in spite of requests made by so many and so often. What we get instead are reports of degrading conditions and occasional riots blamed [...]

(This might be one of the longest pieces on this blog, which is not notorious for the brevity of its wit. So keep this one for when you have the time for it. I trust you'll find it's worth your effort). I walked up to the prison door in the blazing sun of yesterday afternoon. [...]

After much struggle and toil, I was given the opportunity to visit the prison and ask its director some questions. It wasn’t easy. I wrote to then minister Michael Farrugia 5 times in November, never getting a proper answer. Then when it looked like the government was floundering, I waited for the change. In February [...]

If a public official, or anyone serving the state and the community with their work, is in any danger it is the duty of the state to protect them. No government minister, no journalist, no judge, no social worker, no divorce attorney, no prosecutor, no teacher, no nurse should be allowed to face physical violence [...]

Photo: Ivan Martin for Times of Malta. Everyone charged with a crime is innocent until proven guilty. Anyone suspected of a crime, mentioned by others as having committed a crime, asked for an alibi to avoid being charged with a crime: all are presumed to be innocent. No one gets to be punished [...]

It’s not easy being the murder squad at the police. The eyes of the country are on you all the time and most people watch real-life police work and expect nicely wrapped up parcels of logic: the sort that is served in a 45 minute procedural about an impossibly chiseled cop who, with his faithful [...]

I’m not the first to write about the man charged in court for stealing a can of tuna to fend off starvation. All sorts of very valid points have been made. Firstly, the point about our authorities being strong with the weak. While Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi continue to run around without the inconvenience [...]

On TV, Robert Arrigo “offered his post as Deputy Leader” of the PN to Bernard Grech if Bernard Grech were to withdraw his challenge for Adrian Delia’s leadership post. Did Robert Arrigo think he’s negotiating players and their performance at his old football club? The Deputy Leadership of the Nationalist Party is a position Robert [...]

Labour troll Georgina Cardona is causing a stir on Facebook saying that Repubblika is on the list of beneficiaries of funds from the Community Chest Fund and l-Istrina. She publishes some sort of list Repubblika is part of but the document, whatever it is, is clearly not a list of CCF/Istrina beneficiaries. This is a [...]

(*for the hard of comprehending, commentary is not an assertion of fact: this is not a statement that Mercieca should star in “The Godfather Part IV”) A few days ago, Simon Mercieca, who campaigns for Adrian Delia on social media, shared a video from some time ago of Edwin Vassallo asking, presumably rhetorically, who pays [...]

George Vella’s excuses don’t cut it. He says he doesn’t think he is above the Freedom of Information Act. And yet he contradicts the basic tenet of that law by saying that by default all letters to the president’s office should be treated as confidential. Not even the president of Malta has the authority to [...]

From my article in The Sunday Times today: "The fact that we can’t have a referendum to back out of our international legal obligation to rescue people at risk of drowning in our waters is not the most important answer to give those campaigning for one. Racists, for so they are, will project that as [...]

European press freedom NGOs are urging the governments of Malta and Italy to investigate properly threats Neville Gafà, former gofer in Joseph Muscat’s office, openly sent to Italian Avvenire report Nello Scavo over Twitter. The NGOs, part of the Media Freedom Rapid Response project co-funded by the European Commission, said that “the Maltese government's request [...]

Bit of a detail considering all that’s coming out of court today, but Keith Arnaud, chief investigator in the Daphne Caruana Galizia murder, remarked while testifying that the leaks of WhatsApp messages between Leader of Opposition Adrian Delia and murder suspect Yorgen Fenech were entirely accurate. Leaks came in two batches. In July, Times of [...]

The police told the court today that at the time of his arrest Yorgen Fenech told them Keith Schembri got him to organise the killing of Daphne Caruana Galizia. It was a conversation that had been going on for some time before Keith Schembri gave him the nod: Mexxi. Mexxi. Mexxi. Proceed, said three times [...]

Updated. 09.09.2020 at 18:08 US District Court for Western Oklahoma There’s more to the story of Nazzareno Mifsud who is wanted by the US authorities to answer for charges of sexual molestation of children in 1986 and 1987. He is currently waiting for a decision by a Maltese court on a request by [...]

  There was a bit of a scene on the Gozo channel ferry yesterday. A couple of enforcement agents fined two women for not wearing masks while they were sitting at table. A debate ensued – it wasn’t quite as calm as that Oxford Union description suggests – about the nuances of mask-wearing regulations. Does [...]

Here’s one for all the racists saying that the arrest of a man of Albanian origins for the double murder in Sliema ‘proves’ that migration is a ‘problem’. Obviously there are various shades of this. Some write describing migrants living here as if they were a marauding horde using the language of monks describing Vikings [...]

It took a while before I stopped catching myself typing in the link to Daphne’s website to look for her take on yet another absurd development in the catalogue of disgusting scandals that followed her killing. Almost all of those scandals emerged because of her investigations, or were at least predicted by them. The rest [...]

Updated 27 August 2020 at 09:30 (see bottom of post). The United States’ request for extradition of fugitive Reno Mifsud deserves close watching because it is a test of the Malta-US extradition process. According to documents filed in the US District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma, when Reno Mifsud fled from the United [...]