Paul Carachi, who died yesterday aged 80, was a language expert who pioneered popular journalism in Malta. He was given the Gold Award by the Institute of Maltese Journalists last November for revolutionising Maltese journalism by introducing tabloid-style journalism and investigative reporting in the 1960's and 1970s. Professor Henry Frendo called him “the giant of Maltese journalism.”

I interviewed Paul Carachi a few months ago for my biographical work about Gerry Zammit. Among those I interviewed or consulted for this project during the past twelve months, he is the fourth person to die following the demise of former parliamentary speaker Joseph Baldacchino, trade unionist JC Saliba and historian Rev Alexander Bonnici. They were all extremely helpful and I will forever be grateful for their advice.

Congratulations to maltafootball.com, a website dedicated to Maltese football coverage that today celebrates ten years of existence. In this piece, founding editor Antoine Busuttil describes how it grew from a news section of a Premier League club website to become the most comprehensive football news website on the island. maltafootball.com is part of the MaltaMedia Online Network.

French Europe Minister Catherine Colonna said in a speech that the functioning and current state of the EU is 'worrying'. She said nobody can understand why the Europeans are unable to help one another in an organised fashion in fighting forest fires or in coordinating the evacuations of their nationals from Lebanon. She said the EU was suffering from general fatigue, and criticised the 'slow rhythm' of the EU's decision-making process. Colonna argued that the EU's problems derive from the fact that it has not sufficiently adapted to enlargement and globalisation, and said a fundamental leap is necessary to avoid the EU's collapse. In conclusion, she called for a bigger EU budget, saying, "we will not become a power by spending only 1% of GDP!". In response to her speech, an article in German paper Die Welt criticises Colonna's comment that the functioning and state of the EU are 'worrying', noting that it was the French who rejected the Constitution, watered down the services bill and blocked reforms of the CAP

In today's Times, Herman Grech focuses on the chorus of disapproval for the Malta Brand campaign and talks to the experts about the MTA's unpopular marketing initiative. One of the campaign critics Winston Zahra tells him that "the message has been pitched at too high a level and is being missed by many people":

"Concurrently, people who do understand it have found it patronising and, quite frankly, I think this has resulted due to the fact that the MTA is trying to persuade people to take responsibility where the authority has failed miserably in what it promised to deliver itself." Moreover, the timing of the campaign, being launched in the middle of a poor period for the tourism industry, has led some people to look at it as a simple PR exercise, Mr Zahra said.

In yesterdays's Times, the same Winston Zahra who is both a hotelier and a governemnt advisor told Steve Mallia that the Brand Malta campaign "has been torn apart locally":

That message is necessary and correct but the way it's being transmitted is too complicated and goes over the heads of too many of the people that need to understand it. The other problem we have is our sales and marketing effort which has been very ineffective over the past 18 months.

Even the MTA's brand consultant Christian Sinding, the brains behind the Brand Malta campaign, acknowledges the harsh criticism and "admits that the local campaign can be fine-tuned":

"We might have used language which wasn't accessible to everybody. In hindsight, it might have been a better idea to talk about the core values," Mr Sinding, who steered several successful branding initiatives overseas, said.

Any guesses who brought Christian Sinding to Malta? Well, according to this interview in The Business Times last March, it was ironically Winston Zahra himself who recommended him as a way of "supporting" the former MTA chairman, Romwald Lungaro-Mifsud:

When Romwald was appointed I told him I did not agree with his appointment and the rest of the team on the restructuring committee did not agree with his appointment. But I also told Romwald he had my full support. I did support him and even put the MTA in touch with Christian Sinding.

A cynic might suggest that Christian Sinding helped Lungaro-Mifsud "accomplish his mission". Commenting on the "resignation" of the MTA chairman, the editor of The Malta Independent on Sunday Noel Grima was not very kind in his assessment:

One of the “missions” that was “accomplished”, other than the advertising spend on CNN seen in countries, many of which have no direct connection to Malta, was the famous and expensive Brand Malta exercise, which has become a national laughing stock and has not served one whit to make Malta any better for incoming tourists. Once again, the failure of this exercise shows the faults that have bedevilled MTA and its predecessor NTOM: high spend on consumer advertising, little follow-up and even less, achieving results at ground level. It is a measure of the desperation at the top, a tourism entrepreneur told this newspaper: in times of trouble, the last card to play is to get everyone on the bridge, so that all are accountable and none are responsible.

