One of Michael McIntyre’s more relatable skits is the one about walking under the street decorations bombarded by that Mariah Carey song and saying ‘I don’t know what it is but I just haven’t felt Christmassy yet this year. I’m trying. I just got nothing.’ And then it comes, in the latter part of December, [...]
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The Italians use the idiom ‘da quale pulpito viene la predica’. Look at this sermon by one Justin Farrugia, an audio-visual company owner who, bucking the trend set by other film-makers and TV producers, thought that the €2 million film awards night (the figure is unconfirmed but undenied by the government) was a great idea. [...]
A few days ago, I wrote about a relatively minor cock up by the foreign office when they forgot to ask Parliament’s nominations committee to interview and vote on someone they nominated to be our ambassador to Ireland. Preparing that piece, I read up on the rules. Foreign office employees do not need to be [...]
Reverse engineer the discourse of Labour Party politicians to work out what’s worrying them in the data they’re reading. Worrying is relative. They’re not worried they will be losing the election. But they are worried about trends in their support base that could prove to be the thin end of a wedge that could lift [...]
Nadine Delicata, president of Steward Health Care Malta uses this morning’s Times of Malta to indict the government about the state of the three formerly publicly hospitals they run. But first she lashes out at “everyone on the island” because of what she suggests are baseless opinions “trotted out for political point-scoring” forgetting Steward’s hard-working [...]
It is to George Hyzler’s credit that many interpreted the news the prime minister will nominate him to the court of auditors as a way of getting him out of the government’s way. I don’t think anyone agrees with all his decisions. He could have taken up cases and investigated complaints he found creative reasons [...]
He’s having cold feet about the election date. Apparently. He had almost made up his mind about a March election but he's not so sure anymore. Short of an Atocha bombing there’s little to shake the expectation of a Labour landslide whenever it is during the next 6 months that the election is called for. [...]
Robert Abela said this morning Joseph Muscat was given government property in Pietà for his personal use “as part of his severance package”. The office needed to be searched by the police for evidence of a crime for us to even ever know about it. Which can mean there’s more to the severance package [...]
There’s a little-known committee in Parliament that has the job of interviewing people the government nominates to important posts. Sometimes the committee comes to the public’s attention. Yesterday, the committee voted on the confirmation of John Mamo as chairman of the financial services authority. The nomination was approved for the simple reason that the government [...]
Robert Abela’s sister-in-law is campaigning for a seat in Parliament. It seems everyone must stand while she searches for a chair. Here’s her propaganda truck in Bormla, the town she is, ironically, the mayor of. It’s as subtle as a drunk in a graveyard. These images came to me from someone trying to have a [...]
When the futility of history risks overwhelming one, all one is left with to bear the crushing disappointment in sheer existence, is some indulgence in the ironies. Consider the immediate complaint in Parliament from PN MP Claudette Buttigieg who heard Rosianne Cutajar call out ‘qaħba’ (‘whore’) in her general direction while she (Buttigieg) was criticising [...]
The now notorious film awards event of last Saturday is still on the national agenda. The extravagant spending is an important topic especially since the cost of the event outstripped the yearly funding put up by the government to support the industry the event was supposed to be celebrating. Matthew Caruana Galizia made the point [...]
There’s been a positively apoplectic reaction to the Film Awards’ host’s quip that Malta is famous for tax evasion. Judging by videos of the event the audience received the line with stunned silence. Not that there was raucous laughter at most of his other jokes, mind you. Most of it went over everyone’s head. Which [...]
It’s easy to be impressed because this guy was a former prime minister. But this is what anyone feeling the noose tightening around their fate does. Consider the Degiorgio brothers who are facing court appearances for the rest of their lives as they are called to answer for the murders, they’re allegedly involved in that [...]
From my article in The Sunday Times today: "Firstly, the government is careful not to improve conditions of media freedom still reeling from the killing by car bomb of a journalist they described as their harshest critic. Reform bills in parliament are kept off the floor for years. An inquiry’s set of recommendations are still ignored. [...]
In H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds the narrator of the events is a journalist, perhaps not the first thing that might strike the average reader in a novel about invading blood-drinking Martians. At the risk of suggesting a slight hint of self-praise, in the context of a story about Martians told by a journalist, [...]
Today, remember the victims. Inevitably, you will think of the perpetrators, the leaders who plotted and organised the murder of millions of children, women, and men for the crime of being born with a name and a race chosen for hatred and death. You do not recall the names of the millions of victims. You [...]
An Appeals Court presided by Chief Justice Mark Chetcuti overturned a lower court’s decision and ordered the government to pay a former presidential aid money owed to her when her job ended because her boss’s term ran out. Marika Mizzi was President George Abela’s press secretary engaged as a person of trust on a contract [...]
All those hours of listening to Konrad Mizzi’s vacuous, irrelevant, opaque, and interminable “opening statement” filibustered over something like three months proved, predictably, to be an entirely wasted consumption of mind-meltingly boring time. I look with some half-hearted sympathy at Beppe Fenech Adami and his colleagues on that committee. I think what it must feel [...]