The refugees crisis will not go away soon. One reason for this is that it places the European Union before a challenge with which its structures were not really designed to cope.

As of the very start, the Union sought to build structures that brought the different member countries together on a step by step basis, according to the experience accumulated by the time a further step towards unity was to be taken. However every move towards further unity could have consequences which would not always be foreseeable. At a later stage, these would be evaluated and accepted by members not necessarily in the same way. The problem becomes clear when a crisis arises which strongly tests the limits of the agreement achieved by a given point in time.

Obviously, this is what is happening today as refugees arrive in their scores of thousands. Events are happening outside the Union, and the Europeans must together agree as to how to respond to them, since they cannot stop them. How can they distribute among themselves burdens that few reckon will bring any benefits in their wake?

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Trump

Many are rightly worrying at the prospect of Donald Trump ending up in the White House. The kind of politics he stands for... if you can call them that... is the populist version, American style, at its worst. It includes racism, xenophobia, vulgarity and ignorance about the outside world. God forbid that these qualities become the ones to guide the policies of the world’s biggest power.

True, there are some who argue that Trump knows how to wear multicoloured coats and he could still change the nature of his discourse later on to woo “moderate” votes. His extremism up to now has however known no bounds. What’s worse, he is succeeding with Republican voters precisely because of the language he has employed up to now.

It’s a language that is really distant from the best virtues that, as I know from having personally seenthem in action, belong to American society.

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Band clubs

Statistics published this week about the activities of band clubs confirm the impressive spread of these organizations in our country. They are making a vital contribution to the island’s popular culture and social cohesion, even though it is hardly being given the recognition it deserves.

Over the years, having visited band clubs all over the length and breadth of Malta and Gozo, I would be impressed by the organizational skill and dedication with which groups of volunteers run complicated and difficult projects. Impressive too would be the ways by which a band club would succeed to mobilise young and old, men and women, to help in the organization of projects.

As at 2014, clubs had a total of 27,175 members, about 9 per cent of the population – an increase of 7,000 on 2010. As protagonists in the field of popular culture, band clubs should be accorded greater recognition and support.