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The Government, The Catholic Church and the prostitution in Malta

In today's The Times, you can read in an article by David Pace O’Shea, that, in general, Maltese are a helpful people, generous, hardworking, humble, careful with their money, welcoming, peaceful and unaggressive and that they love their families and, especially, their children. In the Observer’s opinion, anyone who states that he or she has all those qualities also might add the words conceited and boastful. The word humble is not the first that comes to one’s mind when reading all the other characteristics Mr. O’Shea states that Maltese in general possess. Thank God (just an expression!) that most Maltese do not consider themselves to have all those qualities (and I do not know of any other country’s citizens that would claim all these good characteristics). Since the article is written by a convinced catholic believer it might be interesting to hear his humble view, from a moral and Christian standpoint, on prostitution in Malta. Every time one passes the area around the closed Empire Stadium one can see prostitutes hanging out from windows or standing on the street offering men their services. In Malta it is allowed to buy and sell sexual services; such services are forbidden in many other EU states. One can ask how this complies with the Maltese character as described in today’s Times. The Maltese government and the Church might not officially be in favor of prostitution but they certainly do not try hard to solve the problem. Prostitution is closely connected with criminality such as trafficking and drug related crimes. There is no reason whatsoever to let young women be treated like slaves in any country and especially not in a country like Malta, which is said to be one of the most Christian in the world. It is a shame for Malta!




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Donald Duck government

When reading The Times one does not know if one should laugh or cry. Malta government seems more and more like a Donald Duck government, a joke, with government officials, sadly including members of the Judicial, being so dishonest that it is difficult to comprehend. The government officials seem so eager to be just bigwigs that they have forgotten who they are put to serve.The judicial system seems to be in a mess.

The Observer just wants to give a few examples from todays The Times.

Once more a new bribery probe is ongoing against Transport Malta officials.
This governmental body seems to be one of the most dishonest not only in Malta but in the whole EU. This time the bribery inquiry concerns three officials so far, but in 2010 another three officials and 230 other people were charged in connection with hundreds of driving licenses granted to people who had not even sat for a test. This proves that The Observer was absolutely right in the article “Traffic in Malta, a risky business” of Feb 14, although some of the licenses have been seized by the police. However, one thing was not correct; the driving licenses are not issued by Disney World or come with the cereal packages from Scotts, but are issued by Transport Malta against a monetary compensation. This way of giving out driving licenses must surely be promoting road safety in Malta.


Malta has a very old fashioned system for ensuring that people can show that they are entitled to vote in the coming council election. Policemen deliver the documents to every single voter in person. This means that the policemen knock doors for several weeks; no wonder that there are more policemen in Malta in relation to the size of the population than in most EU countries. In Sliema the police have failed to deliver documents to 58 % of the voters.

Since Sliema is said to be a PN stronghold one can wonder if this is one more situation in which bribes are occurring. A policeman who delivers documents in Sliema and is a convinced PL supporter can easily neglect to deliver in areas with strong support for PN. The Observer does not state that this is the case but has a time saving suggestion that also will exclude the possibility of bribes; Malta should modernize its system and this is very easily done. Malta has computerized lists of the population which easily can be sorted (if not this has been done already) by place of residence in voting lists. People then just have to show their ID cards when coming to the polls and be ticked off. The present system is just ridiculous.

The Observer just want to stress what is said in the article of Feb 15, “Reflections on the judicial system in Malta” by referring to the following articles in The Times of today. Here.

And do not forget to look into this one!




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Would fundamental rights in Malta be better off under British sovereignty?

Once more, one does not know if to cry or laugh; no, of course one should not laugh at the tragedy that Malta is causing many of the people in this country. In the former communist states, people were kept in prison without a trial. In Malta the state does exactly the same, see article in todays The Times. As stated before, the judicial system in Malta has collapsed and a thought has come to The Observer’s mind: In this sense may be Malta should be better off under British sovereignty. It is obvious to a foreigner that the government of Malta cannot live up to the most fundamental requirements for democracy, namely the one that a democracy do not keep people in prison without fair trials.




