Together with Therese Comodini Cachia, Natalino Fenech, Monique Agius, and Joe Borg, I'm part of the Media Reform Initiative, an effort to ensure transparency in the process of reforming press laws and making sure that changes made enable press freedom, rather than restrict it. This is a statement we published this morning: The statement by [...]
If you’ve been following, you know all this. If you haven’t been following, you wouldn’t care. And yet, if you’re still here and I’m still here, then it must be because we both think this is worth remembering. Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed in 16 October 2017 by car bomb outside her home. She was [...]
Doctors sitting on the board that approved applications for severe disability benefits supported by forged documents complain to Times of Malta today that they “were cheated too”. They could not have known the signatures were forged, they said. They speak to the Times on condition of anonymity although there aren’t hundreds of people who could [...]
From my article in The Sunday Times today: "The thing with political favours is that people who are happy to sell their vote will negotiate to acquire from the politician, in exchange for their currency and commitment, what they wouldn’t be able to acquire by right anyway. Electoral clientelism is not about making sure that [...]
The government is scrambling to cover up the fact that it covered up the benefits fraud scandal. Times of Malta did not stop at revealing the story. They’re pushing the government to answer its questions and the mess of the responses the government are giving is a story in itself. Consider for example answers to [...]
Robert Abela’s Sunday sermon yesterday will have gone down like all other Sunday sermons. It tickled people’s confirmation bias, realigning people to the convictions they were born to. Perhaps a handful might have been curious to see if Robert Abela would react to Times of Malta’s story that morning. They should have known better than [...]
Times of Malta broke the story. That’s how it almost always starts. The police spoke to the Labour MP who was at the centre of the scheme of forgeries and benefit fraud to consolidate the partisan support of likely voters of the Labour Party who have fallen on hard times. The police arrested the MP [...]
There has been much hilarity about the unintended glibness of the Wasteserv CEO’s recommendation that we put our organic rubbish in the freezer, so it doesn’t stink while we wait for the bi-weekly rubbish collection. Richard Bilocca (whose surname has lent itself to some witty references to chunks of icy banana peel and shrimp heads) [...]
At his questioning in the PAC yesterday Joseph Muscat was asked by PN MP Darren Carabott about something I wrote in June 2018. Here’s a link to the piece where I reported that Keith Schembri received substantial amounts of money in January 2015 soon after returning from Azerbaijan. I had published that report around 5pm [...]
Joseph Muscat would have been comfortable in a cubicle at the Ministry of Truth right there behind Winston Smith. Yesterday he was busy casting into the fires of oblivion what we all remembered witnesses tell the Daphne Caruana Galizia inquiry. Almost all the evidence the inquiry heard was heard in public. We can dispute some [...]
Here's a podcast series launched today by PEN Malta. It's a series of interviews with Maltese writers, some of whom have less exposure than they deserve. In this first episode, podcast host Karl Schembri interviews award winner Lara Calleja. https://youtu.be/JPqj_tUR2Gc?si=9Ft3XR7ILkTxsjFg
You could patiently remove cobble stones one by one to undertake repairs beneath, and when the job’s done replacing them carefully to make sure the finished project is matching and one of the most important squares in the entire country remains attractive. Or you could do this.
It shouldn’t have surprised anyone that Johann Grech addressed the nation a few days ago and used Joseph Muscat’s and Robert Abela’s rhetoric that anyone criticising government policy is “attacking Malta”. Johann Grech is a veteran propagandist of the Labour Party. Just because he’s in photos with famous actors who are effectively paid out of [...]
A public sector teacher was told by her bosses she would get an extra allowance if she got herself another university qualification. The state (and other employers, incidentally) give their staff incentives to go to school and learn something new. Our case is about a secondary school Maltese language teacher who got herself certified as [...]
From my article in The Sunday Times today: "The legal notice, setting up the organisation that Saliba was made boss of when the notion was still a twinkle in Bonnici’s eye refers to the wrong enabling law. If it had referred to the right law, it would have found that the original law does not [...]
Big numbers don’t mean much to most people. Few will ever handle €4.7 million in their lives. Even grasping the meaning of €47 million is too far a leap for most people, myself included. I saw once an explanation of scale to help grasp big numbers. It would take you 11 days to count a [...]
This comment was placed by M. Spiteri in response to my comments this morning on Arnold Cassola’s article. Read the original article and my first commentary for context. Hi Manuel. I've read the said article on the TOM. If I am correct, it's stated that the whistle blower spilled the beans AFTER he was denied [...]
I have no way of fact checking the claims made by Arnold Cassola in his Times of Malta article. I am going to assume, for the purposes of this commentary, that all the facts he claims are accurate. The claims briefly: an unnamed individual, identified as Aziz, was born in a refugee camp in Palestine. [...]
The appointment of Norma Saliba as CEO of a new entity called the Centre for the Maltese Language was transparently done to accommodate a loyalist. As many others, I wrote about this recently. It’s indeed a corrupt country that sets up a government entity just to create a job for a crony. But that’s not [...]
https://youtu.be/V9Rl5flt_vw