This guy. For the record this photo was taken the day Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed.

Times of Malta appears to have just saved taxpayers a considerable amount of money that the Tourism Authority was about to spend on luxury hotel rooms for its staff to have their wee breaks while manning the Christmas village. I won’t bore you with predictable comments about why the MTA didn’t need this. This takes [...]

Sitting in the typically mild Northern sunshine in Brussels, surrounded by typically grey urban buildings in an unremarkable-looking city, I got to thinking on the thirst for culture that drove me out into the wild world away from my small sunny island, whose climate I shall always sorely miss. I keep wishing that the sun [...]

It was a relief for me to read Ranier Fsadni’s opinion piece today assessing the debacle after Helena Dalli published an internal style guide hyperbolically alleged to attempt a ban on Christmas. It must have taken courage to comment that the Pope got it wrong. Yep, the comparison with Nazism was grotesque. Helena Dalli and [...]

Not everything, I grant you, is useful evidence to support the argument that democracy is eroding. But, I promise you, this is. NGOs, experts, and professionals are turning to the President of Malta urging him to refuse to sign into law the new cannabis liberalisation bill recently approved by Parliament. As elsewhere, I am not [...]

On Saturday, Times of Malta ran an editorial that put a simple to understand but rather rhetorical question. Is Malta’s justice system working? Since the question followed a chilling list of documented episodes of administrative, procedural, and technical failures in investigations, prosecutions, and judicial processes the answer cannot be anything but a resounding ‘no’. Two [...]

From my article in The Sunday Times today: "The European Commission is funding an OECD research exercise to advise the standards in public life commissioner on how to improve oversight rules and procedures. The government is invited to participate, along with the opposition, experts and civil society. The government was represented at the introductory meeting, behaving [...]

American theologian and author James Freeman Clarke (1810-1888) posited that the difference between a politician and a statesman is that a politician thinks about the next election while the statesman thinks about the next generations. Over the years, Malta has had its fair share of statesmen who had the foresight and the wisdom to pull [...]

I have written here a few times about the disturbing trend of aspiring politicians going into strategic marriages to marry a spouse with a surname beginning with the letter ‘a’ just so they can adopt their spouse’s family name and climb to the top of the ballot sheet. The technical term for declaring voting indifference [...]

Right on cue Joseph Muscat protested that it was Christian Grima’s fault that he did not show up to back up his claim that he had been libelled by the suggestion that he “blew up Daphne”. The man practically invented the hollow excuse that has since become a tiktok trend. Er, sorry your honour, I [...]

Joseph Muscat will try to spin himself out of this because he’s spun himself out of much worse. But not showing up to argue in the libel suit he filed against Christian Grima and having his case thrown out as a result is simply an implicit admission that he does not fancy his chances arguing [...]

I found the interview prison psychologist Gail Debono gave Malta Today’s Raphael Vassallo disturbing reading. A couple of brief disclaimers out of the way first. This interview was timely and the questions asked pertinent. After the episode when a man was urged to jump off a bastion by onlookers filming tiktoks, instant psychologists sprouted everywhere [...]

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The images are by Darrin Zammit Lupi.              

You know you're not living in a democracy when politicians and their staffers feel perfectly entitled to call you at home to pester you to vote for them, but if you dare write to Parliament's Speaker you'll be told you cannot write to him and he will not reply to you. A couple [...]

It’s not people who follow timesofmalta.com or read The Times of Malta in print in the morning who are likely to be impressed by some Anthony Degiovanni accusing Matthew Caruana Galizia of “contributing to his mother’s killing”. So, when an unidentified “spokesman from the OPM condemns” Anthony Degiovanni’s remarks to comments made exclusively to the [...]

We are living in the age of the mediocre. Our scorn for mediocrity blinds us to its vast primitive power. We stand in the glare of our superior intelligence unable to see into the dim lights of the room, to dilate our eyes and see the potential danger of the masses. We cannot quite believe [...]

A friend told me it was wrong of me to call the Speaker and his lawyer piles of shit, not when I complain about hate speech. I tell other people that words are like stones, they should use them to build bridges not to throw them at someone else. And yet I am weak and [...]