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Arriva bus drivers, madmen?



Notice the text on the bus to Marsaxlokk

Prospective Formel-1 champion
Yesterday The Observer went by bus to Marsaxlokk from Valletta, leaving the capital at about 10.40 am. The bus, which was an articulated bus, i e extra-long, had a sign saying it was a special tour and The Observer agrees, the tour was indeed a special one. The bus was completely full with passengers, both sitting and standing. The bus went sometimes in a speed that must have been more than 80 kilometers per hour. Several passengers were terrified, staring at each other in horror. It felt like the back of the bus would skid across the roadway in the curves. It was indeed a special and terrifying tour! Unfortunately, this type of experience is not unusual when going with Arriva buses although there are, of course, also careful drivers.





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Safe Dynamic Memory Management in Ada and SPARK

Safe Dynamic Memory Management in Ada and SPARK by Maroua Maalej, Tucker Taft, Yannick Moy:

Handling memory in a correct and efficient way is a step toward safer, less complex, and higher performing software-intensive systems. However, languages used for critical software development such as Ada, which supports formal verification with its SPARK subset, face challenges regarding any use of pointers due to potential pointer aliasing. In this work, we introduce an extension to the Ada language, and to its SPARK subset, to provide pointer types (“access types” in Ada) that provide provably safe, automatic storage management without any asynchronous garbage collection, and without explicit deallocation by the user. Because the mechanism for these safe pointers relies on strict control of aliasing, it can be used in the SPARK subset for formal verification, including both information flow analysis and proof of safety and correctness properties. In this paper, we present this proposal (which has been submitted for inclusion in the next version of Ada), and explain how we are able to incorporate these pointers into formal analyses

For the systems programmers among you, you might be interested in some new developments in Ada where they propose to add ownership types to Ada's pointer/access types, to improve the flexibility of the programs that can be written and whose safety can be automatically verified. The automated satisfiability of these safety properties is a key goal of the SPARK Ada subset.





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Kans op 2e golf, maar contactopsporing moet 2e lockdown vermijden: bekijk de beste fragmenten uit "Het coronadebat" - VRT NWS

  1. Kans op 2e golf, maar contactopsporing moet 2e lockdown vermijden: bekijk de beste fragmenten uit "Het coronadebat"  VRT NWS
  2. Het Corona Debat met Marc Van Ranst, Erika Vlieghe, Maggie De Block (Open Vld), Bart De Wever (N-VA) en anderen  De Morgen
  3. 'We moeten tijd winnen tot vaccin er is'  De Standaard
  4. Het grote coronadebat: “We moeten tijd winnen tot vaccin er is”  Het Belang van Limburg
  5. Hele verhaal bekijken via Google Nieuws







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Habitat: Environmentalists eye city’s investment policies

Divestment is “more urgent” in Toronto than NYC

A growing list of large institutional investors around the world – state and provincial pension funds, university endowments, and most recently, New York City itself, have been aggressively divesting from fossil fuel investments so as to do their part in mitigating against climate change. Here in Toronto, it’s been a different story. Prominent institutional investors, […]

The post Habitat: Environmentalists eye city’s investment policies appeared first on Torontoist.




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Civic Tech: We tried to get a copy of the Sidewalk Toronto agreement

Why all the secrecy?

If you follow the news in Toronto or if you’re interested in technology, you’ve probably heard of Sidewalk Toronto by now. It’s a joint project of Sidewalk Labs, a sister company of Google, and Waterfront Toronto. This is the tech giant’s first foray into urban development and infrastructure, with Toronto hosting the pilot project. In […]

The post Civic Tech: We tried to get a copy of the Sidewalk Toronto agreement appeared first on Torontoist.




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Top 10 Friday Night SmackDown moments: WWE Top 10, May 8, 2020

Top 10 Friday Night SmackDown moments: WWE Top 10, May 8, 2020




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Becky Lynch racks up most total days as Raw Women’s Champion in history

Becky Lynch has become the Superstar with the most total days as Raw Women’s Champion, surpassing Alexa Bliss.




