The floors of Peter Lawrence’s small, bright Yorkshire home are tramped with mud. Despite their best efforts the twelve reporters, cameramen and photographers cramped into his front room have brought the cold and wet of the outside in with them. Some of them venture little jokes about the weather and traffic but for the most part an awkward silence pervades the makeshift press conference as the cameras are set up. On the mantlepiece is a photograph of a pretty young woman, smiling in the soft focus. Her image is replicated on the Missing Person poster hanging from the table at which Lawrence and his press minder sit. When the conference does finally start, Lawrence begins as he always does: “Thank you all for coming. I wish we didn’t have to.”
The father of missing York chef Claudia Lawrence has launched a new website appealing for information about his daughter’s disappearance.
Peter Lawrence set up findclaudia.co.uk in the hope of generating clues as to the whereabouts of his daughter, who has been missing since March 18.
North Yorkshire Police are now treating the case as suspected murder and Crimestoppers is offering a £10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible for Claudia’s disappearance. Read more…
Police have appealed to Asian students to help identify the body of a murder victim dumped in a canal.
The victim, whom police described as “Oriental”, was found on March 20 in the Selby Canal and is thought to have been in the water for two to three weeks. He died from a “severe and savage beating to his head and face”.
Officers have so far struggled to identify the body and have begun a postering campaign on campus in Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean and Vietnamese appealing for information. A multi-lingual information phone line has also been set up
Hong Kong - The Chinese art market has shown its resilience in the face of global recession after Sotheby’s sold $89 million (£60 million) worth of artworks at an auction in Hong Kong (Raf Sanchez writes). The sale, including a Qing dynasty vase, right, which made a record $6.1 million, beat estimates by 11 per cent. A collection of imperial porcelain, previously held by European collectors, was all sold.
Times Columnist Alice Miles has responded to my Thunderer column on the European Court of Justice’s decision to uphold Britain’s compulsory retirement age. And she hasn’t minced her words.
While it’s a little embarassing to be told off quite so publicly (although in fairness, I’m inclined to think that Miles is right about our generation paying an enormous pension burden) I can’t help but be pleased that an article has appeared in a national newspaper with a first sentence that reads: “I almost feel sorry for Raf Sanchez.”
In the wake of this dressing down I’ve received these two nuggets of encouragement from my cousin Peter Howe, a former reporter for the Boston Globe and now a television journalist:
An unattractive habit of mumbling is developing in Vision’s opinion pages. In the previous edition, columnist Harry Pearse commented on the recent Bad Taste elections in which the editor of Nouse stood for, and won, editorship of the magazine.
Except you wouldn’t know that was what he was talking about as the article strangely contained no references to either publication, guaranteeing that the majority of campus who were unaware of the election remained firmly in the dark. Pearse instead mumbled that “two out of three publications will now operate at the behest of one editor”, forgetting the many other publications as well as the Yorker. The issue of multiple-editorships is important and worth discussing but speaking behind your hands guarantees no one will listen to you.
Originally published in the Thunderer column ofthe Times
Most final-year students will never have heard of the ECJ. If you pressed us we might hazard a guess. Extreme Celebrity Jade? Extremely Callous Joke? Not quite. Tonight, as the precipice of graduation draws near, we should raise what will be among the last of our government-subsidised pints to the European Court of Justice, a most unlikely saviour.
For yesterday the court shot down a legal challenge against Britain’s compulsory retirement age of 65. European judges ruled that the policy of forcing older employees to step down could be “justified by legitimate aims, such as those related to employment policy, the labour market or vocational training”.
Scientology has opened a bizarre new front in its ongoing war on psychiatry: it causes terrorism.
On two scientology chat shows prominent members of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (a Scientology front group whose overwrought website dedicated to exposing psychiatry as an “Industry of Death” can be seen here) calmly explain that bin Laden was brainwashed into committing acts of terrorism by his “psychiatrist”, Al-Qaeda deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Chairman of CCHR Florida Dave Figueroa claims that terrorism is inextricably linked to psychiatry. As he puts it: “behind those individual acts of mayhem you find psychiatrists, you find psychologists and their drugs”. In bin Laden’s case it was Zawahiri: “that ideology of terror was coming from bin Laden who was influenced by a psychiatrist and that really is the bottom line.” Read more…
It has by any standards been a rough year for the Graduate Students’ Association (GSA). Of three sabbatical officers elected in the summer, two resigned before even taking up their posts, leaving a beleaguered Internal Officer to run the organisation single-handedly, organise fresh elections and salvage her PhD. The subsequent by-election ended in farce when Wentworth Edge reached capacity during the voting event, disenfranchising anyone who didn’t show up for a cocktail.
This was surpassed by the next election in which both presidential candidates were disqualified for breaching election rules. We are now in our fourth round for positions that should have been filled last summer.
The ads exhort readers to face up to their crippling erectile dysfunction issues, restore their confidence, and take charge of their lives. Or put more simply: “Bonk Longer”.
Raf is a 20 year-old journalist and a student at the University of York. He is the former editor the award-winning Nouse, the University of York student newspaper, and currently News Editor for Counterknowledge.com.
