On the Dot

• The government, presumably the Office of the Prime Minister, has decided to reserve a good chunk of Castille Place, at the side of the Stock Exchange, for its own exclusive use. It did so with flower pots, barricades and whatnot. Little did it care about the poor pedestrian who has to use the road if cars are parked as shown in this picture.

Bad

• A tiny stretch of road in Stuart Street, Gżira, has so far been three months in a shambles. One wonders how long it will take for it to be asphalted and the debris and plastic barriers removed.

Blockage

• Trying to make contact with the Arms Ltd customer care department is still an impossible dream. Their e-mail inbox is full; new messages are returned as being undeliverable. Getting through over the telephone is also impossible. Despite the relocation and the new routines that were advertised, the only option left for consumers is to go to the offices personally and waste a lot of time waiting.

Breathless

• Bus passengers alighting at the Kulleġġ bus stop, Msida, in the direction of Valletta, face great peril. They have to step down on the wobbly iron rain culverts, which are in uneven, irregular and broken pavement slabs. Some elderly passengers have had bad falls resulting in bruises and sprains. Will it take a fatal trip for the stretch of road to be fixed?

Bridged

• A 19-year-old accused of spray-painting the nose and eyes of a lion statue on the Bridge of Lions at the foot of the bridge in St Augustine, Florida, has been placed under probation for a year, fined $1,200 and ordered to do 300 hours of community service. Not only that, he must also write a letter of apology to the city. Sentences like these can only serve as a deterrent to others who cannot tell the difference between a prank and vandalism.

Bagged

• After a fatal accident, a man was robbed. After fainting at a casino, a woman was also robbed. It is high time that perpetrators of crimes against people in vulnerable positions are given harsh sentences so that others will not be in the least tempted to emulate them.

Backing

• There is a constant barrage of comments about how children should “not be allowed” to frequent places of entertainment where alcohol is freely available and how they should have places made available to them that are not frequented by adults. It would be refreshing were each college to make the open spaces of at least one school in the area available to adequately supervised groups, if not individuals, so that activities can be carried out.

Belief

• One of the projected improvements to the judicial system will be the speeding up of court procedures by having witnesses who would already have given evidence during an inquiry not made to repeat their evidence during compilation proceedings, again and again, unless the defence needed to hear a particular witness. It is also laudable that the evidence of children will be allowed to be electronically recorded.

Bothered

• The advertisement in which a child pleads for persons to foster her is another in a series calculated to tug at heart strings. It does but after being heard on air 100 times it sounds trite and repetitive. If the clips cannot be rotated, the campaign ought to take a different tack.

Banded

• We have been informed that “the Police Association is being granted recognition as a trade union to negotiate policemen’s working conditions but it may not order industrial action...” They are also precluded from forming associations with the General Workers’ Union or the Union Ħaddiema Maqgħudin. Whereas it is understandable that a strike within the police force could make the island descend into anarchy, the issue of forbidding association with other unions is debatable.

Brightness

• Is there any kind of benchmark against which magistrates measure the sentences they give? Or is this merely a matter of personal opinion? It is obvious that, sometimes, people who deserve long sentences for perpetrating crimes against defenceless people, such as those with disabilities or the elderly, get off much more lightly than those who are also criminals but whose crimes did not target the weak.

Base

• One wonders whether there are any laws in the pipeline that would make anyone providing – rather than procuring – abortions liable to a loss of licence, if he is a medicinal practitioner. This is only reasonable, seeing that a policeman breaking the law and a legal person committing fraud are sentenced and stripped of their warrants or jobs.