An essay titled "Does Europe Have Something to Offer the World?" that I co-authored earlier this year has been published in the summer edition of US based foreign affairs journal, The Fletcher Forum on World Affairs. The essay has also been published in a different format by The Brookings Institution and can be accessed here.

So Many Heroes is a book that chronicles the events in Prague leading to the Soviet invasion of the Czech capital in 1968, an event that occurred the week I was born. It is written in diary form by Alan Levy who, at the time, was the only accredited American journalist in Czechoslovakia. I found a copy of the book while browsing in a bookshop in Vienna's 9th district earlier this week. The book reminds me of the diary of the October revolution by another American journalist: John Reed's Ten days that shook the world. Alan Levy's account is deeper intellectually and unlike John Reed's book ( which had an intro by Lenin himself) was only distributed underground at the time.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a novel by Milan Kundera, is also set during the Prague Spring, the period chronicled by Levy's book. It also depicts the Soviet occupation and the dictatorial control of the population. I will forever be haunted by the real-life film clips of the tanks entering Prague that were fused in the film version of Kundera's classic novel, a film I have seen countless times.

After a number of years in Vienna, Alan Levy returned to Prague after the Velvet Revolution and became the editor-in-chief of The Prague Post. Following his death two years ago, Lisa Frankenberg - publisher of The Prague Post - wrote this about Alan Levy:

There was an inevitability about the joining of Prague, Alan Levy and The Prague Post. Prague, the city of arts, of political tumult, of vibrant change, with its history of high honor to the written word. Alan, the indefatigable and enthusiastic force of free journalistic truth. The Prague Post, with our mission to report and interpret, to quote Alan: "The world we live in and the world around us."

According to an exclusive report by Le Figaro, 300,000 illegal immigrants enter the EU from Africa every year. The French newspaper obtained a confidential report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime which indicates that 80% of them use the services of trafficking organisations, whose revenues are estimated at €237 million per year.

A trip to Eisenstadt in Austria to discuss new lecturing engagements within a newly set up Masters degree programme in European Project Management gave me an opportunity to visit the house where Joseph Haydn lived for 12 years. The beautifully preserved Baroque house captures the spirit of the composer and re-creates his work and activities in a very unique way. Eisenstadt is a also where Robert Musil, author of The Man Without Qualities, spent part of his life.

I spent most of yesterday in the beautifully preserved town of Steyr in Upper Austria admiring the historic architecture as well as viewing an exhibition about The World of Work in Globalisation. Reading today´s online papers, I discover that Ray Bondin has just returned from Steyr and is doing his bit to admit the town to the UNESCO World Heritage List.

The press review by the Maltacom-owned news service di-ve keeps getting shorter and shorter. Six papers are published in Malta every Sunday but for yesterday´s edition, only three papers were 'reviewed' with two brief sentences covering each newspaper. The two Labour leaning papers, Kullhadd and It-Torca, were both left out.

The BBC and EL Pais report that the head of the regional government in the Canary Islands, Adan Martin Menis, has called on both the Spanish government and the EU to take further emergency action on the immigration crisis affecting the islands. He described how 16,400 African migrants had arrived so far this year, more than three times the total for the whole of 2005 and added “We're on red alert and can't carry on taking responsibility for accommodation and medical care of immigrants”. He complained that the FRONTEX mission sponsored by the EU to try and curb the flow of immigration in the Mediterranean was too “weak” and “came too late”.

Anybody visiting Vienna between now and late September would do well to visit the exhibition at the Belvedere Gallery focusing on the work of Egon Schiele and the early years of Austrian Expressionism. Another protagonist of this exhibition is Oskar Kokoschka, a figure who has remained marginal in art history despite his powerfully moving work. At times, I found it difficult to walk away from Kokoschka´s exhibits when I visited the gallery this morning.

Apart from portraying the melancholic paintings of the artists, the exhibition examines their lives, strategies and friendships. At the height of his career, aged 28 and just three days after his wife, Egon Schiele died of the Spanish flu epidemic that killed millions of Europeans. He spent the last three days of his life painting sketches of his dead wife.