I am the youngest of 5 children and had parents old enough – or so I thought – to be my grandparents. You’d think I was spoilt rotten but nothing of the sort. When I was about seven...

I cannot get over the scenes from Bergamo in Italy. A town I always intended to visit but never got round to do it, though I have been to neighbour Brescia, polenta and all that. The scenes of...

Taking stock of the astounding mortality rate by coronavirus in Italy is really heartbreaking.  As of Wednesday, the virus had killed 2,978 across Italy with the majority in Lombardy region, when...

Today week was the first day when the doors of all schools and eduction institutions remained shut. On Wednesday, we announced that closure of schools is now extended until at least the end of...

The Coronavirus experience presents policymakers with various quandaries on how to best manage risks. In policymaking, every decision has consequences which may also include unintended ones. Policy...

That Julia Farrugia Portelli as a minister and other MPs have been caught in the quarantine net made necessary by the Coronavirus pandemic, is unsurprising. The work of politicians is precisely that...

The sound of the doorbell. We hold our breadth as mum walked down the 23 steps to our door. We lived in a maisonette in a very conspicuous road on the periphery of Birkirkara. I remained upstairs...

Over recent years the Planning Authority [PA] has processed, and more often than not approved, dozens of requests to develop multi-storey hotels. One recent request that has caused apprehension...

The corona virus pandemic has brought home in a big way the lesson that with globalisation, frontiers have lost all effectiveness in defending people. To be sure, when in the past epidemics...

As sixth-form biology students, we learnt that viruses lie on the outskirts of life. They need a host to replicate, which they do by “hijacking” the host’s cellular machinery,...