Friday
Why Madeleine McCann was never just another ‘lost child’ story
‘It is the story that never goes away. And why should it? The three-year-old girl with the smudge in her right eye would now be a British teenager, looking forward to another family holiday on a Mediterranean or Atlantic beach. Next year she would go to university, perhaps following her high-achieving parents to medical school. Instead, Madeleine McCann is frozen in time – the little girl who disappeared from the family’s Portuguese holiday apartment on 3 May 2007.’
Lachlan Murdoch says black lives matter – but did Greg Sheridan get the memo?
‘Fox News personalities largely ignored Murdoch’s sentiments, as did it seems some of the pundits who work for the Murdoch family’s Australian outpost, News Corp Australia. The Australian’s foreign editor, Greg Sheridan, a regular guest on ABC programs including Insiders and The Drum, boldly told Sky News the Floyd murder was a one-off and there was no systemic racism in the States.’
Experience: I met my sister for the first time at Glastonbury
‘He pointed his thumb towards the woman beside him. I had no idea I had a sister, but she had a hint of ginger in her hair and a pale complexion, just like me. She was clearly nervous, but had a big beaming smile on her face. I asked her what her name was and told her mine, but she already knew it.’
Pennsylvania man who wrongly spent 23 years on death row is freed
“We not only stole 28 years of your life,” assistant district attorney Carrie Wood told Ogrod, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. “We threatened to execute you based on falsehoods.”
Bernie Madoff fails in bid for compassionate release from prison
‘A federal judge on Thursday rejected Bernie Madoff’s request to be released early from prison because he was dying of kidney failure, saying the swindler has never fully accepted responsibility for his massive, decades-long Ponzi scheme.’
Saturday
‘Everyone is in that fine line between death and life’: inside Everest’s deadliest queue
‘He knew things could go catastrophically wrong, and quickly; this stretch of Everest, from the sheer rockface of the Hillary Step to the summit, was the most exposed part of the climb, with drops of up to 3,000 metres (9,842ft) on either side. As people queued, they got colder and used up unplanned-for quantities of their oxygen supplies. It was literally the worst place on Earth to get stuck in a queue.’
Blind date: ‘He looked more grown-up than me. Luckily, he wasn’t’
‘When we were discussing her work as a barista, I was lucky enough to see some photos revealing how her latte art had progressed from phallic to heart-shaped.’
How we stay together: ‘You can’t spend all your life worrying about the other person’
‘The first time Michael Buky took his now-wife Trish Soper sailing, during a holiday in Greece, the small boat sank. Fortunately they survived, and not long after that, when he suggested they pack up their lives in London and go sailing around the world, she agreed.’
America’s top cop is a rightwing culture warrior who hates disorder. What could go wrong?
‘Barr and many conservatives of his generation remember the 1960s cultural revolution as a kind of traumatic rupture in US history. The results, as they see it, were leftist militancy, drug addiction, out-of-wedlock childbirth and a decoupling of religion from society. For a certain kind of conservative, undoing that legacy has been a decades-long political project.’
The NFL did the unthinkable: it gave Donald Trump the middle finger
‘Goodell hardly deserves a parade for his change of tone. After all, his NFL is the one that tossed aside its moral compass and turned its back on Kaepernick four years ago and every day since. Goodell’s statement would have been far more powerful had he mentioned Kaepernick by name. Either way, the NFL’s banishment of Kaepernick is a permanent stain on the NFL. Nothing can change that now.’
Sunday
A week that shook a nation: anger burns as power of protests leaves Trump exposed
‘America has been here before, split by racial division that left its cities in flames and its citizens demanding a different country. But not for half a century, and never with a president whose responses to demands for basic justice were so belligerent and divisive that even his former top military officials have turned on him.’
Trump’s use of the military backfired – but will it back him if he refuses to go?
‘This past week, Donald Trump bet his political future on repression. Much of the rest of America, on the other hand, wants to liberate black people from police brutality and centuries of systemic racism. As of this writing, it looks like Trump is losing and America winning, but the contest is hardly over.’
Murder in the Outback: the Falconio and Lees Mystery review – more tragic than mysterious
‘One of the reasons Murdoch’s conviction has long been supposed by some to be doubtful is because of how Lees behaved before the media. Just as there was supposed to be something wrong with Meursault for not crying at his mother’s funeral in Albert Camus’s L’Étranger, so Lees’s refusal to perform her grief on telly made some think she was hiding something.’
German suspect in Madeleine McCann case linked to two more child disappearances
‘Andreas Hasee said a German investigator called him on Friday to confirm they were reopening the case of his missing son, René, following the identification of the prime suspect in the 2007 disappearance of three-year old Madeleine.’
Buffalo officers filmed shoving 75-year-old protester charged with assault
‘McCabe, 32, and Torgalski, 39, “crossed a line” when they shoved the man down hard enough for him to fall backward and hit his head on the sidewalk, said John Flynn, the Erie county district attorney, at a news conference, calling the victim “a harmless 75-year-old man”.’
