Aim: This paper seeks to understand whether Maltese school counsellors are equipped to deal with dyslexic clients, considers whether specific strategies need to be used, and what positive effects, if any, counselling has on these clients. Previous studies: A literature review on self‐concept and techniques on how to improve the self‐concept of children with Learning Disabilities (LD)/Specific Learning Difficulties (SpLD) will place the current study in context. Method: Questionnaires (available from the authors on request) were distributed to all school counsellors on the island and analysed using content analysis. Findings: Findings from respondents indicate a need for more training, evidence‐based knowledge of specific techniques when dealing effectively and successfully with dyslexic clients, specific specialised training to understand dyslexic clients and that counselling has a positive effect on dyslexic clients.

This paper intends to explore emotional literacy (EL) in relation to Personal and Social Development (PSD) as implemented in the Maltese Islands. Self-empowerment, emotional literacy, and self-expression contribute to a good quality of life of self and others. These are addressed in Maltese schools during timetabled statutory PSD sessions. The authors argue the concept of EL as opposed to emotional intelligence and explain how and why EL is embedded in the methodology used in the Maltese PSD model. This includes the processing stage within the experiential learning cycle. They note that EL is so important that it should not only form part of the PSD syllabus but should also be a whole school approach.

News agencies work around the clock to report critical news such as earthquakes. We investigate the relationship between online news articles and seismic events that happen around the world in real time. We utilize computer text mining tools to automatically harvest, identify, cluster and extract information from earthquake-related reports, and carry out cross-validation on the mined information. Earthquake parameters retrieved from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) Application Programming Interface (API) are organized into earthquake events, with each event consisting of daily earthquake readings taking place in a particular geographical location. The results are then visualized on a user-friendly dashboard. 268,182 news reports published by 23 news agencies from different parts of the world and 14,717 earthquakes of magnitude ranging from 4 to 8.2 listed in the bulletin were processed during a 1-year study between 2018 and 2019. 1.25% of the analyzed articles had the word "quake" and 0.4% were clustered and then mapped to an earthquake event. The use of multilingual news sources from 16 countries (6 languages) gives the advantage of reducing potential news bias originating from English-written reports only. The mapping of articles with an earthquake catalog helps verify earthquake reports and determine relationships. We find that the distribution of the reported seismicity is from earthquakes that occur on or very close to land. We propose a general relationship between the number of news agencies, the earthquake magnitude and the anticipated number of published articles. News reports tend to mention higher earthquake magnitudes than those in the USGS earthquake catalog, and the reports on earthquakes can last from a few days to a couple of weeks following the earthquake.

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