Croatian police say a body has this afternoon been found on a beach in central Dubrovnik, the city where missing Melbourne backpacker Britt Lapthorne was last seen, says one of Britt’s friends in an email to Anorak.

Britt….pic ABC

The 21-year-old Australian went missing two weeks ago after going out to a Dubrovnik nightclub with friends.

On site Australian reporters say five police boats were off the coast where the body was found, according to Australia’s ABC News.

A local film crew was told the body was “unrecognisable”, and Britt’s father Dale, who is in Croatia to search for his daughter, was “devastated” when he heard a body had been found.

Ms Lapthorne was last seen at a nightclub in the seaside village in the early hours of September 18.

Earlier her boyfriend, Simon Imberger, rejected Croatian newspaper reports Britt was promiscuous and a known drunk before she disappeared in Dubrovnik.

The search story and her family pleas for help have not appeared in any UK National…despite the fact thousands of Australian backpackers are travelling in Britain.

- AGW

Bob Spinks On The Britt Lapthorne Case

Britt Lapthorne Is Missing

How The Media Treats Australian Backpacker Britt Lapthorne

BANKING crisis. What banking crisis. Anorak covers the matter, but not everyone does:

Well, a quick sample has Ian Dale looking at an arcane issue on the constitution. Tim Worstall, whose blog has a reputation for economic comment, deals with the vexed question of mothers of struggling families who are shunning ready meals and buying cheaper fresh food as the credit crunch squeezes household budgets.

Worstall, incidentally, is press officer for UKIP, but do not look to that party’s website for anything either.

Then Devil’s Kitchen laments the loss of a blogger – in his usual foul-mouthed way – while Conservatives Home features the official Conservative Party blog. CH is to be congratulated on finding the only political blog worse than the UKIP website.

Strangely, Guido Fawkes does deal with the financial crisis. In an economically illiterate piece, he notes that the government can flood markets with liquidity “but that won’t can’t fix insolvency” – seemingly unaware that we have a liquidity crisis, not a solvency crisis. He should stick to his tittle-tattle.

MP Nadine Dorries, fêted by the chatterati, has not posted since Thursday, when she was eulogising over David Cameron. “He will be a great man, has all the qualities needed to become the next Churchill, my own personal political hero,” she writes.

Archbishop Cranmer looks at a plan to renew Britain – if we have one left after this week - while the Spectator Coffehouse blog does … Mandelson. Not a sheep does allotments – we’ll need those – and Daniel Hannan gets annoyed about the EU using this crisis “to adopt a series of deeply integrationist new measures while not even attempting to enforce free competition among its members.”

New media - same old bollocks. Until the new Anorak is come…

BIAS at the BBC? Of course. Bias in the Guardian. Natually. Only nutters vote for Palin and McCain:

“That is the safe sex message of all time. Use a condom or become a Republican!”

In the light of this pig-ignorant comment coming out of Russell Brand, a so-called comedian at the recent MTV awards, some of you might be wondering if his opinion is shared by others in the UK.

Considering the incredibly biased coverage of the whole election by outlets such as the BBC and the Guardian, it is no wonder I encounter such ignorance about Gov. Palin. What is most appalling is the fact that many media outlets in the UK seem to be perfectly happy to repeat all the Daily Kos-spewed lies about her as if they were fact.

Comment pages online are filled with people repeating the various lies word for word. One finds oneself posting the link to the Palin debunk site.

It is not like they have to look very hard at her to work up a lather in their urban, patronizing minds. All the things that make Sarah Palin attractive to Middle America are the things that disgust the media establishment in the UK. In fact, they could not quite believe the outcry after Obama’s claim that Midwesterners cling to their “guns and God” when times are hard.

The left-wing media stymies the debate…

BBC Bias Against Sarah Palin

The BBC Underdoes Sarah Palin

HE not white. He black. He vote for Obama. He not vote for McCain. John McCain he white…

Barack Obama Buys Michelle Flowers To Match Her Burka

Sarah Palin And Average White Trash

Did You Know That Barack Obama Is Black?

