Updated 02.11.2019 07:50 Adds MGA's reply Schoolyard retorts are a thriving industry in this mediocre country of self-delusion. We take criticism as well as feudal kings and we'd throw our critics in the crocodile pit if we had one. The UK gaming regulator Neil McArthur echoed the complaints of other European law enforcement and regulating agencies [...]
The Times of Malta is a weakness in the great Keith Schembri strategy for unassailable power and unquestioned authority. The organisation, imperfect as it no doubt is, has responded to the threat to media freedom imposed by the present regime with defiance. Their best reporters have worked hard and continue to work hard on publishing [...]
Five witnesses gave consistent testimony. Neville Gafà solicited bribes from them in exchange for a public service: a medical visa. Some of the witnesses testified they were denied the service because they refused to pay the bribe. Some of the witnesses said Neville Gafà used uniformed policemen to bully his victims into paying him. Some [...]
I don’t like Justin Schembri. That’s ok. I imagine the feeling is mutual. I’ve bashed him before for his Facebook behaviour which he would then try to spin and justify. Today he celebrated Matteo Salvini’s win in Umbria. Although he will probably retract it again, after some half-blinded apparatchik at PN HQ makes him, Justin [...]
The trial of Daphne Caruana Galizia's assassins is no ordinary trial. It’s a mafia trial. Just because we don’t call it that in our law, does not mean it isn’t. Something is or isn’t independently of whether the law says so though of course the law needs to say so if something is to be [...]
From my article in The Sunday Times today: "Before 2013, Labour never said anything about privatising public hospitals, a socialist anathema. Socialists are averse to privatising anything, let alone the national health service, the levelling equaliser for a fair society. Privatised hospitals providing free public healthcare cost public funds one and a half times more [...]
The Sunday Times’ report of this morning about scenes out of 19th century plantation abuse of black people within our very own prison is paradoxically both unsurprising and shocking. More than a hundred people were arraigned in court charged with the violence of last week inside the concentration camp they were locked up in. The [...]
Luca Perrino, president of Leali delle Notizie, unveiling Ronchi's new Freedom Bench in the town's main square yesterday. Ronchi dei Legionari is a provincial town the size of Żurrieq. It is home to an NGO that has about 50 signed up members called ‘Leali delle Notizie’ (loyal to the news) that got a [...]
Sandro Ruotolo, Paolo Borrometi and Marilena Natale -- journalists protected by armed guards because of threats from subjects of their investigations -- with Matthew Caruana Galizia yesterday after he was made honorary citizen of Ronchi dei Legionari. Matthew Caruana Galizia was granted honorary citizenship by the north-east Italian town of Ronchi dei Legionari [...]
The signs are everywhere around us. The gaming industry will no longer be for Malta what is has been for the past 10 years. One after the other gaming companies are doing what they’ve always threatened to do: flick shut their laptops and move elsewhere. Not all their reasons for moving could have been avoided. [...]
Julia Farrugia had to parry Karol Aquilina’s onslaught yesterday. She wasn’t very good. To be fair to the honourable lady defending the sale of Maltese citizenship is like talking up Genghis Khan’s table manners. You can try but the loud burping will still drown you out. ‘Revoking citizenship’ is, in my view, a notional abhorrence. [...]
Drunk and disorderly behaviour, violence, damage to public property and physical harm to a police officer are crimes that must be met by the appropriate consequence of the law. The illegal detention of human beings, the deprivation of their basic rights, their brutalisation by detention in inhumane conditions, starved of any means to retain their [...]
The Attorney General’s decision in the money laundering case against George and Alfred Degiorgio and George’s partner Adelina Pop to try them in the Magistrates’ Court instead of in front of a jury of their peers, raises a number of questions. First, some background. Although money laundering clearly happens much more frequently, the Degiorgios are [...]
https://youtu.be/anbKms80Mkw Written by Lizzie Eldridge Filmed and Edited by Darrin Zammit Lupi Recorded on 22nd September 2019 First screen by Broadcasting Scotland on 25th September 2019
The author of the piece wished to remain anonymous. There are some references to me in the text. Needless to say, but perhaps better to say so anyway, the fact the post is published on this blog does not mean I share the views of the guest author. Everyone gets programmed as they grow up [...]
The messages were clear. ‘Daphne Caruana Galizia is Invicta!’ said Ana Gomes. ‘Daphne won!’ said Leo Luca Orlando, the Mayor of Palermo, a city once in the grip of the mafia. As living proof of these convictions, thousands of people cheered the speakers in Republic Street last Wednesday, on the second anniversary of the brutal [...]
What an amazing coincidence. MaltaToday, that paragon of journalistic endeavours, lent its ear to an anonymous “veteran judge” who felt that some words of wisdom should be dispensed on the case that Repubblika have made against the recent appointments to the judiciary. Some context is probably useful, lest the populist rubbish spewed by the judge [...]
An unidentified judge speaks today to Malta Today’s Matthew Agius and says Repubblika’s case in court challenging the method of appointing judges is ‘demoralising’. It’s remarkable that the judge does not say Repubblika is wrong. For a judge, there is in their arguments a gaping absence of legal objection to Repubblika’s arguments in court. That [...]
I don’t want to get too excited but I’ve complained before and now that things appear to be changing slowly it would be wrong of me not to remark on them. For two years of campaigning since October 2017 the general absence of young people in the campaign for truth and justice was painful. With [...]
Sent in by someone known to me who went to yesterday's FIAU anti-money-laundering seminar. This morning I dutifully took up the FIAU’s invitation (at a cost of €100) to attend their seminar about the Revised Implementing Procedures on Anti-Money Laundering. A boring subject if ever there was one but needs must so I braced myself [...]