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…
Netflix’s harrowing British mini-series *Adolescence* and the Hollywood satire *The Studio* swept the 76th Primetime Emmy Awards on Monday night, but while the after-parties raged in downtown Los Angeles, the real buzz on Maltese social media was closer to home: “Did ya see? They mentioned us!” In his acceptance speech for Outstanding Limited Series, *Adolescence*…
Mater Dei’s corridors are filling with the sound of coughing again, but this time it isn’t tourists keeled over by July heat—it’s nanniet who danced at last month’s festa and now can’t catch their breath. Public-health officials confirmed this week that Malta is riding a sharp summer wave of H1N1 influenza, the same strain that…
**Eight Seconds and Dropping? Can You Hold Out Longer?** It’s 7:43 a.m. on a Tuesday in Msida. The bus app swears your ride is “8 min away,” yet the dot on the map hasn’t budged since Żebbuġ. You open TikTok “just quickly.” Eight seconds later—yes, researchers at the University of Malta measured it—you’re scrolling past…
# Journalism in an uncertain age: Malta’s newsrooms navigate AI, lawsuits and a public that scrolls faster than it reads Valletta – The telex machine that once clattered away in *Times of Malta*’s old Fleet Street newsroom has been replaced by a Slack channel ping, but the existential question hanging over Maltese journalism is louder…
Floriana’s Independence Arena was already humming by 07:30 this morning as Prime Minister Roberta Metsola stepped up to the microphone and declared 15 September 2025 “a hinge day for the Maltese decade”. In a 23-minute address—streamed live on every bus-stop screen from Valletta to Gozo—she unveiled a triple package that will redraw the archipelago’s social…
# Was Charlie Kirk Killed by Social Media? A Maltese Wake-Up Call The Mediterranean sun was already baking the limestone balconies of Valletta when newsfeeds across Malta lit up with a rumour that felt both distant and uncomfortably close: Charlie Kirk, the 30-year-old American conservative firebrand, had allegedly been “cancelled to death” by social media….
**When magical thinking meets reality: How Malta’s village festas confront the age of Instagram** The brass band strikes up a triumphal march, confetti cannons explode over the church steps, and fifteen-year-old Mireille from Sliema lifts her iPhone to capture the moment. What she sees through her screen—an explosion of gold leaf, pyrotechnics and centuries-old statues—looks…
Valletta’s Grand Harbour has seen every empire come and go—Phoenicians, Knights, French, British—each claiming “legitimate interests” while the islanders quietly kept fishing. So when Russian diplomats insist their invasion of Ukraine is merely the protection of historic rights, Maltese ears prick up with a familiar mix of scepticism and survival instinct. In cafés from Sliema…
