On TV, Robert Arrigo “offered his post as Deputy Leader” of the PN to Bernard Grech if Bernard Grech were to withdraw his challenge for Adrian Delia’s leadership post. Did Robert Arrigo think he’s negotiating players and their performance at his old football club? The Deputy Leadership of the Nationalist Party is a position Robert [...]

Labour troll Georgina Cardona is causing a stir on Facebook saying that Repubblika is on the list of beneficiaries of funds from the Community Chest Fund and l-Istrina. She publishes some sort of list Repubblika is part of but the document, whatever it is, is clearly not a list of CCF/Istrina beneficiaries. This is a [...]

(*for the hard of comprehending, commentary is not an assertion of fact: this is not a statement that Mercieca should star in “The Godfather Part IV”) A few days ago, Simon Mercieca, who campaigns for Adrian Delia on social media, shared a video from some time ago of Edwin Vassallo asking, presumably rhetorically, who pays [...]

George Vella’s excuses don’t cut it. He says he doesn’t think he is above the Freedom of Information Act. And yet he contradicts the basic tenet of that law by saying that by default all letters to the president’s office should be treated as confidential. Not even the president of Malta has the authority to [...]

From my article in The Sunday Times today: "The fact that we can’t have a referendum to back out of our international legal obligation to rescue people at risk of drowning in our waters is not the most important answer to give those campaigning for one. Racists, for so they are, will project that as [...]

European press freedom NGOs are urging the governments of Malta and Italy to investigate properly threats Neville Gafà, former gofer in Joseph Muscat’s office, openly sent to Italian Avvenire report Nello Scavo over Twitter. The NGOs, part of the Media Freedom Rapid Response project co-funded by the European Commission, said that “the Maltese government's request [...]

Bit of a detail considering all that’s coming out of court today, but Keith Arnaud, chief investigator in the Daphne Caruana Galizia murder, remarked while testifying that the leaks of WhatsApp messages between Leader of Opposition Adrian Delia and murder suspect Yorgen Fenech were entirely accurate. Leaks came in two batches. In July, Times of [...]

The police told the court today that at the time of his arrest Yorgen Fenech told them Keith Schembri got him to organise the killing of Daphne Caruana Galizia. It was a conversation that had been going on for some time before Keith Schembri gave him the nod: Mexxi. Mexxi. Mexxi. Proceed, said three times [...]

Updated. 09.09.2020 at 18:08 US District Court for Western Oklahoma There’s more to the story of Nazzareno Mifsud who is wanted by the US authorities to answer for charges of sexual molestation of children in 1986 and 1987. He is currently waiting for a decision by a Maltese court on a request by [...]

  There was a bit of a scene on the Gozo channel ferry yesterday. A couple of enforcement agents fined two women for not wearing masks while they were sitting at table. A debate ensued – it wasn’t quite as calm as that Oxford Union description suggests – about the nuances of mask-wearing regulations. Does [...]

A parable that speaks volumes on the people of Malta’s individual and collective human and political behaviour; it metaphorically landscapes our islands’ fragile destinies across all sectors of society and the polity. All this will be further compounded by socio-economic problems unless we all, as an equal yet heterogeneous people, resign ourselves to begin “living [...]

Here’s one for all the racists saying that the arrest of a man of Albanian origins for the double murder in Sliema ‘proves’ that migration is a ‘problem’. Obviously there are various shades of this. Some write describing migrants living here as if they were a marauding horde using the language of monks describing Vikings [...]

It took a while before I stopped catching myself typing in the link to Daphne’s website to look for her take on yet another absurd development in the catalogue of disgusting scandals that followed her killing. Almost all of those scandals emerged because of her investigations, or were at least predicted by them. The rest [...]

Updated 27 August 2020 at 09:30 (see bottom of post). The United States’ request for extradition of fugitive Reno Mifsud deserves close watching because it is a test of the Malta-US extradition process. According to documents filed in the US District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma, when Reno Mifsud fled from the United [...]

Updated 09.09.2020 at 18:04. Nazzareno Mifsud, known as Reno, did not show up for his 1987 trial in Oklahoma after the local police charged him with molesting two young boys in his house. Testimonies filed by investigators say Reno Mifsud, at the time aged 23 years, an immigrant from Qormi, Malta, sexually molested his foster-son [...]

Last May, The Shift News reported that the president and the prime minister separately rejected requests the website made under the Freedom of Information Act to publish Joseph Muscat’s resignation letter. The prime minister’s reason was plausible. The requested letter was not in the records of the prime minister’s office and they were therefore unable [...]

My wife, who is French, does not get British humour. As far as she’s concerned British humour is an oxymoron. It’s not just that she doesn’t laugh when Basil Fawlty goose-steps with his finger under his nose wearing a mock Hitler moustache, or that she doesn’t giggle when Derek Trotter nonchalantly rests on the upturned [...]

Take a look at this picture. This was taken this morning outside police headquarters. These people waiting in line are teachers employed in Malta’s schools on a casual basis. That means they do not have permanent employment with schools but are contracted yearly before the scholastic year starts and have a contract that sees them [...]

When 10% of the population sign a petition for a referendum, a nation-wide ballot is called. With 40,000 signatures backing the so-called patriots’ petition to parliament to stop rescuing migrants drowning in our seas, the people-hating, black-baiting racists are calling for a national vote so that a national majority can, as the petition has it, [...]

Match. Yes, the Maltese people have yet to finish off the match against the corrupt Joseph Muscat, the man who for six years raped and plundered their country. Joseph started his ‘mission’ way before 2013. He worked relentlessly with his bosom friends, Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi on the 4th floor at the Glass Palace. [...]