Archive for July, 2008

Many individuals have spent the greatest part of their lives contributing to society both through the work that they have provided as well as through the taxation and securities that they have paid. Throughout the educational process when such individuals were still young, they were brought up to believe that the way to be successful in life was to perform well in school, get a well-paying, stable job in which one could contribute and earn a living, get married and raise a family and, once a ripe age is reached, the cherry on the cake would be to retire and enjoy the ‘golden years’ of their lives and live happily ever after on a state pension.

The reality has been changing and continues to change and such changes are gradually but surely sending shocks throughout the system. For one thing, the concept of the stable job is dissipating in favour of a more flexible workforce where movement is a fact of life.

Secondly, it takes about 4 working individuals to support the pension of the average retiree and, in the context of an ageing population; this is placing strain upon resources. The practice is unsustainable. Being most suited to growing (or at least stable) populations, the pinch of this reality is being felt, with pensions remaining on the low side while the age at which one becomes applicable for pensions creeps upwards. This has a two-pronged effect.

Materially, requiring the taxation contribution of four working persons to support a single pensioner in an ageing population forebodes a coming bottleneck where the functional continuation of pensions will no longer remain sustainable. Already the motions to shift the pensionable age upwards, under the convenient justification in the form of an increased life expectancy, may itself be interpreted to be a quiet admission of a system groaning beneath the weight of its own burden. A not so quiet potential sign of admission is the growing popularity and media emphasis on private augmentation in social securities and private pension schemes.

I am under the impression that this has not gone unnoticed by the general population. There is a thus far suppressed but growing awareness of the situation and a growing fear that the mandatory social security dues paid to the government under the impression that such would be going towards one’s own pension, may in fact not be honoured. One likely reason why this may not have been brought to the fore as of yet is because the engine is still grinding on and has not ground to a halt as of yet – the pensions are still being honoured so far – out of what is supposed to be the securities of the pensioners of tomorrow.

Once the reality of the situation does sink in however, the social implications may make themselves plainer to see. While it is highly doubtful that the younger generations would look upon their elders as parasites in the event of a pension crash, and would almost certainly not attribute blame in the event of a seizure, the elderly person may feel the weight of burden upon themselves simply because that is the placement that the system would have engineered them to assume in the present of any such crisis to be. As for the Government… well the Nationalists have already gotten away with rises in VAT, departure taxes, utilities surcharges (the precursor of which Labour failed to get away with a decade earlier) and who knows what more. People will still pay through the nose and the people will still blindly and unquestioningly support those who seem accountable only to themselves.

This is the second segment in a three-part series recalling different facets of the Bulgarian crisis back in 2007. Focus shall now be placed upon the claims and the accusations, the evidence and the circumstances surrounding the controversy. In doing so the intent is to demonstrate the innocence of the previously detained medics through this re-examination.

Firstly we shall look upon the nature and the timing of Libya’s accusations levelled against the five Bulgarian nurses, and Palestinian doctor. The medics were not the first to be accused of deliberately infecting over four hundred children. Such dubious honour was reserved for the Israeli Mossad and American CIA jointly, both secret service outfits. It was only subsequently that the focus was brought upon the medics.

Secondly, dubious is the Libyan authorities’ claim that the Palestinian doctor was responsible for masterminding the infections. It would have been extremely unlikely for a Palestinian to work with Israeli secret services to pull off such a stunt.

What was the motive? The Libyan authorities claimed that the children were deliberately infected in an experiment to find a cure for AIDS… In a country where there is no shortage of children suffering from AIDS.

Thirdly the Authorities claimed that the Palestinian doctor had not only masterminded the plot but had also succeeded in enlisting at least five Bulgarian nurses in assisting him in carrying out the plot.

Let us pause here for a moment and reflect upon this point. Not only was this Palestinian doctor able to mastermind a plot to infect children with HIV, for the Israeli Mossad, in order to try to find a cure for AIDS, but he apparently managed to achieve a 100% enlistment success rate with the Bulgarian nurses, never mind that it went completely against the training and instincts of each one of them.

Ok… so perhaps the Palestinian doctor duped the nurses into assisting him unknowingly… and yet not a single such accusation was levelled against him by his fellow detainees. And then there is the small matter of not a single other Bulgarian nurse coming forward with claims of being approached by the doctor. Startling indeed.

Fourthly the Authorities claimed to have found bags of HIV-infected blood in the apartments of the medics. Damning evidence indeed except for the small detail that the HIV virus can only last several hours outside a host body, and this only within laboratory conditions. Therefore there was practically no point in collecting infected blood from the hospital for use later in transfusions.

As if this article of evidence weren’t shot full of holes already, on two separate occasions international scientists and scientific bodies had testified or published findings indicating that the infections were not only far more likely due to poor hygiene and the reuse of syringes at the Benghazi hospital, but the the strains of HIV within the infected children concerned suggested that it had been contracted before the Bulgarians started working there. Such evidence was conveniently barred from subsequent appeals.

