The headline item from yesterday’s budget speech is the news that a year from now bus fares will be scrapped for residents. Tourists will continue to pay. The finance minister estimates that for a regular bus commuter that uses public transport to go to work everyday this will amount to a saving of some €300 [...]
No government, however hard-pressed, will want to face the electorate with bad news on the eve of a general election. Yesterday’s budget speech was bound to be a bonanza of gift-giving because no matter what we say about our democratic maturity we still think of the government as some form of Father Christmas and the [...]
The Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights is visiting Malta this week for meetings with the local authorities and civil society. Dunja Mijatovic will have quite an agenda. Malta is not the most complicated country for human rights in the Council of Europe. Her conversations in Russia, Turkey, and Belarus are bound to be [...]
From my article in The Sunday Times today: "Daphne was right, on the hospitals, the passport sales, Dalli’s games and corruption in energy. Yet, none of those she had exposed has yet faced any consequence. She deserves justice. On Saturday, October 16, at 7pm, join the vigil in Valletta demanding just that." Read the full article here.
Photo: STR/AFP This is the first time in my life that someone I have once met and spoken with has won a Nobel prize. I don’t expect that will ever happen again. Maria Ressa has been awarded the Nobel peace prize jointly with Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov. The Nobel prize committee said the [...]
The developers’ association reiterated its proposal that political parties should be funded by the state to remove what they describe as the “wrong perception” that businesses fund political parties to get favours in return. Let’s not quibble about how wrong the perception may be. Yes, we need political parties funded by the state so let’s [...]
When the Pope cancels a dinner appointment with you. And when the traffic management authority thinks it is a good idea to remove a speed camera thereby reducing the deterrent and the means to enforce the law intended to prevent excessive speeding and like incense and the sacrifice of milk-fed lamb burnt at the altar [...]
Take a look at all the pulp sales promoting the idea of a metro in Malta. There are exhibitions, websites, videos, and graphics that probably cost what it would cost to buy Thomas the Tank Engine and pay the Fat Controller for a year. What exactly is this campaign achieving? I don’t think we need [...]
Konrad Mizzi is exercising yet another right to dodge questions he’s uncomfortable answering. At the Daphne inquiry he said a hundred times “I choose not to answer” which was his right because no witness can be forced to incriminate themselves. Today he announced he’ll miss the meeting of the Public Accounts Committee which has called [...]
Current affairs producers on TVM these days are rarely inconvenient to the government. Anyone with a shred of independence has been pushed out and replaced. The internal memo exposed by Times of Malta that instructs producers to give management two-week notice does not just reveal control-freakery and partisan bias at the national station. We knew [...]
John Dalli has fully graduated to the status of nasty grand uncle that must be avoided even on Christmas. He is, to begin with, grotesquely predictable. If only one prominent indigenous name was going to emerge in a worldwide leak of secret off-shore accounts, it would have had to be his. That was certainly predictable. [...]
The way Robert Abela enables Rosianne Cutajar is nothing short of a disgrace. The prime minister and his government seem to be in no doubt that not only is she an embarrassment, but her conduct is entirely and altogether unacceptable. They implicitly acknowledged yesterday that an independent committee of European MPs with no stake in [...]
A libel court hearing a case brought by Carmelo Abela against Jason Azzopardi has denied a request by Jason Azzopardi to bring in statements made elsewhere by Vince Muscat il-Koħħu and the Degiorgio brothers. He wanted them to be respondents with him to Carmelo Abela's complaint. In different places and at court proceedings the men [...]
There’s little doubt that if there’s anyone we need to convince that we are getting it together and not allowing our country to be used as a refuge for pirates, we need to start with the Americans. We keep failing. The United States worked with Maltese police and told them to expect one Frank Rafaraci [...]
It must have been of considerable relief for Karol Aquilina to hear a magistrate say yesterday the police had nowhere near proven the accusation they had levelled against him that he tried to ram into a motorcycle policeman while disobeying traffic instructions. Of course, he knew there were no real-world grounds for the accusation. He [...]
Events marking four years since the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia continue tomorrow with the first in a series of public debates hosted by Repubblika, #occupyjustice and this website. Tomorrow's discussion is being held in St Francis Square in Gozo's Rabat and will conclude the stay in that town of a roving exhibition with the [...]
A man working on a construction site fell two storeys in an accident. Obviously, he got badly hurt. His employer put him in the car and dumped him on the side of the road. The employee fears punishment for working illegally. The employer fears punishment for employing him illegally. Spare me the deep reflections. What [...]
The Commissioner of Police has pushed back on a complaint filed earlier this month by Yorgen Fenech who accused Jason Azzopardi and “blogger Manuel Delia” of what he described as “a systematic attack against Judge Giovanni Grixti”. Yorgen Fenech had alleged that reporting on this website and comments made by Jason Azzopardi on his social [...]
The prime minister says it’s high time to speak about electoral reform. Now he says it. He’s been prime minister since January 2020, an MP since 2017. And the first time he does not merely acknowledge we need reform but earnestly says it is overdue is just a few weeks before the next election, the [...]
