Madeleine McCann and the media

  COMMENT

The most reported and discussed missing person case ever recorded is still not only a highly contentious mystery, but also a personal tragedy that has been turned into a public farce by elements of the media.

In the entirely predictable press frenzy surrounding the imminent 10th anniversary of the disappearance, much of the coverage, particularly in the British tabloids, has been absurd. But it should not be dismissed lightly.

Unable to come up with “news” on the case, the tabloids have been rehashing the same old speculation and guesswork.

“Could Madeleine McCann have been snatched by a lone paedo or simply wandered off?....”

“Abducted by slave traders and sold to a rich family, says ex-Met detective..”

“New hope after decade-long search....”

“Experts say Madeleine McCann’s body is almost impossible to find ”.

And then there was the much-touted Australian TV show that promised “a major breakthrough in the case”.

Meanwhile, the Daily Mirror took a slightly different tack with a story headlined, “What REALLY happened the night Madeleine McCann disappeared as nanny breaks her 10-year silence”.

The story did not explain what “really” happened, nor did it name the nanny or why she had remained silent for so long.

It quoted her as considering the McCanns to be “the picture perfect family” and repeated the usual British criticism of the Portuguese police.

More surprisingly, she claimed that the resort from which Madeleine vanished was considered so unsafe that nannies were given rape alarms (whistles) and advised, “don’t go anywhere by yourself, ever”.

There was nothing to suggest the Mirror had tried to question or check this or any of the nanny’s other assertions, but, in Praia da Luz, they were viewed with derision. It was seen as yet another attempt to brand Praia da Luz as a den of iniquity, which it is not and never has been.

The official police files on the case contain nothing about rape whistles or alarms. None of the signed statements by child-care workers mentioned anything about suspicious goings-on or Luz being “unsafe”.

The manager of the Ocean Club where the McCanns were staying said in a police statement in 2007 that he had “no knowledge of any untoward situation involving Ocean Club users or in the village itself, other than some damage and minor thefts”.

The Mirror story was also a reminder that real journalism has to a large extent been replaced by ‘churnalism’, which disregards traditional standards of original news gathering based on impartiality and fact-checking for accuracy and honesty.

The nanny’s story was quickly recycled virtually verbatim on the Internet by other tabloids. Even the broadsheet Daily Telegraph fell into line as did news services in the United States, Australia and New Zealand.

Trial by the media has had a huge influence on public perceptions about guilt or innocence in this case. Most of the mainstream media reports state as if it were a fact that Madeleine was “abducted”. Maybe she was. Maybe she wasn’t. There is no certainty either about the other main theory, that her parents covered up an accidental death in the apartment.

Until solid evidence is found and the culprits are brought to justice, the public fascination with this case will continue to fuel and be fuelled by the media’s determination to churn out stories whose accuracy and agenda may sometimes be open to doubt.

The current avalanche of stories inevitably evokes the previous admission by Lord Bell, founder and former chairman of the Bell Pottinger public relations group, to columnist and author Owen Jones, that “the McCanns paid me £500,000 in fees to keep them on the front page of every single newspaper for a year, which we did”.

Nevertheless, “Maddie” helps circulation figures and makes money. Money, along with misinformation, has always played far too big a part in this case which, let’s remember, is about the tragic loss of a child.

Searching for Conman Ken

Lee Mackenzie, author of a book published this week called The Charming Predator, is hoping to flush out the notorious, international conman Kenner Elias Jones, her former husband. He was last reported to the police while seeking political asylum in Sweden.

Originally from Caernarfon in Wales, Jones absconded from a trial in Lewes Crown Court in Sussex, England, in 2003. He has been at large ever since, continuing a career of theft, deception and fraud.

Jones has been deported from both Canada and the United States. A senior immigration officer in America described him as “the best conman I have ever encountered in my entire career.”

