Man the ramparts, light the beacons, dust off the uniforms and beat our ploughshares back into swords. Malta is under attack! Or so our exalted Film Commissioner Johann Grech would have us believe. His reasoning is based on the fact that taxpayers are objecting to how their money is being spent to support the production [...]
From my article in The Sunday Times today: "The legal notice, setting up the organisation that Saliba was made boss of when the notion was still a twinkle in Bonnici’s eye refers to the wrong enabling law. If it had referred to the right law, it would have found that the original law does not [...]
Big numbers don’t mean much to most people. Few will ever handle €4.7 million in their lives. Even grasping the meaning of €47 million is too far a leap for most people, myself included. I saw once an explanation of scale to help grasp big numbers. It would take you 11 days to count a [...]
This comment was placed by M. Spiteri in response to my comments this morning on Arnold Cassola’s article. Read the original article and my first commentary for context. Hi Manuel. I've read the said article on the TOM. If I am correct, it's stated that the whistle blower spilled the beans AFTER he was denied [...]
I have no way of fact checking the claims made by Arnold Cassola in his Times of Malta article. I am going to assume, for the purposes of this commentary, that all the facts he claims are accurate. The claims briefly: an unnamed individual, identified as Aziz, was born in a refugee camp in Palestine. [...]
The appointment of Norma Saliba as CEO of a new entity called the Centre for the Maltese Language was transparently done to accommodate a loyalist. As many others, I wrote about this recently. It’s indeed a corrupt country that sets up a government entity just to create a job for a crony. But that’s not [...]
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Images by Darrin Zammit Lupi.
Updated at 15:40 of 14 August 2023 An edition of the Government Gazette has issued a notice that Robert Abela is away and Chris Fearne is Acting Prime Minister. The notice is dated today but back-dated to yesterday when the prime minister was already away. The authors of our constitution anticipated a very simple [...]
I have read many beautiful and heartfelt obituaries and appreciations of Rose Vella who became a reluctant public figure when her daughter, Daphne Caruana Galizia, was killed nearly six years ago. I have little to add to the admiration of those who came to know her in her great pain. “At the cross her station [...]
Except perhaps as a government agent on national TV news, Norma Saliba hasn’t been particularly successful in her last job. No one remembers a single piece of journalistic work that she can be even in part credited for. TVM News under her stewardship lost several impartiality complaints and won close to no awards for the [...]
In today’s Malta Independent Alfred Sant reluctantly acknowledges that “negative thinking” is, on balance, a good thing. He says that critics of the government who point out what they think is wrong without constructively presenting alternatives are boring and tedious. But none of that makes them useless. You need negative thinking because out of that [...]
From my article in The Sunday Times today: "These cronies, utterly bereft of talent, who smiled inanely at the men-only late-night dinner parties with Schembri or at Muscat’s over- the-top birthday parties in Girgenti, ran the branches of government. "They had the job of planning for our electricity needs, of keeping hospitals working, to make [...]
Two years ago today, three judges published their report after hearing dozens of witnesses give their account of the circumstances in which Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed. Most of the evidence they heard was given in public and extensively reported in the press. That was an extraordinary achievement in itself. In the days after Daphne [...]
The Jean Paul Sofia magisterial inquiry makes the following observation: “This in genere inquiry did not and could not have had the direct objective of examining whether administrative and or legislative failures came into play. The evidence gathered by the undersigned indicates institutional, systemic, and legislative failures. This also emerged from the report by the [...]
After a few squats in the trenches ministers have disappeared. They found themselves announcing too prematurely that the faults that caused the power cuts had been solved. They hadn’t. Power cuts are still the order of the day. The story of Mount Carmel patients left in the heat and the dark for hours would have [...]
The headlines of yesterday’s Sunday Times and Malta Today political surveys at face value appear contradictory. If you expect from polls what some expect from tarot cards you risk being misled. Polls are tools and one must learn to use them if they are to work for one. There’s much in the two studies which [...]