Joel Stein: Barack Obama Is Half Black And Three-Quarters Gay

UNDER-achieving schools in Connecticut, USA, are encouraging uniform behaviour:

Some students who balked at the preppy look have found that they like wearing the clothes, particularly after people on the streets have reacted well.“ A lot of people thought I came from a prep school and they were surprised when I told them I go to Bulkeley,” said Luis Nunez, a senior and captain of the football team.

On the first day of school, Bulkeley High School students walking along the street in their new uniforms were cheered by residents who looked out their open windows…

And men in caravan parks…

Shannon Matthews: Paul Donovan’s ‘Vile’ School Uniform Sex

Loving The New McDonald’s Uniform

US Police Taser Man For Speeding: Give A Man A Uniform

Via

The owner of the Croatian hostel where Melbourne backpacker Britt Lapthorne had been staying before she disappeared allegedly tried to post the 21-year-old’s passport to Australia, her father says.

Meanwhile in Britain, Essex MP Bob Spinks has tabled a Parliamentary question for the UK Home Office:”If he will set out the number of British citizens who have been i) reported as missing in Croatia and ii) have not yet been found, in each of the last three years and if he will make a statement.”

Britt Lapthorne was last seen in a nightclub in the Croatian coastal resort of Dubrovnik on September 17., says today’s coverage in the Melbourne newspaper The Age.

Dale Lapthorne, is in Dubrovnik to try to find his daughter and told Australia’s ABC Radio of an anonymous telephone call to the Berkley Hotel where he is staying on Saturday night.

The call was in Croatian, which was translated by an Australian consular official.

The male caller said a woman he recognised as the owner of the hostel where Britt had been staying was at a Dubrovnik post office trying to post a passport to Australia on the day Ms Lapthorne went missing.

The caller said she left with the passport when she was told she could not send it through the mail.

Ivica Perkovic, the son of the hostel owner, was questioned at a Dubrovnik police station late last week after police discovered Britt had telephoned him on the night she was last seen.

He was later released, and denies knowing anything about Britt’s disappearance.

Dale Lapthorne told reporters the anonymous caller contacted the hotel where he, son Darren and Britt’s boyfriend Simon Imberger are staying.

Mr Lapthorne said the family was holding onto a glimmer of hope that Britt was alive because her body had not been found.

The story still appears to be being ignored by the UK media. I wonder how the same Red Tops would react if the positions were reversed and The Oz media was ignoring a story of a British female backpacker missing on a Pacific Island?

The mystery remains a lead story in all of Australia’s news bulletins and Page One in all newspapers.
The Sydney Herald tells of Britt’s father’s anger over the seemly softly, softly, methods of an Australian police aide:
See: Phantom Presence

- AGW

Britt Lapthorne Is Missing

How The Media Treats Australian Backpacker Britt Lapthorne

THE Large Hadron Collider. When it works, it will kill us all. But what if you stick your head inside it? What happens?

So it was in 1978 that when the proton beam entered Anatoli Bugorski’s skull it measured about 200,000 rads, and when it exited, having collided with the inside of his head, it weighed in at about 300,000 rads. Bugorski, a 36-year-old researcher at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Protvino, was checking a piece of accelerator equipment that had malfunctioned - as had, apparently, the several safety mechanisms. Leaning over the piece of equipment, Bugorski stuck his head in the space through which the beam passes on its way from one part of the accelerator tube to the next and saw a flash brighter than a thousand suns. He felt no pain.

From what we know about radiation, about 500 to 600 rads is enough to kill a person (though we don’t know of anyone else who has been exposed to radiation in the form of a proton beam moving at about the speed of sound). The left side of his face swollen beyond recognition, Bugorski was taken to a clinic in Moscow so that doctors could observe his death over the following two to three weeks.

