Anya (not her real name) is 16 years old and lives just outside Moscow. I first met her about a year ago as her online English language teacher. She’s bright, articulate, devours the Russian classics and has also read Orwell’s 1984 which, for her, is ‘about the total control of people by the government’, Big [...]
Barely a week after Russia invaded Ukraine, the journalist John Sweeney gave an interview to Manuel Delia. Sweeney was, and still is, in Kyiv, surrounded by air raids, bombs, gunfire and shelling. Describing his experience of being the first journalist to enter the TV Tower after it was bombed, he speaks of the blood left [...]
These aren’t my words. This is the title of a piece Daphne Caruana Galizia wrote in February 2017, 8 months before she was brutally assassinated. In this article, she writes: ‘Malta is governed by a crime syndicate, and the first thing that crime syndicate set about doing, when it achieved its suspiciously-funded objective of getting [...]
Covid restrictions have had an impact on pretty much everything. Most, if not all, universities across the globe moved from face-to-face to online teaching. The University of Malta is home to 11,850 students on a range of 930 courses, including 1,242 international students from 119 different countries. Nevertheless, and in line with many other educational [...]
This letter was sent directly to Anġlu Farrugia's email address [email protected] in defiance of what his lawyer Ian Refalo described as "proper Parliamentary procedure". You should send him one too. Dear Anġlu Farrugia, In absolute defiance of 'proper parliamentary procedure' and in the best interests of democracy and the rule of law, I'm writing to you [...]
There’s been a ghostly silence since the publication of the first part of this investigation on 23 September, the same month in which the AUM was supposed to have its license renewed. There’s been no further response from Clemson University, supposedly in charge of Quality Assurance services for the AUM as set out in the [...]
Nobody sets up camp outside the Police Headquarters, enduring the wind, rain and unsanitary conditions for 72 hours, for the good of their own health. People tend to prefer their home comforts, don’t they? In Malta, these home comforts have been threatened for a very long time – a reality that came sharply into perspective [...]
The AUM has gone quiet in recent months and the government’s been keeping mum on this one, too. Must be because the massive cohort of students are still enjoying their annual summer leave. At least, that’s how Professor John Ryder explained the void to me when I interviewed him in his office two years ago. [...]
This piece is dedicated to Daphne Caruana Galizia and to her remarkable family who have never stopped fighting for justice. Picture: Seb Tanti Burlo'. With permission. A new day began which was always the same. But not quite. The flowers looked similar, but they were always fresh. The photos were exchanged for other [...]
‘Journalists in Malta still remain at tremendous risk.’ Rebecca Vincent of Reporters Without Borders didn’t mince her words at the press conference the day after the publication of the Public Inquiry Report. She was emphatic about the dangers to journalists in Malta whose work is carried out in a hostile climate where harassment and threats [...]
The public inquiry was clear-cut and unequivocal in its findings: the Maltese State is responsible for the brutal assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia. The report details a culture saturated in impunity, from its governing politicians to the police force to the judiciary to businessmen to public bodies responsible for safeguarding the interests, needs and very [...]
How do you spot a criminal gang when you see one? What sort of crimes come into your head? Drugs, bribery, corruption, extortion, fraud, armed robbery, guns, bombs, money laundering, cryptocurrency, murder? And where do you begin when there are so many pigs at the bloody trough? If all animals are equal but some are [...]
This long piece was completed in December 2020 and first published in Epoch No. 2 'Aftermath', Spring 2021 (Epoch Press). Published again here with permission. A journalist is blown to pieces in her car on a road not far from you. Everything is close to everything else on an island full of dust and noise and [...]
In between Robert Abela’s macabre murmurings that the institutions are working, a phrase he’s repeated ad nauseum since he began his reign of continuity just over a year ago, let’s not sweep Nuxellina under the table in a brown paper bag. Just because she’s (conditionally) resigned as Parliamentary Secretary for Reforms (pending an investigation) doesn’t [...]
What a hill this is. Four years of witnessing the madness of Donald Trump behaving like a tyrannical emperor who mistook the presidential oath for an evil wand he could wield at his command. We watched insane attempts to build a wall; we watched children separated from their parents; the materialisation of the belief that [...]
For weeks now, I’ve had that lingering sickly feeling which just won’t go away. Sartre uses the term ‘nausea’ to describe that sense of dislocation when you realise life is fundamentally meaningless and absurd. In Malta, the absurd has long since become the accepted normality. The head of the Hate Crimes Unit commits these crimes [...]
Well, well, well. Joseph Muscat thinks he can just slink off into the Azerbaijani sunset and laze around in a hammock for the rest of his days. The Limestone Cowboy wants to hang up his studs, walk off into the Panama sunset and all will be forgotten. It’s that easy, eh? In Malta, perhaps it [...]
Who killed Daphne Caruana Galizia? We’ve been asking this question since her brutal assassination on the 16th October 2017. We’ve been asking this question since Joseph Muscat, King of Organised Crime and Corruption, nefariously promised to ‘leave no stone unturned’. We’ve been asking this question while all the evidence has continually been pointing at Castille. [...]
It’s almost exactly 40 years since John Lennon was shot dead outside his New York apartment, the man who imagined a world without countries, without greed, a world with nothing to kill or die for, where people live in peace. What a dream that was and humanity lost an influential voice of protest with the [...]
Is it just me or have we all gone right back into that busy hectic social whirl we’re supposed to be relinquishing? Seriously, quarantine really has upped the social ante. It’s as if we’ve never seen the inside of our own homes before, the internet has become some kind of newly-discovered resource and – horror [...]