Howelings / On becoming a Maltese

BY MARK HOWELL

A Maltese is not a candy (that’s a maltesa) but a citizen of Malta.

And becoming a Maltese is the latest trick in Miami that’s sparing very rich Americans from being responsible citizens here at home.

Last November, Joseph Muscat, the prime minister of Malta, flew from the capital of that Mediterranean island, Valletta, to Miami in order to strike a deal with a law firm called Henley and Partners.

Malta now allows carefully screened foreigners to obtain fast-tracked, no-strings-attached Maltese citizenships in exchange for an investment of 650,000 Euros (that’s a lick larger than $905,000).

Citizenship by investment is a lucrative nosiness nowadays, says Christian Kalin, a Swiss-German executive of Henley and Partners, which he describes as the global leader in “residence and citizenship planning.” And Malta has more cachet than tiny Caribbean islands like St. Kitts and Antigua that have long offered similar programs.

Malta, as a tax haven, offers access to a safe banking sector, good infrastructure, easy access to major airports and a first-class ticket to the other nations in the European Union; by virtue of the Schengen agreement, international borders including custom posts have been informally erased between member nations.

Henley & Partners have marketed citizenship investment and passport programs in Dubai, Hong Kong, Cyprus and Canada.

Its ranking of the best and worst citizenships to have, based on how freely their passports allow people to travel, ties Finland and the United Kingdom in first place with Afghanistan last, just after Iraq, Somalia and Pakistan.

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You’re too late: The new McLaren P1 is the fastest road car ever made.

It will speed to 124 mph in 6.8 seconds, what many cars require in order to hit a mere 60 mph.

The cost is $1.2 million.

All 375 of these McLarens that the company intends to produce have been presold.

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For every half hour of exercise, you can expect to extend the length of your life by two hours.

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Robert Thorson, a professor at the University of Connecticut’s College of Arts and Science, writes that “the greatest extinction of life on Earth was aided and abetted by the burning of coal.”

Although coal has been a great boon for humans since the 18th century, it was “a bane beyond measure for nearly every living thing during the 2,519,410th century BC.”

The rainfall back then was so acidic from sulfur dioxide leaking from fissures in Siberia that much, if not most, terrestrial life was killed by it.

Mercury, a potent neurotoxin, fell from sooty skies and drove sentient creatures mad. Lava from the eruptions created what writer Richard Kerr calls a “vast subterranean, coal-fired inferno that belched metal-bearing ash into the stratosphere.”

Giga-tons of coal fly ash fell as dust contaminated with radionuclides and other toxins. Life on earth likely went insane before it died from acid rain.

Scientists at Massachusetts of Technology estimate that 90 percent of all species was rendered extinct.

Good ’ol King Coal!

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The New York Times reports that more than half the prisoners in the United States have a mental health problem, including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

According to the Justice Department, we now house three times the number of mentally ill people in jails as we do in mental hospitals.

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In an article titled “The Secret Auden” in this month’s New York Review of Books, Edward Mendelson writes that British poet W.H. Auden (author of “In Praise of Limestone” and other perennial favorites) was widely expected to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964.

But he failed to do so after refusing to revise his review of Dag Hammarskjöld’s posthumously published memoir, “Markings,” in which the avowedly gay English poet suggested that the Norwegian UN leader was a homosexual plagued by a “narcissistic fascination with himself … and could never hope to experience what, for most people, are the two greatest joys earthly life has to offer, either a passionate devotion returned or a lifelong happy marriage.”

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Quote for the Week:

“May you live all the days of your life.”

— Rev. Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)

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