Bernard Grech will have expected yesterday’s newspapers to give more prominence to what was officially the warm-up act on Wednesday night. The PN hasn’t seen Wednesday’s sort of crowd at its Independence Day events for many years. The crowds did not swell because Bernard Grech was giving another speech. Bernard Grech knew that. Politicians are [...]

Charles Scicluna’s homily at the official Independence Day mass justifies the ecclesiastical paraphernalia in an entirely secular holiday. I’m not a big fan of official religion, but even I can see that what Charles Scicluna said on the day marking Malta’s independence, no elected official, no bureaucrat, no judge would have had the courage to [...]

Any decision-maker should have the opportunity to fly kites. You need to throw up options, even outlandish and unlikely ones, and have them debated and tested by trusted associates. The act of discarding a mad notion helps distil the remaining options. Whatever is left after you throw out the bad ideas should be good. When [...]

Images by Darrin Zammit Lupi

One of the grievances raised in the beginning of the French Revolution was the (buy then rare) use of the ancient procedure – though the word ‘procedure’ may be misleading – of lettres de cachet. These were letters signed by the king and sealed with instructions to put someone in prison or in a mental [...]

Together with Therese Comodini Cachia, Natalino Fenech, Monique Agius, and Joe Borg, I'm part of the Media Reform Initiative, an effort to ensure transparency in the process of reforming press laws and making sure that changes made enable press freedom, rather than restrict it. This is a statement we published this morning: The statement by [...]

If you’ve been following, you know all this. If you haven’t been following, you wouldn’t care. And yet, if you’re still here and I’m still here, then it must be because we both think this is worth remembering. Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed in 16 October 2017 by car bomb outside her home. She was [...]

Doctors sitting on the board that approved applications for severe disability benefits supported by forged documents complain to Times of Malta today that they “were cheated too”. They could not have known the signatures were forged, they said. They speak to the Times on condition of anonymity although there aren’t hundreds of people who could [...]

From my article in The Sunday Times today: "The thing with political favours is that people who are happy to sell their vote will negotiate to acquire from the politician, in exchange for their currency and commitment, what they wouldn’t be able to acquire by right anyway. Electoral clientelism is not about making sure that [...]

The government is scrambling to cover up the fact that it covered up the benefits fraud scandal. Times of Malta did not stop at revealing the story. They’re pushing the government to answer its questions and the mess of the responses the government are giving is a story in itself. Consider for example answers to [...]

This quotation from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which most of us who took English at O or A levels have had to study, came to my mind on reading a recent article in the Times of Malta describing how quickly the present government have managed to transform Malta from a Paradise to a Hell on [...]

Robert Abela’s Sunday sermon yesterday will have gone down like all other Sunday sermons. It tickled people’s confirmation bias, realigning people to the convictions they were born to. Perhaps a handful might have been curious to see if Robert Abela would react to Times of Malta’s story that morning. They should have known better than [...]

Times of Malta broke the story. That’s how it almost always starts. The police spoke to the Labour MP who was at the centre of the scheme of forgeries and benefit fraud to consolidate the partisan support of likely voters of the Labour Party who have fallen on hard times. The police arrested the MP [...]

There has been much hilarity about the unintended glibness of the Wasteserv CEO’s recommendation that we put our organic rubbish in the freezer, so it doesn’t stink while we wait for the bi-weekly rubbish collection. Richard Bilocca (whose surname has lent itself to some witty references to chunks of icy banana peel and shrimp heads) [...]

At his questioning in the PAC yesterday Joseph Muscat was asked by PN MP Darren Carabott about something I wrote in June 2018. Here’s a link to the piece where I reported that Keith Schembri received substantial amounts of money in January 2015 soon after returning from Azerbaijan. I had published that report around 5pm [...]

Joseph Muscat would have been comfortable in a cubicle at the Ministry of Truth right there behind Winston Smith. Yesterday he was busy casting into the fires of oblivion what we all remembered witnesses tell the Daphne Caruana Galizia inquiry. Almost all the evidence the inquiry heard was heard in public. We can dispute some [...]

Here's a podcast series launched today by PEN Malta. It's a series of interviews with Maltese writers, some of whom have less exposure than they deserve. In this first episode, podcast host Karl Schembri interviews award winner Lara Calleja. https://youtu.be/JPqj_tUR2Gc?si=9Ft3XR7ILkTxsjFg

You could patiently remove cobble stones one by one to undertake repairs beneath, and when the job’s done replacing them carefully to make sure the finished project is matching and one of the most important squares in the entire country remains attractive. Or you could do this.

It shouldn’t have surprised anyone that Johann Grech addressed the nation a few days ago and used Joseph Muscat’s and Robert Abela’s rhetoric that anyone criticising government policy is “attacking Malta”. Johann Grech is a veteran propagandist of the Labour Party. Just because he’s in photos with famous actors who are effectively paid out of [...]

A public sector teacher was told by her bosses she would get an extra allowance if she got herself another university qualification. The state (and other employers, incidentally) give their staff incentives to go to school and learn something new. Our case is about a secondary school Maltese language teacher who got herself certified as [...]