The island is the EU's last outpost of licensed spring shooting. The TV naturalist explains why it's time to stop the barbarity When it comes to life and death I'm probably more stoic than most. But last week I cried in front of more than 20,000 viewers on YouTube. Like all our team, I was close to exhaustion we'd been on four hours sleep a night for days. I was also clearly depressed by the daily...
The BBC presenter talks of confrontations with hunters and police while making films to highlight the cruelty of the annual bird shoot When Chris Packham announced he was heading to Malta to report on the island's annual spring bird shoot as if he was a war correspondent covering a conflict, even his admirers probably thought he was guilty of hyperbole. But after a week in which the naturalist has...
Hunters try to block referendum on traditional spring shoot, while British volunteers help patrol countryside to protect birds As dawn breaks over the sea and ancient stone churches turn pink, the morning's stillness is broken by volleys of gunfire. Tucked behind walls, sitting on armchairs in specially built turrets or else popping up from old stone sheds, Malta's marksmen open fire as migrating birds...
When my husband, Ian Purseglove, was born, his life expectancy was five years, and it remained so for most of his 70 years. He had a severe form of haemophilia B, then untreatable, but timely intervention by American medics who were stationed in his native Weymouth for D-day kept him alive when he was a baby. He survived childhood with his mother Winnie's loving care while his father, Bertram, served...
Pivotal figure in Maltese politics who served as Labour prime minister and did battle against successive British governments Dom Mintoff, who has died aged 96, was Malta's leading politician during the period when it moved from seeking integration with Britain to non-aligned independence as a republic. The country's socialist prime minister from 1955 to 1958 and 1971 to 1984, he was a thorn in the...
European commission moves to outlaw cigarettes with 'characterising flavour', and seeks bigger health warnings The European commission has called for strongly flavoured cigarettes to be banned and unveiled draft legislation to impose graphic images of the risks of smoking on all cigarette packaging. Reporting that 700,000 people die in Europe every year from smoking-related diseases, the costs of treatment...
Economists have predicted that the UK will lose its coveted AAA credit rating this year. See how different credit ratings agencies rate countries worldwide Get the data US debt ceiling analysed Who owns America's debt? How do credit ratings vary by country and by ratings agencies? Economists expect the UK to lose it's coveted AAA rating this year. Phillip Inman has more on the story here, where he...
Expert on the law of the sea who became a world authority on the international regulation of whaling Patricia Birnie's expertise in law of the sea and international environmental law brought her to prominence at a time when the latter field especially was still in its infancy. In 1983 she joined the law department at the London School of Economics, then as now one of the world's leading repositories...
Tiny Malta's banking sector is even bigger relative to GDP and secretive Luxembourg's banks exceed GDP by a factor of 23 For the architects of the Cyprus bailout the German government and the International Monetary Fund there was no doubt that the central aim of the shock therapy was to bring down an oversized banking sector that was failing. That applied especially to the Bank of Cyprus, the island's...
systemic discrimination' against non-Maltese offenders The family of a British man serving 10 years in prison in Malta for cannabis offences is petitioning the European commission alleging "systemic discrimination" against non-Maltese offenders. Daniel Holmes, from south Wales, was convicted in 2011 five years after his arrest and the sentence was confirmed by appeal court judges in October. The case...
s cheap compared with other countries, such as Britain and the US Citizenship is like rhythm: if you weren't born with it, it's not easy to get. However, in the EU there is a fast-track for the super-rich. The Maltese government now has a scheme to attract "high-value" foreigners to the country, by selling passports for £546,000 . Which, by passport standards, is pretty cheap. The move has ruffled...
new avenues of political will' Malta's prime minister has called on his fellow European leaders to pull together and prove they are committed to ending migrant boat tragedies in the Mediterranean, warning that "we will be reporting more deaths next year" unless concrete action is taken soon. Ahead of an EU summit later this month, Joseph Muscat said he hoped the two disasters in the Strait of Sicily...
s planned "military-humanitarian mission". "We will work so that Europe tackles it but on the other hand we will immediately do our bit," he said. Malta's prime minister, Joseph Muscat, said the EU had to act or it would face the same macabre spectacle on its southern rim again and again. "If nothing changes we will be reporting more deaths next year and there will be consternation for a couple of...
turn sea into a tomb' Italy is to triple its air and sea presence in the Mediterranean between north Africa and Sicily in a bid to make it "as safe as possible" for migrants making the perilous journey in overcrowded rickety boats, the prime minister, Enrico Letta, has said. Speaking after a fortnight during which at least 390 people lost their lives in disasters involving capsized vessels, Letta announced...
Fedora Project - Start Page Web Return results that are Not filtered by license Free to use or share Free to use or share commercially Free to use, share or modify Free to use, share or modify commercially Reach higher. Fedora 8 now available. About Fedora ...
Survivors of a capsized boat, carrying migrants across the Mediterranean on Friday, are brought ashore in Malta ...
Italian and Maltese naval vessels have rescued hundreds of migrants whose boat capsized between Sicily and Tunisia ...
Photographs from the Guardian Eyewitness series Jim Powell ...
s disaster , the Maltese prime minister Joseph Muscat told journalists in the island's capital, Valletta, that 27 people – including at least three children – had been pulled from the water following the capsizing about 60 miles south-east of Lampedusa. Although near the Sicilian island, the boat was in international waters where Malta is responsible for search and rescue operations. Earlier, Italian...
s smallest state, Malta – began to sink, the Maltese army launched a 13-hour overnight operation to rescue the 112 passengers. Eight were airlifted to hospital for emergency treatment; the rest were suffering from exhaustion, dehydration and sunstroke. This story is not unusual. Each week similar boats arrive on the country's shores. Last month, the prime minister, Joseph Muscat, attempted to send...