He is wanted in Kenya. allegedly for unpaid debts of more than $100,000 after running his own charity for seven years, posing as a doctor. He also conducted church services claiming to be a priest.

Back in Europe he continued on his wicked way across the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal and Spain, apparently undeterred by having previously racked up more than 60 convictions over a period of four decades.

BBC Wales tracked him down and filmed him in Lisbon, but ‘Conman Ken’, as the BBC dubbed him, refused to answer accusations of defrauding individuals, businesses and institutions.

A travel agent in the town of Palmela near Lisbon said he persuaded her to hand over €2,500 worth of travel tickets and then disappeared without paying for them.

But his deceptions in Portugal were minor compared with his activities elsewhere.

In southwest Spain he spent six weeks having medical checks in a district hospital only to leave in apparent good health without paying a bill of some €26,000.

Two years ago a man in Malmo reported Jones to the Swedish police because of suspicious money transfers and after researching the Welshman’s background on the internet. The Swedish police declined to investigate. Meanwhile, Jones was seeking political asylum in the country as a refugee from Kenya.

The Canadian author Lee Mackenzie has written an account of how she met, fell in love with and married Jones only to find out too late about his true character.

As a young, unworldly woman from a small, trusting community on Canada’s west coast she fell victim to a sociopath regarded by all who met him as highly intelligent and charming. But he went on to shatter her emotionally, psychologically and financially.

“After storing all the memories away in a cardboard box for decades,” says Mackenzie, “I finally opened it and looked inside. Not long after that I connected with an editor who challenged me to write my story. I love a challenge.”

Mackenzie admits that even after a long passage of time, sifting through the story was difficult. “It was certainly a journey into the past,” she says.

“And along with remembering the damage Kenner had done, I also had to face my own part in the story. It was embarrassing, humiliating to see how easily I had been duped. I see now how I simply wanted to make my marriage and my life a happy one. I had to heal and forgive myself. That’s part of the story too.”

A former CBC radio and television journalist, Mackenzie is now a professional artist as well as a member of the administrative staff at her local detachment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Since her ex-husband’s last sightings in Spain and Sweden she has been trying to locate him via the internet.

With the publication of her book she plans to step up her efforts and has launched a website with a page called “Where’s Kenner?” www.thecharmingpredator.com.

The Charming Predator has been published by Penguin Random House:

/http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/546232/the-charming-predator-by-lee-mackenzie/9780385687126/

A CBC interview with the author on the subject of deception can be heard here:  
     http://www.cbc.ca/radio/outintheopen/pastepisodes/deception-effects-1.4030392?autoplay=true

Algarve Romanis in major German photographic project

Romani families in Portugal recently welcomed into their homes a professional German photographer, Florian Schwarz, to take portraits for a unique exhibition to illustrate the diversity of migrant communities across Europe.

Schwarz’s focus on Romani people, more commonly known in English as Gypsies and in Portuguese as Ciganos, was the start of a year-long project. Having previously photographed all over the world, his current project will take him to four geographical extremities of the European continent – west, east, north and south.

In the Algarve, local contacts introduced him to different Romani communities, the one in Porches long settled in municipal apartments, the others in Albufeira transient camps. He encountered remarkable hospitality, he said.

Originally from northern India, Romani people have been on the move for many hundreds of years. They first arrived in Portugal in the 15^th century and long thereafter were subjected to severe discrimination. Full integration in Portugal continues to be officially encouraged, but it is still slow. Most Romanis live in close family groups with their own distinct cultural and social preferences.

As an integral part of the country’s population, official government statistics about Romanis do not exist. About 40,000 to 50,000 spread across Portugal as a whole is thought be a realistic estimate by the Council of Europe’s Commission against Racism and Intolerance.

Next stop for Schwarz, 37, will be Bucharest, capital of one of the continent’s most easterly countries, to photograph Romanian nationals (not to be confused with Romanis) heading westward on transport services to seek a better life in Germany, France and beyond .