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The automatic diaper-changing machine is now in development

BabyWasher, the automatic dirty-diaper-changing invention, honored by the 2019 Ig Nobel Prize for engineering, now has a name, and is now undergoing intense development. You can follow the progress by visiting the inventor’s new web site, BabyWashers.com.




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Men At Play

Oh, did you think we were going to eat it? Haven't you heard, wasting food is the manliest game! ~Not-So-Handy Andy




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Leaving Comments - How To Get Noticed

One of the ways to get people to notice your site is to comment on other blogs and websites. The benefits of leaving good comments are that you not only get to add your two cents about a topic, you can also gain valuable links pointing to your site. Sounds easy right, and for the most part it is, but when selecting blogs or websites to comment on you need to consider some things. First try to find sites related to your niche, while you can comment on any site you want you stand a better chance of getting traffic from that site if it’s a related site. You also want these sites if possible to be on the number one page of Google for keywords you’re trying to rank for




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Crap Comments - How You Can Hurt Your Site By Leaving Bad Comments

Leaving comments on blogs and websites. It doesn’t matter if the site is a “do follow” or not, building links through comments can help get the word out about your site. Comments are also a good indicator if you’re doing something right and can give you great feedback. Of course in a perfect world every comment would be a good one, the reality is that at some point your going to get bad comments or comment vomit if you will. Self centered crap that’s there to only advertise their site, bash yours, and all other types of garbage that adds nothing of value.






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Somalis turn to Dr Hyena to fight depression, mental illness

The growls from the caged hyena reverberate through the room as Mohamed Sheikh Yakub slumps silently in a chair nearby, hoping the animal will frighten away the evil spirits he says have troubled him since his divorce.




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Youtube Comment WIN






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F&S leggen ene krans namens de veteranen (NRC, ma, 04-05-20)




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How to Break the Cycle of Debt and Mental Health

The spread of coronavirus has shaken the economy with mass layoffs and increased uncertainty. As a result more and more Americans are finding themselves in mounting debt. In 2018, the American household debt reached an all-time high at $13.21 trillion across 300 million people. But for those with a diagnosable mental illness, debt has an even more detrimental impact.  One in four adults will experience a mental health event at some point in their life. The relationship between debt and […]

The post How to Break the Cycle of Debt and Mental Health appeared first on The Simple Dollar.




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Counteracting the “Sameness” of Frugal Living

One complaint people often make when they settle into a more frugal lifestyle is that their life begins to take on a feeling of “sameness,” in that each day feels more similar to the others than it did before they made frugal changes to their life. (This same shock is being felt by people under stay at home orders, too, for similar reasons.) I’ll give you a great example of this. Many people settle into a routine of eating out […]

The post Counteracting the “Sameness” of Frugal Living appeared first on The Simple Dollar.




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How to test length contraction by experiment?

Relativistic length contraction is theoretically predicted but not directly tested, which lead to incorrect interpretation of the theory illustrated by Bell’s spaceship paradox and Ehrenfest paradox. But these paradoxes can help us designing experiments to test length contraction. Ideal direct experimental proof should contain the following steps: 1. Measure the tested object’s length at rest,...




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From Michelson–Morley experiment to length contraction

Length contraction is used to explain Michelson–Morley experiment. A Michelson interferometer is formed by 2 perpendicular arms. The journey of light along the vertical arm gives the time dilation law. The journey of light along the horizontal arm gives the length contraction law. The derivation scheme of the length contraction law is: 1. The time...




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Length, distance and Michelson–Morley experiment

There are 2 types of length contraction, the physical meaning of each is explained below with the help of the example shown in Figure 1. The Earth and the star are stationary and the spaceship mobile. The 2 types of length contraction are: 1) Object contraction: In the frame of the Earth the length of...




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Velocity, mass, momentum and energy of an accelerated object in relativity

Analytical derivation of relativistic velocity, mass, momentum and kinetic energy of an accelerated object. For Special relativity the momentum of an object of rest mass m0 and velocity u is expressed by equation (1) which is infinite when u equals c. Is it physically meaningful that the momentum of an object becomes infinite while its...




