pap

Well done, Verbal. Another idiot taking the argument on the extreme terms you set.

Theirs was no exception. The McCanns actually used the daytime service; Madeleine went there.

The PJ have collected everything you need to know about the case and released it five years ago. The continuing campaign just looks like an attempt to drown those reports out with concerned noise. You can certainly argue that many of the questions were loaded. So what? That's what you'd expect of someone investigating the disappearance and possible death of a child. I'd expect British police to do exactly the same thing. It's uncomfortable for the person being asked the questions whether they're on the level or not. The PJ already know what went down, but had to shut their investigation down under intense political pressure. Hell, the British OB already broadly know what happened. They've just decided to investigate a different case, one which is potentially imaginary, for largely political reasons. Chief investigator removed from role (and later sued when he released his book), chief of police resigned when the investigation was shut down and every member of the waiting staff that served the Tapas Seven were sacked within a year. As I said, the dodgiest thing is the refusal to answer those questions. Sure, some are potentially incriminating, but others, like whether Madeleine was taking any medication or had any illness, are not "no comment" affairs. They could have actively assisted the investigation. The one question Kate McCann did answer came when she was asked about whether she knew her refusal to answer the 48 questions could affect the PJ's ability to find Madeleine. She said "if that's what the investigation wants to think". C'mon. These were the early days. Can't speak for anyone else, but if it were me and I were innocent, I honestly wouldn't give a f**k about what the authorities thought of me, or whether I stood to do any bird as a result. I'd just want my daughter back. I am amazed that she kept schtum.

Leicestershire Police re-interviewed the Tapas Seven. No idea whether those questions were asked, but it had already been decided that it was an abduction case at that point. In any normal case, the inconsistencies in the various accounts ( either from different people or the same people when asked at different times ) would have been enough to consider the McCanns suspects. Yet they're the two people who the British police are not looking at.

1. On May 3 2007, around 22:00, when you entered the apartment, what did you see? What did you do? Where did you look? What did you touch? 2. Did you search inside the bedroom wardrobe? (she replied that she wouldn’t answer) 3. (shown 2 photographs of her bedroom wardrobe) Can you describe its contents? 4. Why had the curtain behind the sofa in front of the side window (whose photo was shown to her) been tampered with? Did somebody go behind that sofa? 5. How long did your search of the apartment take after you detected your daughter Madeleine’s disappearance? 6. Why did you say from the start that Madeleine had been abducted? 7. Assuming Madeleine had been abducted, why did you leave the twins home alone to go to the ‘Tapas’ and raise the alarm? Because the supposed abductor could still be in the apartment. 8. Why didn’t you ask the twins, at that moment, what had happened to their sister or why didn’t you ask them later on? 9. When you raised the alarm at the ‘Tapas’ what exactly did you say and what were your exact words? 10. What happened after you raised the alarm in the ‘Tapas’? 11. Why did you go and warn your friends instead of shouting from the verandah? 12. Who contacted the authorities? 13. Who took place in the searches? 14. Did anyone outside of the group learn of Madeleine’s disappearance in those following minutes? 15. Did any neighbour offer you help after the disappearance? 16. What does 'we let her down' mean? 17. Did Jane tell you that night that she’d seen a man with a child? 18. How were the authorities contacted and which police force was alerted? 19. During the searches, with the police already there, where did you search for Maddie, how and in what way? 20. Why did the twins not wake up during that search or when they were taken upstairs? 21. Who did you phone after the occurrence? 22. Did you call Sky News? 23. Did you know the danger of calling the media, because it could influence the abductor? 24. Did you ask for a priest? 25. By what means did you divulge Madeleine’s features, by photographs or by any other means? 26. Is it true that during the searches you remained seated on Maddie’s bed without moving? 27. What was your behaviour that night? 28. Did you manage to sleep? 29. Before travelling to Portugal did you make any comment about a foreboding or a bad feeling? 30. What was Madeleine’s behaviour like? 31. Did Maddie suffer from any illness or take any medication? 32. What was Madeleine’s relationship like with her brother and sister? 33. What was Madeleine’s relationship like with her brother and sister, friends and school mates? 34. As for your professional life, in how many and which hospitals have you worked? 35. What is your medical specialty? 36. Have you ever done shift work in any emergency services or other services? 37. Did you work every day? 38. At a certain point you stopped working, why? 39. Are the twins difficult to get to sleep? Are they restless and does that cause you uneasiness? 40. Is it true that sometimes you despaired with your children’s behaviour and that left you feeling very uneasy? 41. Is it true that in England you even considered handing over Madeleine’s custody to a relative? 42. In England, did you medicate your children? What type of medication? 43. In the case files you were SHOWN CANINE forensic testing films, where you can see them marking due to detection of the scent of human corpse and blood traces, also human, and only human, as well as all the comments of the technician in charge of them. After watching and after the marking of the scent of corpse in your bedroom beside the wardrobe and behind the sofa, pushed up against the sofa wall, did you say you couldn’t explain any more than you already had? 44. When the sniffer dog also marked human blood behind the sofa, did you say you couldn’t explain any more than you already had? 45. When the sniffer dog marked the scent of corpse coming from the vehicle you hired a month after the disappearance, did you say you couldn’t explain any more than you already had? 46. When human blood was marked in the boot of the vehicle, did you say you couldn’t explain any more than you already had? 47. When confronted with the results of Maddie’s DNA, whose analysis was carried out in a British laboratory, collected from behind the sofa and the boot of the vehicle, did you say you couldn’t explain any more than you already had? 48. Did you have any responsibility or intervention in your daughter’s disappearance?

