He hasn’t just stopped speaking to journalists. Now he’s locking them up.
Joseph Muscat hasn’t just stopped speaking to journalists. Now he’s locking them up. He already tried the Knights of Malta Option, walling himself off behind nested layers of barricades, but his metal bastions didn’t stop the cries of “Mafia” or “Assassin” from getting through, or the stray egg, even if they did wall Muscat off […] More
Melvin Theuma’s letter of insurance that appeared in The Times on Monday is material for investigators and police best kept away from speculation concerning Daphne Caruana Galizia’s assassination. Yet, one element in the letter points to an interesting modus operandi within our corridors of power. Theuma referred to a job that Keith Schembri had given […] More
Emotions are running very high. The gravity of the unfolding situation is overwhelming. The entire country has been described in the press as engulfed by feelings of ‘fear and foreboding’. The anger of the huge wave of protestors converging daily in the streets of Valletta is described as ‘verging on rage’, as crowds of people […] More
Malta’s democracy looks like someone in the last stages of tertiary syphilis. Every organ has begun to fail, and the brain is increasingly deranged. It all started, of course, when the patient was well and truly forked — and we know who did the forking. It sounds dramatic to say that Malta is now a dictatorship. […] More
In one of Malta’s darkest weeks, as Europe (and let’s face it most of the world) held its breath, Joseph Muscat dragged his feet and clung on to the seat of power. The spin from part of his Party machinery emphasised the consistent majority he enjoys at the polls. Even as more information brought to […] More
After a tumultuous week, it is evident that Joseph Muscat is disgraced. Evident to anyone, that is, with two brain cells to rub together and the backbone to speak one’s mind – with due allowances for those to whom the dawning truth is so hurtful that they need to shield their eyes. The issue still […] More
There’s a hole in the space where Joseph Muscat’s integrity should be. In its place, we see a massively swollen survival instinct — inflamed by the fight for his own survival, and not the survival of his Party or his government. That’s the point we’ve now reached. His Chief of Staff Keith Schembri, the man […] More
The situation is desperate, and even worse since Daphne Caruana Galizia put those words in her final blog post before she was murdered. There are crooks everywhere you look now, she wrote. This week the situation is also obscene and shocking. It is fluid and still taking shape. The web is unravelling. Every day, hour […] More
Selling the Rule of Law: the message that we tried to relay three years ago is now writing itself.
In May 2017 I co-founded a group called the Advocates for the Rule of Law. We took out a full-page advert on The Times of Malta in which we announced vacancies for the proper functioning of democracy. That was the beginning of a brief campaign in which we raised the alarm that the backsliding of […] More
It shouldn’t need saying, but it’s part of our political predicament that it must be said: The police doing their duty does not mean ‘the institutions are functioning’. The Prime Minister cannot simultaneously “wait for the facts to emerge” when he is also in a position to control which facts do emerge. Joseph Muscat cannot […] More
What if Yorgen Fenech decided to ask for a presidential pardon? One day before Fenech was arrested in connection with the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia, Joseph Muscat promised to grant the alleged middleman in the case a conditional pardon in exchange for testimony that leads to the conviction of the mastermind. If Fenech was […] More
Owen Bonnici had a bad night. Why would he exit parliament by the front door — right into the middle of a peaceful protest — when he could have slipped out the back like the rest did? After all, Bonnici wasn’t the main focus of the protestor’s rage — at least, not in the serene depths […] More
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