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Active and Independent Living Improvement Programme (AILIP)

Sarah Mitchell Programme Director for the Active and Independent Living Improvement Programme and Susan Kelso AHP Lead for Early Intervention (Scottish Government) spoke to Iriss.fm about the programme and the LifeCurve Survey.

The Active and Independent Living Improvement Programme (AILIP) was officially launched on April 26th by Shona Robison MSP, Cabinet Secretary for Health and Sport. The vision for Scotland as outlined in the Health and Social care Delivery Plan is to have a Scotland with high quality services that have a focus on prevention, early intervention and supported self management.

The AILIP will be a key contributor to delivering that vision.

Transcript of episode

Music Credit: Something Elated by Broke For Free




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Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival

Michael McEwan speaks to Richard Warden, the film lead, about the 2017 Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival (10-29 October).

Transcript of episode

Music Credit: Something Elated by Broke For Free




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Women in social work education

On 24 October, Iriss attended Navigating Troubled Waters: Women in social work education in Scotland seminar, where we heard from Emeritus Professor Viv Cree and Dr Mary Mitchell about a study funded by the Carnegie UK Trust, which began with the realisation that women in the academy fare less well than men across all disciplines: they are less likely to be promoted, they earn less pay, and they are much less likely to become professors.

What this means for the discipline of social work education is explored.

Transcript of episode

Music Credit: Make your dream a reality by Scott Holmes




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Foster carer recruitment

Dorothy Neriah is a a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh who is conducting research on rethinking how we understand, evaluate and undertake foster carer recruitment.

Michelle from Iriss had a conversation with her about how she came to focus on this topic, current practice in foster carer recruitment, and the benefits of rethinking the approach.

Contact Dorothy about her research: dorothy.neriah@ed.ac.uk 

Transcript of episode

Music Credit: Make your dream a reality by Scott Holmes.




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Adult social care recruitment campaign

'There’s More to Care than Caring' is a Scottish Government-led adult social care recruitment campaign which was launched in January 2020. It aims to encourage people to take up a career in care.

Michelle from Iriss had a conversation with Lorraine Gray, Chief Executive of SSSC, about the purpose of the campaign, the importance of adult social care work and how people can get involved in promoting the campaign.

Campaign website: https://caretocare.scot/

Transcript of episode

Music Credit: Make your dream a reality by Scott Holmes.




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Dan Hughes on trauma, early child development and attachment

Dan Hughes is a leading authority on dyadic developmental psychotherapy and has integrated recent research on the neurobiology of trauma, early child development and attachment.  

During one of his many trips to Scotland as a guest of Scottish Attachment in Action, Iriss was pleased to video record Dan explaining how the brain reacts to trauma and how an understanding of this process is helpful to foster and adoptive parents as well professionals such as residential care workers and teachers.

read more




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Peer support roles in mental health services

We've published Insight 31 - Peer support roles in mental health services - which was written by Louise Christie, Network Manager (Policy and Development) at Scottish Recovery Network. 

The print version has been newly designed to reflect our new brand and colours. I think you'll agree that it looks rather lovely. Print copies are available on request

read more




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Lives sentenced. Experiences of repeated punishment

Little is known about the effects of repeated imprisonment. Very few research studies have examined how those who are punished by the criminal justice system experience and interpret their sentences. Research that does exist, like my PhD, has largely focused on one single sentence. But people who have served many sentences (in other words, who have long punishment careers), are likely not to experience criminal punishments in isolation, but in the context of their wider lives and previous sentences. The aim of the Lives Sentenced project is to address this gap in the knowledge base by examining the life stories of 35 people with long punishment careers




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Home supervision requirements

Home supervision requirements are a type of legal supervision order at home which is unique to the Scottish system of child legislation. Despite being the most common type of disposal used by the Children’s Hearing little is known about how HSRs work in practice or about its impact on young people and families. Using a multi-method approach that included secondary analysis of the Scottish Children’s Reporter Administration (SCRA) dataset; documentary analysis of social work case files; and in-depth interviews; this research seeks to find out more about the nature, scope and outcomes of HSRs from the perspective of those who are affected the most by this type of compulsory intervention – young people, their parents and social workers.




