For sure, one cannot but agree with all worthwhile initiatives undertaken to generate new activity in Gozo. Meanwhile, one certainly cannot be impressed by the Opposition’s criticism regarding problems in the health sector. For long years,PN leaders took decisions that heaped crisis upon crisis over the health sector, from San Raffaelle to Mater Dei to the provision of primary care.

Still it is difficult to understand why all colonoscopies are now being held in Gozo. Prior to undergoing a colonoscopy, you must fast from noon of the previous day, while consuming some very powerful purgatives. By dawn of the day of the intervention, this treatment leaves you quite weak. I know from personal experience having gone through the intervention a number of times.

In order to get it done, weak as you are, early in the morning you now have to leave Malta and travel to Gozo’s general hospitalin a friend’s car or by ambulance. This all amounts to the infliction of needless and senseless trouble and anxiety.

However if interventions are carried out in Malta, would not the same problem affect Gozitans?

Would it be so problematic if colonoscopies were carried out in both Malta and Gozo?

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Tax haven?

In the discussion that is still proceeding in Europe about taxation and the control of tax evasion, a perennial argument revolves around tax havens – those countries which provide a fiscal refuge for firms and people prepared to do anything in order to pay as little tax as possible. Such countries are lambasted from all points of the compass for serving as a refuge for sinners, but meanwhile, they do quite well for themselves from this activity.

A definition that is universally accepted of what constitutes a fiscal paradise does not exist. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which brings all the richer countries together, has its own procedure by which to classify tax havens. Malta is one country which falls outside this classification. However, other authorities and tax experts disagree with the OECD.

Now it seems that a new proposal is firming up for the European Union to formulate its own defintion. Those who are promoting this idea insist that the criteria which should be adopted by the EU must be much more stringent than those of the OECD.

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If...

As the civil protection corps was launching an exercise to simulate what should be done if an earthquake struck, stories were published in the media regarding what would happen if a tsunami arose in the Mediterranean. According to the reports, a tsunami would mean the end of Malta.

This reminded me of a map developed not so long ago by a computer programme which forecast how the Mediterranean would shape up two hundred thousand years from today. Not only will Malta have vanished, but so would Italy as a whole, as well as Greece and the whole Balkan peninsula.

If everything remains like it is today, nobody now alive would be able to note that the computer had made a mistake.

Still the computer might also have gotten it wrong not with regard to the Mediterranean’s eventual “shape”, but about when it will happen.