This autumn he will be in Lapland to portray nomadic Sami people, the northernmost indigenous group in Europe, who traditionally travel around the Arctic regions of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia with herds of reindeer.

His final destination will be the Greek island of Crete where he will focus on the workers who arrive in droves to take part in the olive harvest that has been going on since ancient times.

Schwarz’s intention is to depict aspects of migrant life very different to the much televised mass movement of refugees from the Middle East and North Africa in recent years.

He uses a a small, modest-looking camera with a standard 50mm lens that takes images, undistorted by wide-angle or telephoto lenses, as near as possible to the way they are perceived by the human eye.

The exhibition of his work will be held next year in four public venues as part of a major cultural event in his home city of Konstanz in southern Germany. 

 

An exclusive preview image taken in the Algarve, the only photo from the project so far made public.

Expats in UK and EU equally worried

As the formal process of removing Britain from the European Union gets underway this week, two parallel surveys highlighting expatriate concerns show consensus between respondents regardless of their nationality and whether they are living in the UK or in the remainder of the EU.

Overall, 80% of the 1,900 respondents in the surveys conducted by the interactive platform Expat.com agreed that Brexit posed “a threat” for the UK.

When asked if Brexit had affected their daily life, 38% of British expatriates said it had already had a “significant” impact, while 22% said that so far it had made only a “slight” change.

The same questions put to EU expatriates living in the UK yielded similar results.

The nature of the questions in the surveys allowed respondents to express emotions. According to researchers, “an alarming number” acknowledged that the decision to leave the EU was impacting on their mental health.

Respondents spoke of stress and depression due to the unpredictable nature of the Brexit negotiations, and anxiety over how the outcome may affect their careers and the education of their children.

Around 12% of expatriates living in the UK reported experiencing or witnessing some form of racism. A further 8% revealed that they now feel unwelcome as a result of the ‘leave’ referendum.

“Some people make nasty comments about me as an immigrant, accusing me of taking a job from the British,” said one respondent.

“I had my car vandalised six times in the months before the vote. I was fired from my job afterwards,” said another.

“They see us as second-class citizens,” insisted a futher EU national.

Some Britons abroad spoke of a change of attitude towards them, as well as a sense of embarrassment and fear over “rising nationalism in the UK.”

Beyond the Expat.com survey, British government officials say they do not expect the status of expatriates to change during the negotiations over the next two years.

But Prime Minister Theresa May has made it clear that any long-term guarantees to EU nationals in Britain will depend on reciprocal arrangements with the EU member states.

There is much talk of possible complex deals but as of now no one knows if the negotiations will result in any sort of deal at all.

Former Portuguese prime minister and the previous president of the European Commission José Manuel Barroso for one has warned that Brexit is on course to fail unless both Britain and the EU negotiate constructively and are willing to compromise.

Of the four million expatriates involved, it has to be said that the Brits in Portugal and Portuguese in the UK would seem to be less vulnerable than most of the others.

Despite soothing words recently from British and Portuguese officials, there are many worrying uncertainties, though it is hoped that the centuries of close alliance between Portugal and Britain will come into play in the event of a critical breakdown in the Brexit deliberations. 

 

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Sainthood for Fátima seers

Following the announcement that two of the visionaries of Fátima, Francisco and Jacinta Marto, are soon to be canonised, hopes have been expressed that the process be accelerated to elevate the third and principle visionary, Lúcia Santos, to sainthood.

The three shepherd children claimed to have witnessed apparitions of the Virgin Mary at Fátima in 1917.

The Marto siblings are likely to be canonised during Pope Francis’ pilgrimage to Fátima on 12th-13th May, the centenary of the first of six monthly Marian apparitions.

Although theVatican has yet to reveal the timing of the canonisation, it is now much anticipated following Pope Francis’ official recognition last week of the so-called ‘Miracle of the Sun’ at Fátima in October 1917.

