Mark Anthony Sammut

My latest post on the Sunday Circle on Minister Bartolo's suggestion to extend the length of compulsory education: "if students reach age 16 with no thirst for knowledge, sometimes with no basic literacy and arithmetic skills, than it's futile to force them to spend another two years in a system which they have grown to hate and from which they can't wait to escape. It would achieve nothing except make them hate the system even more." For the full article click the link below: http://www.sundaycircle.com/2014/06/longer-compulsory-schooling-doesnt-tackle-the-problem/

Original post published on the Sunday Circle http://www.sundaycircle.com/2014/06/the-petition-to-end-other-petitions-blog/ There are two fundamental issues at stake around the discussion on the spring-hunting referendum. The first one is whether spring-hunting is a minority right which ought to be protected from being changed by a majority. The second one is whether 104,293 persons, or any other number of persons for that matter, should be able to stop or change a democratic process such as an abrogative referendum. The first issue has been tackled in various articles. Rights are defined by universal conventions and declarations, and spring-hunting is not one of them. Minorities too are defined in our Constitution as being groups identified by "gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, colour, language, ethnic origin, disability. religion or belief or political or other opinion." Protection of minorities is also generally understood to mean protection from

I will be blogging regularly in the Sunday Circe online portal ( www.sundaycircle.com ). First post was out yesterday. Below is a short excerpt, you can read the whole article by clicking on the link below. "... Contrastingly, this means that while decisions affecting these “minorities” could still be changed by laws enacted or abrogated by Parliament, by politicians, they could not be pushed for by direct, democratic, civil action by the people if they deem that politicians are refusing to take action. So rather than protecting the rights of minorities, the only privilege this petition aims to protect is the privileged position of those who are able to keep politicians in their tight control. It would ironically be using a tool designed to give more power to the people for the opposite end: to take power further away from them." http://www.sundaycircle.com/2014/06/the-petition-to-end-other-petitions-blog/

You heard that right, The Guardian has revealed that Malta is one of the most spied nations by its own government, with 3,773 such requests processed last year alone. And these are the requests made just to one operator: Vodafone, which has roughly half the market share. The total number of requests made to all operators would approximately be double that figure. More details available on these links: http://www.tvm.com.mt/news/malta-l-iktar-nazzjon-spjunat-fl-ewropa/ http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20140606/local/vodafone-lifts-lid-on-governments-phone-spying-capability.522183 In Malta, it is the Malta Secret Services which has direct access to such data, and it only requires the written consent of the Home Affairs Minister to carry out any such tapping. That means the written consent of the trustworthy and never-caught-in-a-lie Manuel Mallia (yes, it's called satire). This is a serious issue of privacy and transparency. Why is such a high proportion of our p