Gavin Gulia will have to be vetted by a parliamentary committee before he can be reinstated as chairman of the Malta Tourism Authority.
Gulia, who was elected as an MP to replace Edward Scicluna only to resign a few minutes later last Wednesday, has said that the prime minister wants him to stay on as MTA chairman, a role he has fulfilled since 2013.
Tourism Minister Clayton Bartolo confirmed on Friday that Gulia would have to face parliamentary scrutiny before being reinstated.
“A few moments after Gulia’s resignation from parliament, I submitted his nomination as the Malta Tourism Authority’s chairman for vetting via the public appointments committee’s (PAC) chairman,” Bartolo said.
Using cyclists as scapegoats
Wayne Flask, in ‘Wake up and smell the tarmac’ (January 5), cites an Infrastructure Malta architect as admitting to a resident that the reason for the land uptake is “the fact that ‘there are the towers now…’”.
So not the need for cycle lanes? This isn’t the first time that cycle lanes and cyclists have been used as scapegoats for land uptake by an authority that has removed far more where they are needed most and slipped some largely cosmetic one-sided footpaths that cyclists can share (if only they could get on and off them) with pedestrians.
For Neil Crossey, Monday morning was a particularly exciting and nerve-wracking day.
It was the first time since the pandemic hit Malta in March that he chose to send all of his five children back to school.
“As one of our children has special needs and is vulnerable, we are slightly apprehensive, as we do not know what to expect but hopefully the measures at school are successful,” he said.
Neil was one of the many parents who waved their children goodbye as they had their temperatures checked and hands sanitized at the entrance of public schools, opening after a two-day teacher s strike ended.
A global pandemic, two leadership elections, and the continuing repercussions of a journalist’s murder: it has been a tumultuous year. But it wasn’t always the big stories that left their mark on Times of Malta journalists. Here they choose the stories that resonated most with them in 2020.
A windfarm in Montenegro
Jacob Borg
Having written countless stories about corruption over the years, there was one in 2020 that stood out for its immediate political impact.
The Montenegro wind farm story showed how businessman Yorgen Fenech’s secret company 17 Black was quietly used to profit from a project that had long been mired in suspicions of corruption.
Pregnancy and the law
As a practising gynaecologist, I have been following the ongoing debate in this newspaper regarding pregnancy termination.
As I have stated in a previous contribution, one’s stand on this matter reflects one’s own personal moral and religious beliefs. It is a personal stand and one that cannot really be argued in the theatre of science.
However, the contribution ‘Giving women a choice’ by Christopher Barbara (December 19) requires a clarification.
Barbara quotes the law to state that the termination of a pregnancy is a criminal offence in Malta and proposes that the termination of an ectopic gestation must, therefore, also be deemed to be illegal and thereby questions the validity of the law or that the age-old practice of performing a salpingectomy in the case of an ectopic amounts to a criminal act.