It would be a little easier to understand this tangle if one were to consider that Benghazi has historically been the venue for a number of anti-regime uprisings. Perhaps the Libyan authorities genuinely felt that the mass infections were too much of a coincidence… but within the context of relative ostracization from the Libyan state in terms of public spending, as would be the likely result of needing to suppress uprisings within the region, spending in healthcare would also have had to have been hit badly.

Also, within this volatile region over four hundred families were clamouring for the blood of the perpetrators who had terminally sickened their sons and daughters. Hence it is not beyond speculation that Libya needed somebody to take the fall and the implication of a Palestinian doctor and Bulgarian nurses, gaining confessions through duress, might have been an attempt to do so. They were to be sacrifices to be made in exchange for the relative satisfaction of the Benghazi population.

Fortunately history decided otherwise.

There are not many things that I truly get hung up on. For the most part things just slide off of me like water off a duck’s back. However there do remain a few things that bother me and one of the worst would probably be personal inefficiency.

I like to be punctual. It doesn’t matter if it is meeting a deadline set by others or myself or whether its getting to a certain place by or at a certain time, I do not like to keep persons waiting. It is fortunate that I do not apply these standards quite as rigorously to other persons around me as I’d probably end up with an even smaller network of individuals that I’d call friends than I do at present.

However I also have several rather annoying habits that sometimes hinder my ability to meet my own standards. One is a tendency to underestimate tasks that I have to deal with, or to overestimate my ability to deal with them within a set period of time. Another is a tendency to take on or seek to take on more tasks than I can actually handle at any one time. This is why my personal to-do list dwarfs my done list. Either way these little quirks mean that I end up encroaching upon or even surpassing my deadlines more often than I would care to admit. It is similarly fortunate that this is far more likely where the tasks are being dealt by myself and ‘for’ myself but occasionally other persons do get a bitter taste of it in the form of way-overstepped expected deadlines.

I guess it comes down to having time-management issues really and, since I am reluctant to give up the new-found pace that I’ve set into motion within this web log, I thought it would be good to use this opportunity both to apologize to that individual who is waiting for work from myself as well as to provide a little insight to readers. I am working upon it of course, and will try to get results through as soon as possible, but I’ll be sparing the estimates this time as they were wildly optimistic the last time round and I’m nowhere near done with the segment concerned.

Besides, I can be a bit of a perfectionist and if there is one thing that troubles me more than handing in work late, it would have to be handing in what I personally consider to be shoddy work.

This is the first segment of a three-part series reflecting upon different facets of the Bulgarian medic crisis back in 2007. It is appropriate to recall the event as we approach the first anniversary of the conclusion of this chapter. This first segment shall focus upon the chronological progression of events.

Back in 1999 five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor were taken into Libyan custody and detained as part of an investigation over the infection of over four hundred children with the HIV virus in a hospital within the Benghazi province. Charges were levelled against them, their guilt was declared and they were sentenced to death, so the medics spent the next eight years of their lives in imprisonment as they exhausted their options in appeal. All this was in vain and on the 11th of July 2007 their final appeal was rejected.

On the 16th of July 2007 an agreement was reached between the European Union and the Libyan government, paving the way for victims’ families to waive their legal right to seek the death penalty in exchange for a financial compensation package from the European Union adding up to four hundred million dollars to be divided amongst the families. As a result the death sentences upon the six medics were commuted to sentences of life imprisonment.

Throughout this saga protests worldwide had for the most part fallen upon deaf ears; Libya and the European Union had remained locked in stalemate. It was ultimately only through the timely intervention of France’s then freshly-elected prime minister Nicholas Sarkozy and his then first lady, Cecilia Sarkozy, that a positive progression of events began to unfold. Through a series of diplomatic visits and negotiations the then couple were able to come to further agreements with the Libyan leader Gaddafi, including treatment for the surviving infected children within France, sponsored improvement of the Benghazi hospital, grants for Libyan students studying within the European Union and even, for a time, flirting with the idea of permitting Libya to invest within nuclear energy.

In late July of 2007, eight years after the medics’ saga began, it ended and Libya finally arranged for their release and immediate air transfer to Bulgaria, whereupon who’s arrival they were promptly pardoned by Bulgarian president Georgi Parvanov. And this is where the chapter closed almost one year ago.

Every one of us who has ever been behind the wheel after sun-down has likely experienced it. Some of us, especially those of the younger generations, use the twilight hours to let off steam after a day of labour. Some others use them for relaxation. Whether in the chaos of a discotheque, the relative calm of a shore side promenade, in the bustle of a familiar pub or indulging in the fare of a restaurant, many tend to involve a few minutes of driving time and driving time after dark can be a rather risky affair, particularly when one needs to skip town.

When one leaves the relative population density of the population centres, the towns and the villages, we tend to find that the roads become more winding and are poorer served by street lighting. We find ourselves relying more upon the headlamps of our vehicles and the more cautious of ourselves tend to slow down to compensate. However other drivers do similarly and the impact upon one’s visibility can be very similar to or worse than that apparent in the picture. Visibility in meters decreases considerably and one is much less able to make out what lies ahead. To compound the problem, the lack of road lighting means that one has much less of an idea of what or who is lurking or walking along the road. Even worse is the tendency for such roads to lack even rudimentary pedestrian pavements.

