The headlines of yesterday’s Sunday Times and Malta Today political surveys at face value appear contradictory. If you expect from polls what some expect from tarot cards you risk being misled. Polls are tools and one must learn to use them if they are to work for one. There’s much in the two studies which [...]
I wrote a few days ago that the first reason by tyrannies flounder is that there’s no one to prevent political leaders from making stupid mistakes. Leaders of democracies have an equal potential to blunder but checks and balances along the way can slow them down. Insider reports on the days leading to Robert Abela’s [...]
Napoleon died in exile in St Helena in 1821. In his will he asked to be buried in Paris but at the time of his death the British refused a French request to return his remains. In 1840 King Louis-Philippe’s popularity was waning and he thought it would be a good PR stunt to bring [...]
I’m not going to volunteer expertise in electricity generation or distribution, in urban planning, in meteorology, in climate science, and in all the trails of expert knowledge that go into understanding why some of us have run out of battery charge on their phone and have lost the ability to read this, never mind the [...]
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I’m just back from the vigil held in front of Castille calling for a public inquiry into the circumstances of the killing of Jean Paul Sofia. Everyone there knew on their way that the official mission of the vigil had already been accomplished. It looked throughout the day that Robert Abela was going to have [...]
https://youtu.be/T6cH2qBoFMQ
https://youtu.be/M3AoNnJbKhg
https://youtu.be/3KSqrM-pkwc
From my article in The Sunday Times today: " The swell of anger in the public mood is palpable, perhaps even more obviously than the anger after Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed and the government insisted that the arrests of three hitmen were all the authorities needed to do. The fact is that the Sofia [...]
If he was the king of an absolute monarchy, the optics would be bad. If he was an oil sheik who both owns and runs a country, a princeling of a tax-dodging microstate, a colonel of a tinpot junta in Central America, a drug lord holding court in downtown Medellin, Robert Abela’s behaviour this week [...]
I’m not sure the family of Jean Paul Sofia had spent much time in Parliament’s Strangers Gallery before Wednesday. But that night they looked like they owned the place. I would normally feel queasy about people shouting down at Parliamentarians. It would make me think with some distaste of deadly episodes from the French Revolution. [...]
Cartoon by Ġorġ Mallia. First published in The Third Siege of Malta (2021). Alex Dalli, who ran the civil prisons like a gulag and resorted to psychological torture and intimidation as a matter of course while prisoners under his watch committed suicide in unprecedented numbers, has lost libel suits filed against journalists who [...]
There are tinges of culture-war polarisation in the internet battle over a drag act during pride week at a children’s event in Valletta. There’s blessing in disagreements but intolerance is a curse. Hard right conservatives – who are far more in number than their extremism might suggest – express concern that children seeing a man [...]
There’s no shame in begging if you are in desperate need. The shame must lie with people who need to be begged to stop allowing the conditions in which begging is necessary. Jean Paul Sofia’s mother spent the day outside Parliament yesterday collecting signatures to persuade the prime minister to order an inquiry to find [...]
The Malta Film Commission Facebook page has a new profile. Is the Commission diversifying genres or have they replaced the Commissioner with someone more resourceful?
https://www.change.org/p/petition-to-members-of-parliament-to-support-a-public-enquiry-on-the-death-of-jean-paul
Times of Malta works out how much fines the Financial Intelligence Agency has raised over the last several months. It comes to an average of around €360,000 every month. The report also says there are 17 court cases filed against the FIAU by people it has fined, all making the same complaint. The complaint is [...]
Robert Abela’s behaviour in the Jean Paul Sofia case would be worryingly childish if it weren’t worryingly corrupt. Parliament debated a motion yesterday asking for an inquiry to establish if the government had done less than it should have to avoid Mr Sofia’s untimely death. An inquiry would act independently (of anyone, not just the [...]