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Evaluation of sixteen women's community justice services in Scotland

In 2013-15, the Scottish Government funded 16 projects proposed by criminal justice partners across Scotland to develop community services for women who offend. Developments were based on existing service provision and to ensure changes could be sustained locally at the end of the funding. Funding varied in amount and timeframes. Most of the projects were undertaken by local authority criminal justice social work1 (CJSW) departments with partner providers, including public and third sector agencies. The national evaluation examined how the 16 women’s community justice services (WCJSs) were implemented and to what extent they contributed towards positive outcomes for women. A further aim was to build local capacity for self-evaluation in WCJSs. Findings were drawn from two phases of interviews with practitioners and women, secondary documents, and quantitative data for 1,778 women who were in the WCJSs between April and December 2014. This included outcomes data for 406 women.




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What helps women who have learning disabilities get checked for cervical cancer?

This is a paper produced as part of the PROP2 (Practitioner Research: Outcomes and Partnership) programme, a partnership between the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships (CRFR) at the University of Edinburgh and IRISS that was about health and social care in Scotland. This paper was written by Elaine Monteith from ENABLE Scotland who participated in the PROP2 programme. What this research paper explores: All women are asked to go to the doctor every few years to get a check for cancer but women who have a learning disability don’t go for these checks as often as other women. The paper explore what barriers there are for women attending for checks and also looks at what could be done to encourage women them to attend.




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People affected by dementia programme. Individual awards pilot projects: Argyll & Bute and Edinburgh. Evaluation report

This evaluation report is based on feedback from people living with dementia and carers who received an Individual Award from the Life Changes Trust. The Individual Awards Pilot Scheme was run in Argyll & Bute and Edinburgh in 2014-15 and aimed to provide a small amount of additional financial empowerment to a number of individuals whose lives have been affected by dementia, to help improve their well-being and quality of life. A secondary aim of the pilot scheme was to find out what people would spend the Award on when given relatively broad choice, and what benefit that might bring in the short and medium terms.




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‘I’ve been thinking’: How does completing life story work affect people with dementia?

This is a paper produced as part of the PROP2 (Practitioner Research: Outcomes and Partnership) programme, a partnership between the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships (CRFR) at the University of Edinburgh and IRISS that was about health and social care in Scotland. This paper was written by iain Houston from Alzeimer Scotland who participated in the PROP2 programme. What this research paper explores: An explorative case study investigating how completing a life story project affected a person with dementia.




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Resilience and wellbeing in people living with dementia in relation to perceived attitudes in their communities

This is a paper produced as part of the PROP2 (Practitioner Research: Outcomes and Partnership) programme, a partnership between the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships (CRFR) at the University of Edinburgh and Iriss that was about health and social care in Scotland. This paper was written by Geraldine Ditta from Alzheimer Scotland who participated in the PROP2 programme. People living with dementia are at risk of becoming socially isolated and disconnected from their local communities. Reactions from others on being told someone has dementia can have a significant impact on the person with dementia’s sense of self. This study sought to explore the perceptions of people with dementia in relation to attitudes within their communities and how they subsequently respond. Semi-structured interviews were carried out to examine how they feel about their lives with dementia.




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Mental Capacity Act (MCA) resource

This report shows commissioners and providers of care how to embed the principles of the Mental Capacity Act (MCA) into care and support planning across the board.




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Can yoga create calm in people with dementia?

This is a paper produced as part of the PROP2 (Practitioner Research: Outcomes and Partnership) programme, a partnership between the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships (CRFR) at the University of Edinburgh and Iriss that was about health and social care in Scotland. This paper was written by Sarah Duff from Alzheimer Scotland who participated in the PROP2 programme and is a research study exploring the experience of group yoga classes and music with those affected by dementia




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Dementia Services Development Centre (DSDC)

The Dementia Services Development Centre (DSDC) draws on research and practice, from across the world, to provide a comprehensive, up-to-date resource on all aspects of dementia.