**Cash Crackdown: New Law to Ban Under-the-Table Wages for Third-Country Nationals** In a move that could reshape Malta’s labour landscape, government officials are drafting legislation that would prohibit cash-in-hand payments to third-country national (TCN) employees. The proposed ban—expected to be tabled in Parliament this autumn—aims to stamp out abuse, shore up national insurance contributions and…
Trump’s UN Tirade Resonates in Valletta: “Your Countries Are Going to Hell” Sparks Debate in Malta’s Migration Hot-Spot By Hot Malta Staff VALLETTA – When Donald Trump strode to the UN podium this week and sneered that “your countries are going to hell” on peace and migration, the clip went viral in Malta before the…
**Trump’s $100k Visa Price Tag: Maltese Tech Talent Forced to Rethink the American Dream** Valletta – For two decades the ritual has been the same: finish top of your class at MCAST or the University of Malta, land a summer internship at a Santa Monica gaming studio or a Manhattan fintech, file the paperwork for…
**PN MP Sounds Alarm Over Deportation of Long-Time Ethiopian Residents After 15-18 Years in Malta** In a case that has sent shockwaves through Malta’s tight-knit migrant communities, Nationalist Party MP and home affairs spokesperson Beppe Fenech Adami has condemned the deportation of three Ethiopian nationals who had lived, worked, and built lives in Malta for…
**Boxer Charged Over Fake Certificates Living ‘Irregularly’ in Malta Since 2008** Valletta – A 35-year-old professional boxer from Cameroon, who has been living “irregularly” in Malta since 2008, was arraigned on Tuesday after allegedly presenting forged residence certificates to regularise his stay. The case, heard before Magistrate Donatella Frendo Dimech, has reignited debate on Malta’s…
**Thrown to the Virus: How Malta’s Prison Walls Became a COVID Cage** The call to prayer had just faded over Paola when the news broke: Malta’s own prison authorities had locked a healthy man in a cell with two COVID-positive inmates, then left him there for 14 days. By the time the European Court of…
St Julian’s on a Friday night feels like a campus that has spilled out of its lecture halls. Cocktails slosh in plastic cups on the steps of Love Monument, Arabic mingles with Italian over shisha smoke, and a hen-party from Leeds negotiates the zebra crossing while a Maltese nanna watches from her doorway, plastic church…
**5,481 Departures: The Human Story Behind Malta’s Migrant Returns** The figure lands like a slap: 5,481 people escorted off the island since 2021. Enough to fill the City Theatre in Valletta twice over, enough to populate a village the size of Żebbuġ. Yet behind every number is a name someone once whispered on a Sliema…
**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…
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…
Realms of Colour: How Elaine Mifsud’s Latest Exhibition is Painting Valletta Back to Life By Hot Malta Staff Valletta’s narrow limestone streets have always echoed with footsteps, but this month they’re humming with colour. Inside the vaulted halls of the National Museum of Fine Arts—freshly rebranded as MUŻA—Elaine Mifsud’s solo show “Realms of Colour” has…
Valletta watches London burn: Maltese diaspora holds breath as far-right violence erupts across the capital By late afternoon on the Strand, the scent of tear-gas drifted as far as the Maltese kiosk outside St Mary’s church, where 73-year-old Ġorġ Zammit had queued for his weekly ftira. Instead of the usual chatter in Maltese, the queue…