Unfortunately we reside within a country that only considers seeking to solve problems when fatalities occur, and such is not guaranteed. Why is it that the areas where tiny shrines to the deceased are set up tend also to have been or remain poorly lit and poorly served by pavements? Why is it that a much larger portion of animals killed during the night also happen to be within areas of poor lighting? I would hazard to guess that hundreds of animals fall victim to Maltese roads every year and I would wager that the density of such fatalities would rank highly amongst EU member states, were they recorded.

Of course the countryside is not the only place that one can find poor lighting. The lighting infrastructure of the Maltese Islands, overall, is ageing, although it seems to be sufficiently maintained thus far overall. However more striking are the gaps that exist in the lighting infrastructure. Within Paceville alone there are several poorly-lit roads just one-to-two blocks away from the entertainment hub. The roads leading down to the promenade are regularly used as makeshift latrines and I would hazard to guess that they are also locations of elevated mugging and rape risk, as crime thrives in the dark.

Street lights may be costly to run, in their current outdated set up, but today (preferably yesterday) is the time to start to phase old energy-guzzling bulbs out in favour of LED-technology. While I am not certain of the suitability of the technology in high velocity, non-urban zones I do believe that they would be ideally suited to lighting up the street level of our urbanized localities, including Paceville.

Well, it was a rather typical scene for a Friday night. The music from many discotheques permeated into the streets, the different tunes and beats polluting each other as they did so, as did the chilly overflow from air-conditioning units blissfully unaware of the practical doubling of the surcharge in recent days. The cigarette fumes unfurled and reached for the sky in a futile exercise of vanity and the spent glass bottles of alcoholic beverages skittled and rolled upon the streets, long forgotten by the lads and girls who had drunken them dry earlier.

In the heart of Paceville there was a young man struggling prostrate upon the ground, his forehead bruising and bloodied and a look upon his face that can only be described as a picture of rage and anguish combined. Several youths closed in and withdrew from the crowd around him, raining down kicks and blows upon him in the most cowardly of fashions, with precious few fools stepping in to break up the fight. Bottles were broken, skin was broken, shirts were bloodied and stained long before the boys in blue, a half-dozen-men-strong, strolled in to pick up the pieces.

I do not know how this incident began but I do know how it should not have ended. I was under the impression that glass containers were barred from the streets of Paceville and with good reason. Not only do broken bottles pose a lasting danger to the exposed feet of revellers but they are only too easily converted into instantaneous potentially lethal weapons.

It is disturbing how few individuals there typically are in any crowd willing to interfere in such potentially deadly conflicts. It is indeed more convenient to stand by the sidelines and watch the show unfold but when the cost of one’s impromptu entertainment is potentially the life of another, it just smacks of something not too far removed of the evil of the act itself.

It has been reported on the Times that Minister Austin Gatt has gone on record stating words to the effect that investing in alternative sources of energy (with the exception of nuclear energy) would be more expensive compared to remaining with fossil fuels. He also went on to note that there exists a cable that leads from Malta to Sicily that would enable Malta to purchase electricity from abroad.

Yet Dr. Gatt also went on record stating that investment within a deep sea wind farm is still on the drawing board – never mind that weeks earlier it was reported that the Nationalist government was still looking into exactly how it would implement another electoral promise of energy-saving bulbs.

What was not mentioned however, is how this fits in with the earlier refusal/ stonewalling of an alternative energy laboratory several years ago to have been set up in the vicinity of what has now been sold off to the owners of Smart City.

What is also similarly confounding to common logic is Dr. Gatt’s sound judgement on the viability of alternative energy in the context of a resource as volatile in supply and in price as oil. Is his judgement not as unsound as if the Mayor of Venice were to come out and say that loss of the city to the waves would be viable comparative to the setting up of sea water barriers to keep water levels down at high tide?

What one deeply suspects at this time is that the following may be true. The undersea cable is in itself an expressed interest in purchasing power from abroad. While this may very well make economic sense, the government needs to remember that it is running a country and not a private company. They are running our lives and I for one would like to see that they don’t ruin our lives through furthering the existing dependency culture that persists throughout various segments of society.

Sure alternative energy ‘may’ be more costly in the short run, perhaps over the span of five-to-ten years, but beyond this time an intelligently set up alternative energy grid would pay off big time. We also need to incorporate alternative energy into our daily lives – our architecture – not just out at sea (which I would be wary of, not convinced of the government’s ability to properly set up and maintain such feats of engineering so far out of the discerning sight of its citizens). Furthermore one cannot neglect to mention that alternative energies tend to be greener and this in itself could have a positive effect upon pollution related healthcare costs.

It is a responsibility, but it is firmly my belief that privatizing the family silver is not going to pay up the booze forever. The government cannot continue to shun what used to be and remains its responsibilities and, if it truly isn’t prepared to face the challenges head on, then perhaps it should step aside for those who will as such responsibilities were and remain strategic interests in promoting and upholding the living standards of the people.