Abandon hope all ye who enter here    

Mario Portelli, chief witness in the trial that acquitted David Gatt in an organised crime trial two years ago, has uploaded a video on his Facebook profile earlier today that appears to show him being arrested by the police to be committed to the mental institution. https://www.facebook.com/jack.bristow.507/videos/2484721218266560/ In his video, Mario Portelli claims that the [...]

Listen to this brilliant half hour of comedy at Malta's expense. Mark Steele's BBC series of send-ups of towns and cities made a stop in Malta for its broadcast yesterday. Brilliantly done and will be nice to watch the squirming of xenophobes like the Alfred Sants of this country, that speak of "foreigners" as if [...]

Three years ago today Daphne Caruana Galizia published this post. It was just a curtain raiser but it would start the series on Panamagate. The lamb refers to the New Zealand trust he set up ostensibly to "populate it with his family assets". He went all the way around the world to hide the ownership [...]

The case of a businessman who collected almost €90,000 of VAT and pocketed it instead of passing it to the taxman is another shocking indicator of the collapse our law enforcement and justice system. Judge Consuelo Scerri Herrera has this week let the gentleman concerned, Charles Le Brun, walk away free and keep the money [...]

Sent in by Pandora under the post President Coleiro, you're not the King of Thailand:   And yet every morning Malta wakes up and keeps going on in spite of the failure of all its institutions. From Christmas to carnival to Easter, summer holidays and village festas, back again to Christmas it has become just [...]

Faced by the scandal of corruption and international money laundering another institution fails us. The behaviour of Marie Louise Coleiro after the video of her saying there was “no legal proof” of what Pilatus Bank was up to was uploaded by the Oxford Union, is a stark warning to those who think they can solve [...]

If the President of Malta doesn’t want to be criticised for her speeches, she should not deliver any. It is hard enough not to think of Marie Louise Coleiro Preca as just another agent of the Labour Party. Her remarks today about Pilatus Bank are not merely a disgrace to the office she occupies, I [...]

Did he tell her to her face about the hopeless state of the Parliament she's a member of?

The fact that Joseph Muscat adopts the diversionary tactics of Donald Trump (though in their case you really need to wonder who’s the chicken and who’s the egg) does not excuse him. In reality, if you step back to remember whom Joseph Muscat’s behaviour is reminding you of, that would be Dom Mintoff. It’s really [...]

Within minutes of becoming aware of the UK House of Commons committee report confirming that it had seen evidence that contradicts Malta’s official version of events, Malta’s government repeated its line that the charge it met SCL before the 2013 election is baseless. Of course, there’s a lot that is upside down in the government’s [...]

A delegation from Repubblika led by its president Marion Pace Asciak met today the President of Malta Marie Louise Coleiro Preca and the constitutional reform steering committee. Present at the meeting for the steering committee there were Louis Grech, Owen Bonnici and Tonio Borg. At the meeting, Repubblika affirmed that constitutional reform must follow a [...]

The UK Parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee has over-ruled denials by Malta’s government that Malta’s Labour Party “had dealings with the SCL Group for several years before the 2013 elections”. The SCL Group would set up Cambridge Analytica which would be at the centre of a major scandal of voter manipulation in several [...]

This is 1 pm today. They took their time, considering.

https://youtu.be/5oeTji9o4Es This is a translation of the speech: When Daphne Caruana Galizia was assassinated many were shocked. But few were surprised. For many years, and most of all in the last several months of her life, they stripped her of her human dignity. All that was left to do was to strip her of her [...]

https://youtu.be/kLuL9XaCW58 This is a translation of the speech: On the 18th November, the Times’ front page bore this headline: Daphne murder mastermind suspects identified – investigators It would seem, however, that these masterminds have disappeared into thin air because they were never mentioned again, and have never been caught. Is this yet another lie by [...]

https://youtu.be/5Y9CzGiIvWQ My son has a habit of asking me difficult questions just before bedtime. I know he’s stalling but he’s really good at it so his questions are never small or dull: Why is a clear sky blue? Why does fog float? Or one of my favourites, if I only ate roses, would my poo [...]

https://youtu.be/Tc2w07nxf94 A translation of this speech follows: And why should students study History of Art? Why should they study History, Geography, Literature, History of Music and so many other “useless” subjects? And after all, why should they study subjects like Mathematics and Science? And then what about Economics? Isn’t this an area of study that [...]

Sent in by someone known to me:   Last Saturday night, after attending the 16th Day of the Month Justice protest standing out in the cold in Valletta, down the road a piece, there was another commemoration event about to take place. Since the morning the public broadcaster PBS was setting up equipment for the [...]