Over the next few days, skin on the back of his head and on his face just next to his left nostril peeled away to reveal the path the beam had burned through the skin, the skull, and the brain tissue. The inside of his head continued to burn away: all the nerves on the left were gone in two years, paralyzing that side of his face. Still, not only did Bugorski not die, but he remained a normally functioning human being, capable even of continuing in science. For the first dozen years, the only real evidence that something had gone neurologically awry were occasional petit mal seizures; over the last few years Bugorski has also had six grand mals. The dividing line of his life goes down the middle of his face: the right side has aged, while the left froze 19 years ago. When he concentrates, he wrinkles only half his forehead.

When it works, they say it will kill us all…

Soruce, Via

The Large Hadron Collider Has Killed Everyone

Hadron Collider Used To Bring Satan Back

Large Hadron Collider: We Might Not all Die, Says BBC

Large Hadron Collider: New Labour’s Theme Song To Armageddon

Satan Bug: The Large Hadron Collider

Up And Atom: The Large Hadron Collider Sex Aide

The One About The Hadron Collider And Jade Goody

AN Investigation into Whether America Is Still a Constitutional Government.

He writes: “On September 11, 2001, the government declared a state of emergency. That declared state of emergency was formally put in writing on 9/14/2001″:

“A national emergency exists by reason of the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center, New York, New York, and the Pentagon, and the continuing and immediate threat of further attacks on the United States.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, I hereby declare that the national emergency has existed since September 11, 2001 . . . .”

It’s been extended every year. Most recently, on September 18, 2007.

Because the actions of these persons who commit, threaten to commit, or support terrorism continue to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the United States, the national emergency declared on September 23, 2001, and the measures adopted on that date to deal with that emergency, must continue in effect beyond September 23, 2008. Therefore, in accordance with section 202(d) of the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1622(d)), I am continuing for 1 year the national emergency with respect to persons who commit, threaten to commit, or support terrorism.

Why? Because the president can do all sorts of things in a state of emergency that wouldn’t normally be legal.

When does an emergency end?

ALSO Sarah Palin. Language Log writes:

One of the things that marks Sarah Palin as a linguistic outsider is her use of also. In part, this is just a matter of frequency…. Relative to the rates seen in large and representative corpora, Gov. Palin used also about 5 to 10 times more often than expected…

But the most striking thing about Gov. Palin’s affinity for this word is how she used it, not how often. 13 out of her 48 examples (27%) were sentence-final…

Also:

(more…)

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The New York Times and the Washington Post are churning out reams of articles in fulfilling their traditional function of explaining what went wrong - you will be relieved to know that they haven’t come up with anything that Anorak has not already covered- but I am waiting with some glee for the next step in the process.

Viz, how come things could be so monumentally f*cked when the New York Times and the Washington Post hadn’t noticed that there was anything wrong before the shit hit the fan bigtime?

The model will be the New York Times eviscerating itself when the Weapons of Mass Destruction it had so confidently stated were stockpiled in Iraq turned out to be a fantasy.

This time around it’s the Weapons of Mass Financial Destruction which they failed to notice, notwithstanding the fact that, short of turning cartwheels across their desks, the WMFDs couldn’t have been more blindingly obvious.

Anyone like to bet on the time scale for the ritual breast beating to start?

- Chenier

Anorak Scoops Washington Post On Sovereign Funds Debt

Washington Post Calls For Tax On Information

New York Times Links Madeleine McCann To Murder Of Meredith Kercher

ROGER Franklin says black people cing poor and white people being sad caused the credit crunch:

As for a home loan, the real estate agents assured him that wouldn’t be a problem, even with no money to put down.

Sure, he’d never earned more than $45,000 a year, carried a wallet stuffed with maxed-out plastic and was on the hook for car payments, school fees, medical insurance and all the furniture that went into his McMansion by the sea.

Twenty years ago any sane banker would have told him to take a hike.

Because a lot of those with poor credit also happened to be black, any refusal to lend was also apt to be called racist.

In the black, and in the red…

Opinions? : 2 So Far! | In: Politicians, Twitterings | Talk: Forums | By: Anorak