10/30/2007 - Climate change is affecting Europe faster than the rest of the world and rising temperatures could transform the Mediterranean into a salty and stagnant sea, Italian experts said yesterday.

Warmer waters and increased salinity could doom many of the sea's plant and animal species and ravage the fishing industry, warned participants at a two-day national climate change conference that brought together some 2,000 scientists and officials in Rome.

"Europe and the Mediterranean are warming up faster than the rest of the world," said climatologist Filippo Giorgi. "It's a climate change hot spot, one of the areas where we actually see the change happening."

Scientists still do not know why the region is more sensitive to climate change, but Mr Giorgi said that in the next decades temperature increases hitting Europe during the summer months could be 40-50 per cent higher than elsewhere...(Read Full Article)

9/17/2007 - Newspeak was coined by George Orwell in his novel Nineteen Eighty Four to refer to the redefinition of words that would help the regime suppress opposition and freedom of speech. Orwell understood that manipulation of language can be a key to control.

Some developers today have become a very powerful force to reckon with, and some are quick to attempt to redefine words in the planning laws to get around even the most obvious restrictions.

One of the first examples of planningspeak to hit our shores was the notorious "cluster villas" to justify blocks of apartments in Madliena in a zone limited to villa development. That was in the early 1990s....(Read Full Article)

6/12/2007 - As various tall building projects all over Malta move into high gear, the media battle has begun, with each developer vying to woo potential investors. Money talks, and as of late it has talked volumes, with every glossy regaling us with a multistory feature, while full-pages adverts fill the dailies.

But what of the less appealing truths that are left unspoken? One of the most keenly contested projects is that of Fort Cambridge, the ex-Holiday Inn site where the residents feel cheated by the fact that Mepa has removed the developers’ obligation to carry out an Environment Impact Assessment (EIA). An EIA is a study of a project’s impact on the area’s geology, flora and fauna, traffic, air quality, social, cultural and heritage values, utility services, nuisance during construction, etc, in order to evaluate the best possible end result both for the project as well as the area. But an EIA takes time and costs money....(Read Full Article)

3/10/2007 - Members of the public showed their determination to learn more about their environmental rights and access to information when they braved the bad weather to attend a Forum organized by the NGO Flimkien ghal Ambjent Ahjar (FAA) on Friday evening. Celebrating FAA’s first anniversary, Coordinator Astrid Vella said that the NGO’s early experience in trying to preserve Malta’s heritage had immediately shown that the root of the problem lay in planning issues, hence the focus of the Forum....(Read Full Article)

12/24/2006 - Dak li finalment xpruna lil Astrid Vella biex tiehu azzjoni kien it-twaqqigh ta' l-aktar dar antika f'Tas-Sliema, fi Triq il-Kbira, meta organizzat kampanja bla heda halli ma titwaqqax. "Li kieku l-MEPA ma hargitx dak il-permess, ma nahsibx li dal-moviment tas-socjeta' civili kien qatt jibda. Dal-kaz kien indikazzajoni li meta l-izviluppaturi jkollhom ir-rih fil-qala, l-affarijiet isuru kif iridu huma", tghid Vella. L-agha shih li qam kontra d-decizjoni tal-MEPA biex isir it-twaqqigh, bi ksur kontra ghaxar regolamenti tal-MEPA u ta' zewg ligijiet, ghenu biex iqanqlu lil dal-moviment gdid, Flimkien ghal Ambjent Ahjar (FAA), biex jintefa' fl-azzjoni....(Read Full Article)