http://bigstory.ap.org/article/migrant-crisis-overwhelms-italy-churches-help

I said ‘gang rape’ not just any crime.

A priest, also hailing from Nadur, intervened – shamefully, not to protect the girl, but to exert pressure on her parents not to report the crime to the police, and also mediated in an attempt to buy their silence.

So, Charles Sammut, where does that leave the people of Nadur, of Gozo, and the Gozo Curia? Should they all be barred from taking the ferry to Malta?

[Daphne – I don’t know why I bother, David. The fact that something exists in many countries does not mean it is NOT irrational. On the contrary, the more likely it is to be irrational because irrationality, and not rationality, is the natural human condition. Rationality is the product of a combination of education, knowledge, learning and intelligence. Irrationality is NOT most prevalent in the most advanced and educated countries – it is LEAST prevalent there. It is MOST prevalent where there are great masses of uneducated people: take your pick. Would Hugo Chavez have been so popular in Venezuela if the great mass of the population were not illiterate peasants? Are nuclear physicists irrational?]

‘the other was the cocaine-addicted black sheep son of a petrol hawker’

While on the topic. The term ‘black sheep’ is NOT racist.

It stems from the genetic effect in sheep whereby a recessive gene occasionally manifests in the birth of a sheep with black rather than white coloring. These sheep naturally stand out in the flock.

The idiom serves to describe an odd or disreputable member of a family.

B-but…. but they’re white.

[Daphne – Gang rape is characteristic of nothing. Drunken yahoos from highly privileged backgrounds are perfectly capable of gang rape. Two men stabbed the mothers of their children 50 times, in front of those children, in Malta in the last few years. One was a white-collar worker from a conservative, middle-class background; the other was the cocaine-addicted black sheep son of a petrol hawker.]

[Daphne – I think most sensible people would say they would rather have African immigrants as neighbours than any of that lot.]

If I told my wife what she had to wear, I’d have to wear the burka myself for a couple of weeks until the swelling went down.