The Vatican has said that Pope Francis signed the recognition decree during a meeting with Cardinal Angelo Amato, prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints.

The cardinals and bishops who are members of the congregation must vote to recommend their canonisation and then the Pope would convene the cardinals resident in Rome for a consistory to approve the sainthood.

Portuguese newspapers reported in in 1917 that up to 70,000 people along with Francisco, Jacinta and their older cousin Lúcia watched a spectacular lunar display at the time the children had predicted a miracle.

The Marto siblings were beatified by Pope John Paul II in 2000. Papal approval of a miracle is required to elevate beatification to canonisation.

Francisco Marto, born in 1908 and the second youngest of the Fátima seers, died in 1919, a victim of the 1918 influenza pandemic that swept through Europe.

Jacinta Marto, who was just seven years of age in 1917, fell seriously ill in 1919 and suffered considerably before dying after an operation in a Lisbon hospital in February the following year.

Lúcia Santos, who was ten at the time of the apparitions, died in 2005 at the age of 97. All three of the seers now rest together in the basilica in the Fátima sanctuary, which will welcome hundreds of thousands of pilgrims from all over the world this centenary year.

Pope Benedict XVI decided to speed up the beatification process for Sister Lúcia in 2008. The Congregation for the Causes of Saints announced that the pope had chosen to dispense with the mandatory five-year delay usually required after the death of a nominee.

The process of beatifying had previously been considerably speeded up for Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II.

Three years to the day after the death of Sister Lucia, Cardinal José Saraiva Martins at a Mass in Coimbra where she lived from 1948 until 2005, announced that Benedict XVI had decided to dispense with the missing two years.

For some, especially traditionalist Catholics long critical of the handling by successive popes of the so-called third secret of Fátima, the canonisation of Lúcia is being unnecessarily delayed and cannot come quick enough.

Amended 27 March 2017

Lúcia, Francisco and Jacinta

Plan to counter expat Brexit confusion

     A database of channels for reliable information is being assembled and will be kept up-to-date over the coming months and years by a specialist team at Cambridge University to help British expatriates cope with concerns about how Britain leaving the European Union may impact on their personal lives.

The researchers behind the project say one of their main aims is to insure that good information and advice “to prevent rash Brexit-induced decisions” by British students, families and retirees living on the continent reaches as many UK citizens abroad as possible.

They warn of a“milieu of rumour, speculation and tabloid bombast”, and also of “an information vacuum” surrounding Brexit that may be exacerbating expat insecurities, particularly among those aged over 65.

Lead researcher Dr Brendan Burchell from Cambridge’s Department of Sociology, said: “UK citizens abroad need to be empowered to make sound, informed decisions during Brexit negotiations on whether to remain in their adopted homelands or return to the UK.”

Dr Burchell added: “At the moment there is a missing link: there is no database of the conduits through which high quality information can be communicated that targets specific countries or sub-groups of UK migrants. This is what we aim to build over the coming weeks.”

The database will cover the legal status and rights of expats, including access to welfare, health and pensions, as Britain leaves the EU.

The research information will be shared with government agencies and select organisations in such a way to avoid “exploitation” by commercial and lobby organisations.

Dr Burchell notes that the interests of UK nationals potentially returning to the country from the EU have been given little consideration in Brexit debates since the June referendum.

“Without access to well-grounded information that updates throughout the Brexit process, the current void will be increasingly filled with dangerous speculation and even so-called ‘fake news’ from partisan groups or those that would seek to prey upon the anxiety of UK over-65s to make quick money through lowball property sales or investment scams.”

An economist working on the project, Professor Maura Sheehan, thinks that Brexit concerns could lead to a panic domino effect in certain expatriate communities.

“Housing markets in areas along the Mediterranean coast could collapse as retirees try to sell up, but with no new UK expats looking to buy. Life savings could get swept away in the confusion,” she warns.

