The year 2017 was a very particular year for Maltese politics. Today marks the anniversary of when Prime Minister Joseph Muscat brought a foreign delegation to Serkin in Rabat to eat pastizzi, like locals do. The images travelled: dignitaries in suits, no cutlery. It looked spontaneous. It wasn’t. It was soft power by design. A visual pitch for a country that wanted to believe that everything was “business as usual”. However, the backdrop matters. 2017 was not a calm year. Th

Aidan’s “Bella” is a jazz-leaning, retro-styled, multilingual ballad. It is not radical, but it is clearly positioned. It sits outside the dominant contemporary dance-pop lane that usually fills national finals.

STRASBOURG. Irma Dimitradze came to the European Parliament to speak for someone who could not. Dimitradze, a Georgian journalist from Batumelebi, represented her imprisoned colleague Mzia Amaglobeli at the Sakharov Prize ceremony. The prize is designed to spotlight freedom of thought. In Georgia’s current climate, that spotlight functions as both protection and provocation. Amaglobeli’s detention has become part of a wider argument about whether Georgia is moving closer to E

Neutrality may still matter, but modern threats show that Malta must also be prepared. Sitting at the crossroads of the Mediterranean, the island remains exposed to nearby instability in Libya, rising tensions in the Eastern Mediterranean, and the vulnerabilities of global trade routes.