Over the last three years the government commissioned three reports following the violent and untimely deaths of three women. There was the public inquiry that followed the killing of Daphne Caruana Galizia which found the state responsible for her death, allowing for a toxic state of impunity to protect senior government ministers and their criminal [...]
That was a strange interview that Raphael Vassallo had with criminology academic Saviour Formosa last Sunday. In some respects, it recalled an interview with another expert discussing traffic congestion on TV some years ago. That expert had said something to the effect that traffic congestion was not real as much as it was a “perception”, [...]
I’m the good news first kind of guy. So, a court yesterday did something which has accurately been described as very rare. It allowed for a tool provided by human rights legislation to be used to stop someone suffering an alleged human rights violation while a court decides whether they’re suffering a human rights violation. [...]
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The pictures are by Darrin Zammit Lupi. Daphne vigilPhoto: Darrin Zammit Lupi
Alex Agius Saliba voted for an EP resolution supporting military aid to Ukraine for as long as necessary. One other Labour MEP Josianne Cutajar voted for the resolution as well, while Alfred Sant and Cyrus Engerer were not in the room when the vote was taken. This Newsbook report points out that just a few [...]
That’s how we’d put it in Maltese. Mejjet bil-ġuħ. I criticised Robert Abela and his government for changing the law to remove the cross-party consensus requirement to appoint the Commissioner for Standards in Public Life. I called the action anti-democratic, a regression on governance standards that in this country are too low to begin with. [...]
Karl Cini thinks he’s made. He knows all the five rules. He is obedient and loyal, that’s one and two. He’s a stand-up guy so he’s got honour in the bag. And he’ll be damned if he’s not proud of his work. Rule number five for the wise-guy is silence. It’s the sacred oath of [...]
I want to join the chorus of support for the editor of Malta Today, Matthew Vella, who is being bullied by the owners of the Steward hospitals for doing his job as a journalist and letting us know, as best as it is possible to know, who is making money on the back of our [...]
A consultation meeting was held today, called by the Committee of Experts the government appointed 13 months ago to make recommendations on how to implement recommendations by the Daphne Caruana Galizia inquiry to protect media freedom in Malta. Let me just briefly remind you how we got here. Daphne Caruana Galizia was murdered on 16 [...]
Joe Borg and Therese Comodini Cachia launched yesterday their latest book, published by MidSea Books, an exercise in completion, gathering in one place the sources that are needed to measure a gap in the regulatory framework that governs the press in Malta, how it falls short of doing the job of guaranteeing media freedom, and [...]
From my article in The Sunday Times: "Holding the Labour government to account feels futile when people who agree it should go can’t imagine themselves replacing it. You will, no doubt, ignore the fake tears of the occasional Labour Party leader bemoaning the poor state of the PN and regretting the harm to democracy because [...]
I’m going to go against the grain here, perhaps, but I don’t consider a 45-minute power cut during a storm of the scale we experienced over the past few days as a major national crisis. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for the infrastructure to falter under the pressure of exceptional weather conditions that are so [...]
There is supposed to be a clear division of labour between the political bosses of a government, and the civil service employees who work for them. The political bosses make policies and drive them forward. The civil service, while ambivalent about those policies, is expected to do its best to put them to work. Whilst [...]
I wasn’t a witness to the conversations that mattered but I was close enough to hear the whispers. After years of struggle and pointless controversy Malta was on the eve of a referendum that would decide whether the country would join the EU. Those of us in favour of joining had spent little time over [...]
A US federal judge has thrown out a request by former Pilatus Bank owner Ali Sadr Hashemi Nejad’s Hong Kong company to force the CEO of a US consultancy company to surrender her correspondence with the Maltese banking regulator on recruiting a “competent person” to take over Pilatus Bank. Ali Sadr’s Alpene Limited asked a [...]