The dodgiest thing about the whole affair has to be Kate McCanns refusal to answer 48 questions posed by the Portuguese police, including many that would have helped to find an abducted child.

You couldn't be more wrong, Sour Mash. Jizz-moppers potentially aside, I've never been one to judge someone by the job they do or the education they have. I've known the system to fail too many people for that ever to be a consideration, and have met too many geniuses keeping bars and waiting tables to fall into the "lack of respect" trap you think I've wandered into. I'll be sure to inform both the Flower Estates and the sh!thole I live in now that we're all middle class now thanks to your assessment. They'll be happy with the extra dough, I reckon.

Did you hear the one about the frightened white people who tried to use Radical Islam in the UK as cover for a wider racist agenda?

I like the Shield, but the A-Plot gets ridiculous. Ended up enjoying the secondary characters more. Sons of Anarchy has major problems if you've a functioning brain. Ah'll steal yer boy! B*llocks. And Agent Stahl? Jesus wept.

Nah, he's seriously not very smart. No nous about him.

Seconded. All of them.

Very good find, Tokyos. He's actually got to be pretty thick for getting ambushed like that. The whole EDL "it's about Radical Islam" in tatters in less than three minutes.

What court did they ever appear in?

DoubleVision, Monday night @ Liverpool Uni Guild of Students - doubles for a pound. Extremely messy, although I was behind the bar most weeks. Carnage seems like a cheap imitation. Very few of these photos come close to emulating the river of spew you used to navigate in the Guild at 1am on a Tuesday morning. I saw a couple openly f**king on a table while out collecting plastic glasses. It was during the fast bit of Common People.

Is this a rhetorical question?

I've never said that Madeleine was murdered by her parents. Well done, Verbal's intended ploy of making it about the extreme, burrowed right into your mind and stuck there. Well done, Verbal, I say. If it had happened here, I'm sure the McCanns would have been more robustly investigated by the British authorities. It happened abroad, had international attention and could have given the rest of the world a nice new label to assign to us. Family Guy references the Louise Woodward case when Stewie shouts "Shake me! Shake me like a British nanny!" when tangling with Lois. Back at the time, Louise Woodward was a huge story. Britain, by association with its citizens' behaviour in the US, was in the dock. The McCann case is much more serious. I don't think that they murdered their child, but I think they could have been more directly responsible for her disappearance than they claim, i.e. mere inexplicable neglect. Sedatives have been suggested as an explanation for Madeleine's disappearance. If that's the case, it's not murder; no intent to kill. As btf points out, something could have gone very badly wrong. An accident with some parental culpability seems like a valid avenue of investigation. If that were the case, how would the McCanns be perceived in this affair? Arrogant cheap Brits who drugged their kids instead of paying for a sitter? Out of control Brits who caused an accident through a loss of temper? The case had international profile and could have seriously damaged British reputation if the McCanns bore some responsibility for the actual death of their own child. The continuing and decade long campaign would actually be a calculated campaign, aimed at the gradual transformation of the McCanns from being neglectful parents and arguaidos into concerned parents through the process of repeating the mantra, that they care about their daughter, believe she is still alive, and that everyone should keep looking. You do not have to be a murderer to be directly responsible for another's death, or we wouldn't bother with manslaughter. If the McCanns were ever found to be directly responsible for their daughter's death, the sh!t would hit the fan, and sadly, Madeleine's fate would be a secondary consideration. People would focus on the decade afterward and all the things they said, all the time they wasted and all the money they raised from the public. They would be utterly vilified. I've never seen any other major suspects be able to protest their innocence on television with such regularity and for quite so long a time. Give it enough time and people will forget they were ever suspects in Madeleine's disappearance. Some sooner than others, it'd seem.

Good luck skating on this ice. Are you only interested in demanding proof to a judicial standard from posters on a football forum, or will you choose to address the cadaver dog video? Don't blame you if not. The police didn't bother either, even though it was one of their own presenting it. Would have been so much easier to dismiss if it had been the "bumbling" Portuguese rozzers that had presented it, eh?

If you're loaning money, that's generally how it works.

Fair enough. I'd advise that you don't get me started on rent controls

It's fine. It's a much better phone for muggles. Most serious technical people I know are on Droid.

I do everything, skip. Oddly enough, decided to look elsewhere for semi-sensible discussion on "nut job" matters. It's not me who continues to bring it up.

If that's the only thing you've taken from my six years of posting here, then some people are doing a very good job. Trebles all round!

Aye. Was pretty tough for a few years, though we didn't know it at the time. In retrospect, it seems mental.

I very much enjoyed this. Some very creative writing and a grade above your mindless sneers.

Frank's cousin - I feel as if I've brought a kitchen knife to a gunfight. You're correct in your assumptions. My criticism comes from a high-level perspective which is undoubtedly led by the headlines. I can't claim to know much about the internals of big pharma, save the obvious, such as large outlay on R&D, trials, training government approval. I also know it's not necessarily a licence to print money, as Pfizer's recent troubles have shown. Even so, the headlines have been interesting enough. My overriding case would be that of the introduction of generic HIV drugs in South Africa, and the fact that 40 pharmaceutical companies went after the South African government. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1119675/ In this case, the headlines were damning. It was a clear case of profit over human need. Those companies knew that lives would be lost as a result of a successful litigation, but went for it anyway. The outrage at the time created public pressure that put this issue to bed years ago. Companies are either not enforcing the patents or sub-licensing the drug as a generic to the local pharmaceuticals. So while I can't say I've plumbed the depths of big pharma, even the layman's perspective shows that they can be utter bastards when they want to be.