The dangers of putting your name to articles you haven’t written, in a language you don’t understand

Published: March 16, 2014 at 1:02am

nukes

Labour MEP Joseph Cuschieri with a fetching young lass in Brussels

Labour MEP Joseph Cuschieri with a fetching young lass in Brussels

Labour MEP Joseph Cuschieri has had an article published in Times of Malta, which he hasn’t written (he doesn’t speak, let alone write, English).

It’s called ‘Don’t dump nukes in Med’. And it is about the dumping of chemical, not nuclear, weapons in the Mediterranean.

I wouldn’t bother trying to explain to him that nukes is American slang for nuclear weapons, or that chemical weapons are something else entirely. But at least it should be explained to the office intern who wrote this.




16 Comments Comment

  1. H.P. Baxxter says:

    If I could afford a defence lawyer I’d call him a clown.

  2. Connor Attard says:

    When you say that a person doesn’t speak English at all, do you mean it in a literal sense; or are their language skills so abysmally poor and childish that they’re unable to talk about anything less trivial than say, the weather?

    [Daphne – Joseph Cuschieri can’t speak English at all, though he understands very simple spoken English without complicated syntax and with a basic vocabulary.]

    In any case: How on Earth are you even allowed to run for the MEP elections without a good grasp of the English language? It’s an official language of the country, and broken English is often indicative of a low level of education across the board.

    [Daphne – Not often indicative, but always indicative. It is impossible to be well educated when you speak only Maltese, given that the means of acquiring a good education do not come in that language.]

    • Connor Attard says:

      Oh right, Cuschieri wasn’t elected. He filled the gap Muscat left behind, didn’t he? In that case, he shouldn’t even have been considered for the job. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

      [Daphne – There has been another EP election since Muscat resigned his seat, so no, he didn’t fill that gap. Cuschieri got the sixth seat when it was finally allocated to Malta. So yes, he was elected.]

    • Joe Fenech says:

      What’s Cuschieri’s background, apart from Super 1 man?

      [Daphne – That’s his brother, Manuel. Joseph, as I recall, worked at Magic Kiosk in Sliema.]

  3. one of us says:

    Ever since articles above his name have been appearing in Times of Malta, I’ve been dying to know who’d written them. Does he honestly believe we thought he did?

  4. P Sant says:

    Haven’t read the article and don’t mean to. Doesn’t he have any leverage within this government not to allow something like that to happen? Or is he still thinking as though he were in the Opposition benches?

  5. giraffa says:

    Surely he must have picked up enough ‘English’ to be able to wait on Magic Kiosk’s patrons. “How you want your stake, Sah?”

  6. the saint says:

    I am under the impression that this man was reading for a university degree. What became of that?

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