Mark Anthony Sammut

It had to be there. Marsascala Front. The same front where I tried to run more than 5 weeks ago, but where after 5k the pain in my knee told me that I needed to take a long break. I did. I had to completely shift my targets, halt my momentum. Missed out the LungBuster, missed out the Duathlon, and next Sunday will miss out the Half-Marathon. Sometimes, when your body says stop, a certain type of pain makes you listen. After visits to the podologist and another adjustment to my new supporting soles, I felt at ease walking and my knee felt normal. So it was time to hit back to the road. A come-back, as the name implies, is a return to where you previously were. And this return is not only physical, it's deeper than that. So the place where I had to come-back had to be the place where I had left it off. And today, at 3.30pm, I was back there: at Marsascala. I ran for 3k - I know, it's a short distance, but this time I have to take it slow and build it up again carefully. Any

The situation in Libya is deteriorating by the hours. A ruthless mad dictator who doesn't give a damn about the people he's murdering is with his back against the wall, and people in this situation can act very unexpectedly. We just pray and hope that the Libyan people can finally prevail, and in this country freedom can once again reign. In the meantime, I feel ashamed that our country's leaders have throughout time licked the feet of this mercenary. Probably out of fear...and let's face it, he did stop us from drilling our oil-shelf with his toy-boat destroyer. So there may be some justification in fearing him, and his threats of immigrant flooding. But to bestow him with our highest honours? Makes me sick. And well he did reciprocate from his part, like a true friend should. In 2008, he honored our ex-Prime Minister Dom Mintoff with the Al-Gaddafi Award for Human Rights. At the time I was dumb-struck. Were it an award for patriotism, or combatting poverty, I woul

Today I just want to share a true story the priest recounted during the homily of yesterday's mass: During the time this priest was giving service at the Oratory in Birkirkara, a weekly prayer meeting was being organized there. One day, at the back of the room, he noticed a man who had never attended before. He went to speak with him, the usual small talk. After a few minutes this man confessed that he was going through a dark patch. He owned a small but thriving business which was doing very well. One day he met a friend who had lost his job and had nothing to sustain his family. He decided to do an act of charity with him, and took him as a partner in his business. The business continued growing, and they had enough income for both of them. After a few months, this friend started taking over, and at a point in time threw this man out of his own business. This man had been thrown out of his own business by a friend he had let in to help. "So, I had two options," he t

I am sometimes amused by the fact that the same generation of people, who lived through the same era, under the same leadership, can have a completely opposite view of the same days. It can be seen in the current turmoil between supporters and opponents of the regimist dictatorships in North Africa, but it can also be seen in the way supporters of the two main parties in Malta describe the seventies and eighties. Nationalists describe them as days from hell which they hope are never repeated, Labourites describe them as the glory days, which Muscat told us yesterday, they want to go back to. I guess there's nothing contradictory in the opposite ways they describe them, because probably that's what they were: glory days for the red-supporting 49% of the population, but hell days for the blue-supporting 51%. They were: - Glory days for the red worker who was given land for free, but hell days for the blue worker whose land was stolen from his children without any compensatio