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 [...]
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 [...]
