TT(O)M

  Dear Alban , I’m sorry I haven’t written sooner. Four weeks ago they moved me from prison to palliative care, though I don’t know if anyone reported it—I haven’t been following the news. The doctors confirmed stage IV pancreatic cancer. They don’t think I have more than a few weeks left. For months I dismissed the dull ache in my belly and back as prison life—the cold, the hard bed, the terrible food. I blamed the weight loss on the same. By the time they finally diagnosed me, the cancer had spread everywhere. Pancreatic tumours are insidious that way; they hide until it’s too late. The classic signs—tummy pain, back pain, unexplained weight loss—I had them all, but I simply mistook for the symptoms of being an old man in a cage. This letter has been months in the making, and most of it wasn’t written by my hand. The squiggly parts are mine. Everything else comes through a volunteer here who has become my scribe and, on difficult days, even helps organise my thoughts. Pick...

Dear Lucy, I am glad you understand that no one has ever held an exclusive claim on my story. Much of what is known about me, and about the events that brought me my small measure of notoriety, now lies in the public domain. There are many who possess the skill to gather, organise, and shape that material into a convincing account of my life from publicly available sources, and I admire this ability immensely. My mother was not a woman who dwelt on her past, and I was very young when she left. What I have, I have pieced together from a handful of sentences she let fall over the years, from the few things others have uncovered after my story made national headlines, and from the particular kind of knowledge a child absorbs without quite knowing he is doing so. I offer it to you in that spirit. I hope you will use this story to advance the wider narrative about the failings of the justice system, and perhaps to uncover facts that, even now, remain unknown. Yours sincerely, Ky ...

This article discusses the unfair rent laws. To familiarize yourself with the topic and understand how a group of citizens is being unfairly targeted by the Government of Malta, head over to https://www.alanbonnici.com/2021/06/maltas-unjust-rent-laws.html . Source DOI On the 5th of June, Social Housing Minister Roderick Galdes proudly reported that since 2017 the number of people on the waiting list has gone down by 42%. That is a great achievement.  Over a 5-year period, almost 1,400 persons are no longer on the Social Housing waiting list. What an achievement! One must compliment the Government's efforts that saw 160 families taking up social loans in order to purchase properties. This was done through the Home Assist scheme. Why is the effort to help persons become homeowners not applied equally to those in pre-1995 rental properties? Another initiative to bring down this number, according to minister Galdes, was to implement measures to reduce the number of families that would ...