Sliema cat-killer blames violent upbringing, court hears – but island’s feline faithful aren’t buying it A 34-year-old Sliema man who admitted to trapping and bludgeoning three cats told magistrate Donatella Frendo Dimech yesterday that a childhood “filled with fists instead of affection” had taught him to treat animals as “moving targets”. The confession, delivered in…
**APS Bank’s €45 Million Rights Issue: A Quiet Revolution in Malta’s Financial Heart** Valletta’s Republic Street was still yawning itself awake on Tuesday when APS Bank dropped the kind of news that makes the city’s limestone walls hum: a €45 million rights issue, the largest in its 105-year history, aimed at reinforcing its capital buffers…
# Silk and Water: How Jiangnan’s Ancient Grace is Being Unpacked in Malta This Weekend Valletta’s Mediterranean Conference Centre will feel more like the banks of the Grand Canal of Suzhou this weekend when the China Cultural Centre hosts “Jiangnan Days”, a two-day deep-dive into the canal-threaded region that gave the world silk, ink-wash painting…
**Magnitude 5.2 tremor felt across Malta: ‘The ground moved like a boat deck’** Malta jolted awake at 06:04 this morning as a magnitude 5.2 earthquake centred 80 km south-west of Żurrieq sent chandeliers swinging, dogs barking and a wave of WhatsApp voice notes ricocheting across the islands. The quake, the strongest felt here since the…
**Three Irregular Migrants Deported from Malta, Ministry Says** In the early hours of Tuesday morning, three irregular migrants were escorted onto a military-chartered aircraft at Malta International Airport, marking the island’s first deportation of 2024. The Ministry for Home Affairs, Security, Reforms & Equality confirmed the removal in a two-line statement that gave no detail…
Valletta’s evening news bulletins will carry a Belfast dateline this week as the landmark trial of a former British paratrooper—accused over the 1972 “Bloody Sunday” killings—opens in Northern Ireland. For many Maltese who remember their own country’s brush with British military justice during the 1950s dockyard protests, the proceedings feel less like distant history and…
Watch: Heaviest piece of Msida flyover is installed By Hot Malta staff A hush fell over the Msida yacht marina at 05:47 this morning as the last slab of caramel-coloured concrete—78 metres long, 4.2 metres high and weighing more than a Boeing 747—inched into place like a giant Lego brick. By 06:12 the deed was…
**Ten ODZ Villas Proposed Opposite Planned Large Xemxija Project** Xemxija Bay, the sleepy inlet whose honey-coloured ramparts have sheltered Roman grain stores, 17th-century fish farms and Sunday-morning bathers in equal measure, is bracing for a second development wave. Barely six months after the government issued a call for proposals to turn the neighbouring Mistra Valley…
Three Men Repatriated After Years of Living in Malta’s Shadows By Hot Malta Newsroom Valletta – At dawn on Tuesday, as shopkeepers along Merchant Street raised their shutters and the first pastizzi carts hissed with oil, three men boarded a military-chartered flight at Malta International Airport and disappeared into the sky. None of them had…
From Mdina to the Black Sea: How a Romanian Drone Drama is Echoing in Maltese Living Rooms By [Hot Malta Staff] Valletta’s cafés were buzzing with more than pastizzi gossip this week as news broke that Moscow is accusing Kyiv of steering a drone into NATO ally Romania. For an island 1,500 kilometres away, the…
The future is closer than you think A Maltese dawn breaks over a skyline that would have looked like science-fiction to our grandparents. Silent electric ferries glide across Valletta’s Grand Harbour, their batteries charged by the same sun that now powers three out of every ten rooftops on the archipelago. Drones buzz above the Three…
**Silent Shadows: When a Tourist’s Refusal Shakes Malta’s Conscience** The call came in at 02:47 on a humid Sunday in late June, the kind of night when St Julian’s smells of spilt vodka, frying hamburgers and the faint salt sting of the incoming tide. Two young Italian women, holiday-flat neighbours, phoned 112 to report that…
