The NAO made a number of observations written in civil service code that need translating. The authors dedicate entire chunks of the report to the explanation on how line departments were left out of the discussion and the decision making on disposing such a huge chunk of public land for commercial development. At the time [...]

A National Audit Office report said it is “a matter of grave concern” that it could not determine who decided to kick out the Institute of Tourism Studies from its St George’s Bay campus in order to give the public land away for development. The auditor expresses dismay that the decision to throw the ITS [...]

Julia Farrugia dismissed calls for her resignation saying she never meant to give Chetcuti Cauchi any advantage when months ago she gave an “interview” on the passports sales scheme. We saw that “interview” in obviously advertising material published by Chetcuti Cauchi and left there even as the firm’s senior partner Jean Philippe Chetcuti was caught [...]

If you've seen Vanilla Sky you will remember the scene of David Aames driving through a deserted New York and running through an empty Time Square. He was running through a nightmare which in that film was called a lucid dream. Watch this short by Eric Bartolo about our own lucid dream: the streets of [...]

The biggest lesson from the 2008 financial crisis was to act big as early as possible. The hesitation of regulators, governments and central banks had an enormous economic cost that led to hardship that more timely action could have at least in part prevented. That’s the biggest lesson from the world stage borne out of [...]

The commissioner for standards in public life read the only message that was intended by the Chetcuti Cauchi law firm and Julia Farrugia Portelli and the government she's part of: "aħna ta' ġewwa". 'We're buddies'. The videos of the then junior minister responsible for the passports sales scheme in the office of the prime minister [...]

The government wants to have a temporary hospital with at least 84 beds built in the next 8 weeks. That raises a number of questions the government should really have answered before we found out about this. Firstly, when are the government’s calculations telling them to expect the spread of this disease to peak in [...]

Local film producers have asked the Ombudsman to investigate Film Commissioner Johann Grech four weeks after press reports showed he removed the bulk of them from the official list of local producers the Commission makes available to international film makers looking for crews when working in Malta. In spite of evidence published by news site [...]

The government has moved to fix a gap in powers of the superintendent of public health which if not fixed could cause chaos in the courts including allowing persons charged with crimes to walk free because of a technicality. The issue was first raised by this website in a 15 March post, the day after [...]

Zhou Enlai (not Mao Zedong as an earlier version of this post wrongly said) was asked once what he thought the impact of the French Revolution was. He replied that it was too early to say. That was almost two centuries after the fall of the Bastille. Trying to predict what life will be like [...]

The prime minister needs to do more. Now. The prime minister has not spoken to his people for many days. A transmission on the Labour Party radio station does not count. Rather the contrary. When the media of a political party is used we are divided into tribes when we desperately need to be together [...]

This tweet shows a small anthology of exasperated Italian mayors trying to get people to realise that after 5,600 people were killed by coronavirus anyone could be next. One of the mayor complains rather wittily about people ordering their hairdresser to come round to their house because the shops have been on lockdown for two [...]

The leap Marthese Portelli made from parliamentary politics to lobbying politicians on behalf of the construction lobby is unseemly. It’s like dating too soon after your spouse’s funeral. Worse. It’s like dating your late spouse’s neighbour with whom your family has been in a long-standing property dispute. Let’s get some obvious objections out of the [...]

Christo Georgiev's company myPOS that sells portable point of sale terminals for contactless payments was advertised yesterday in a paid advertorial carried by local website Lovin Malta. The feature, marked 'sponsored' by the website, promotes the services of Malta company 247Pay the local partner for Christo Georgiev's MyPOS a company based in the UK. Christo [...]

A slowed down caused by the coronavirus pandemic may be the reason why the sentencing of Ali Sadr Hashemi Nejad has been set for five months after he was found guilty by a New York jury of 5 counts of money laundering, bank fraud and busting sanctions against his native Iran. The date of the [...]

Someone sent me this but they don't know who wrote it. I thought you might like to read it. Stop. Just stop. It is no longer a request. It is a mandate. We will help you. We will bring the supersonic, high-speed merry-go-round to a halt We will stop the planes the trains the schools [...]

Daphne Caruana Galizia is being remembered today along with hundreds of people killed at the hands of mafia organisations in the bloody history of violent deaths of innocent victims of organised crime. For the last quarter of a century umbrella anti-mafia organisation Libera has marked 21 March as the day of remembrance for innocent victims [...]

Updated at 16:02 An entrepreneur who has set up a co-location facility in St Julians for “digital nomads” people working remotely in cities away from home, has warned Minister Silvio Schembri he would reveal information on the minister’s “personal involvement and interests” in the Blockchain project unless the policy of deporting third country nationals who [...]

This poem was shared with me by a regular reader. It was written by an Irish-French Catholic writer, Kathleen O’Meara (Dublin 1839 - Paris 1888), who also wrote under the pen name of Grace Ramsay, and is to be found in her novel Iza’s Story, set against the background of the Polish struggle against the [...]

Earlier today I wrote a post about areas of information that are remarkably lacking in the briefings the government is giving about the ongoing crisis. Here’s some more information I think we should be hearing. What’s happening to people who sleep rough? We know there are cases of people reduced to sleeping on cardboard in [...]