“Meanwhile there is no slack in UK social infrastructure for ageing expats returning en masse with expectations of support. The NHS has yet to emerge from its current crisis, there is a desperate shortage of housing, and social care is badly underfunded.

“The idea that we could see socially isolated baby-boomer expats back in the UK with health conditions, financial woes and even ending in destitution as a result of bad decisions based on misinformation should not simply be written off as so-called ‘remoaner’ hysteria.”

Brexit angst rising alarmingly

With the triggering of article 50 and the start of the formal process of leaving the European Union just weeks away, feelings of insecurity are mounting across the EU, including among the 50,000 or more British expatriates in Portugal and four times that number of Portuguese nationals in the UK.

At the time of the in / out referendum last June, the complexities of leaving the EU were far from clear. Since then, the confusion has reached new heights.

Residency rights for the 1.2 million British expatriates throughout mainland Europe, as well as the 2.8 million EU citizens all over Britain, will remain the same while the negotiations continue, probably for the next two years. But what then? Nobody knows.

A recent pan-European survey among British expatriates found a very high level of concern, mainly about losing their automatic rights to reside and work, freedom of movement, and continued access to healthcare and pension benefits.

Ongoing worries include the fall in the Pound and speculation that it could fall further. This is of particular concern to expatriates and foreign property owners relying on incomes or pensions in Sterling.

Worrying to immigrants in Britain, including in Portuguese communities, are the spiralling numbers of anti-foreigner hate crimes since the referendum reported by three-quarters of the police forces across the country.

Brexit belligerence in high political circles significantly heated up this week because of the British government’s refusal to assure EU nationals they will be permitted to stay in the country after Brexit.

The British Home Office’s stated position on the matter is that the government wants “to protect the status of EU nationals already living here and the only circumstances in which that wouldn't be possible is if British citizens' rights in European member states were not protected in return.”

Doubts took a turn for the worse this week when an internal document prepared by the European parliament’s legal affairs committee was leaked. It warned that Britons abroad could face “a backlash”.

The document noted that the attitude of member states’ may be coloured by the fact that it is presently difficult for foreign citizens in Britain, even if married to UK nationals or born in the UK, to acquire permanent residency cards.

Since the referendum, there has been a massive increase in the number of EU citizens applying for permanent residency.

Those applying say they have to complete an 85-page form requiring many files of documentation, including tax statements dating back for five years, plus historical utility bills and a diary of all the occasions they have left the country since settling in the UK. Some applicants have reportedly received letters inviting them to prepare to leave the country after failing to tick a box on a form.

Opposition politicians in Britain have condemned Prime Minister Theresa May for failing to give an unequivocal guarantee that EU nationals can continue to stay in Britain.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has accused the government of “playing political games with people’s lives”. Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron says Prime Minister May has been caught “playing with fie”.

Caroline Lucas, a co-leader of the Green party, said any further delay in giving EU nationals a guaranteed right to stay would be “unforgivable”.

A Dutch MEP, Sophie in ´t Veld, who is leading a European parliament task force investigating the residency issue, said the UK government had acted “immorally” in failing to offer security to those who had made Britain their home.

The leaked legal affairs committee document hints at possible revenge as it will be down to each EU member state to decide whether British expatriates are allowed to carry on living as before within their adopted countries after Brexit.

The upshot of all this is that a great many people in the British Isles and in mainland Europe are faced with agonising uncertainty about their homes, their jobs and the future of their families.

With Portugal and Britain’s long history of bilateral friendship and co-operation, does it make any social or economic sense for either country to discourage compatible residency and working arrangements?

On a grander scale, does it really make sense to proceed with the so-called “will of the British people”? It is glaringly obvious that the “leave” voters did not fully understand what Brexit would involve – and still don’t.

With this in mind, former prime minister Tony Blair has controversially stepped into the fray. He is calling for a U-turn.

He said: “The people voted without knowledge of the true terms of Brexit. As these terms become clear, it is their right to change their mind. Our mission is to persuade them to do so.”