From my article in The Sunday Times today: "A few days ago, the Degiorgio brothers, serving the dawning days of a 40-year prison sentence for killing Daphne Caruana Galizia, published through their lawyers what they swore to be the truth. In some places, their statement corroborates independent evidence and might very well be true. In [...]

This morning I spoke at a conference organised by the Faculty of Media at the University of Malta which discussed 'Disinformation, Misinformation and the Digital Environment: Challenges and Opportunities'. Here's what I said. “Is it actually possible to have a free and fair election ever again?” The Guardian journalist Carole Cadwalladr asked that question when [...]

This is a co-production with News. Let me know what you think. https://youtu.be/wM4GWKSjEvE

There’s no envying Robert Abela’s balls, caught as they are in Joseph Muscat’s squeezing grip. When Muscat was prime minister the government was run by a criminal gang. Now we have the only possibly worse scenario. The government is the hostage of a criminal gang. They finished the year removing temporary asset freezes for money [...]

Perhaps I'm too anal. This is the section of the prime minister's official website which introduces the cabinet of Ministers: (https://primministru.gov.mt/il-kabinett/) When you scroll down, the list of ministers continues, seamlessly, to include the ministers' parliamentary secretaries. Shocking as it may be to the parliamentary secretaries to learn this and despite what the prime minister's [...]

This is not exactly hot off the press. The Sunday Times published this on 31 December and I haven't uploaded it since. My excuse is I was on holiday. If you've missed it, you must surely have a good excuse. So here it is. "The European Commission’s 2023 (rule of law) report was scathing enough. [...]

Maybe it’s the weather, or maybe it’s the thought of adjusting after two weeks of holiday. I woke up today with an acute case of Monday morning blues. Maybe you have as well. But however dark your day is, it’s better than Aaron Farrugia’s. He’s newly unemployed. He can’t ride that grey Tesla anymore. And [...]

  The government has filed an appeal seeking to overturn a decision by Judge Toni Abela that ruled my right to free expression was breached when as a journalist I was denied appropriate access to the prisons and other detention facilities to report on conditions in there. In the meantime, requests I made to visit [...]

It’s incredible to me that the courts are debating now, more than 6 years since Daphne was killed, how to protect the identities of the sources whose conversations with Daphne remained on her communications devices after her murder. This was always an issue. Hours after Daphne was killed journalists gathered for a march in Valletta [...]

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George Tabone “tal-Gram” is the witness for the government’s political case to remove temporary asset freezes for money laundering. He gives this heart-rending interview to Times of Malta describing pitifully how he suffered for years under a temporary asset freeze only to be eventually acquitted of the crimes he was accused of. Two courts have [...]

I wrote a piece in The Sunday Times yesterday that suggested we think about Citizens Assemblies, a way some democratic jurisdictions (Ireland and Iceland are leading examples) have looked at to increase participation and citizen engagement. The reaction to the suggestion was, to be kind, cool. To begin with, this is not the first time [...]