Is that an Elvis type newspaper?
But… they haven’t even found the child’s body.
The article says they found evidence of sleeping pills in the “body fluids” recovered from the rental car’s trunk.
The infamous “they”…
:dubious:
I’m skeptical about the “she was drugged” news, as I would imagine that it would be BREAKING NEWS!!! on every website were it definite. Unless everyone over there is still asleep. 
So she writes that her kids are wearing her out, her husband doesn’t help out enough, she feels like she has to cope alone with her very young twins, the kids are hysterical while on vacation, one of the three is just bouncing off the walls.
Honestly, I don’t know a mother of small children (with or without twins in the mix) who hasn’t said/felt the exact same things. It sounds to me very much like what I hear moms talk about when they get together – and what they talk about to themselves.
I think the McCann parents are weird. And I think it’s quite possible that they were involved in her (seems to me probable at this point) death.
But I have some trouble getting excited about the stuff that is currently being leaked – an 80% DNA match where the testing almost has to have been PCA supported isn’t exactly a smoking gun after all, and especially not when there are siblings in the mix.
The Metro is a free paper in the UK, it’s normally OK but they do have a habit of picking up stuff from where ever they find it and reprinting it. It’s not going to have been made up out of nothing but who knows what their source said.
And that article is incredibly vague and worded to give the paper a get out clause (they name their sources and attribute all the comments to them, so no come back on the paper for printing it).
The problems is that the UK press hates to be taken in by people and they seem to love ripping people to pieces if given the excuse, particularly if they can have a go at someone previously perceived as untouchable. I imagine it sells papers.
80% DNA match? Couldn’t they get a closer match from a randomly-selected chimpanzee? 
What you need is one of my patented my Chupacabra-repelling rocks. Also keeps the area clear of vampires, werewolves and, with suspicious coincidence because it wasn’t designed to, Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Price on application.
I guess my distrust of this information comes from the fact that the car was rented after the disappearance of the child. I think the parents were under pretty intense scrutiny at the time - I just don’t see how they could have retrieved the body from whatever location they had it stashed in (I imagine some pretty intense searching was done after the child was reported missing - including searching suitcases in closets), put it in the trunk of a car and made off with it without someone (media or police) noticing.
I am not an expert (or even a novice) on DNA - how close a match is 80% What portion of the population does that rule out?
The McCanns weren’t holidaying alone - there would have been ample opportunity for their friends to help out with the concealment of a body as they were under far less scrutiny than the McCanns themselves.
Very little has been reported about the others in the group and the part they may have played.
The problem here is that I don’t see any way to distinguish between:
-Facts leaked or released by the Portuguese police
-Speculation voiced by the Portuguese police, or other characters in this drama
-‘Facts’ that speculative journalists have pulled straight out of their arses
It’s not the possibility that seemingly normal parents might have accidentally or deliberately killed their pretty daughter and covered it up, that’s eroding my faith in humanity, it’s the fucking howling media circus that’s doing that.
police wouldn’t have had the resources to follow 24/7, media wouldn’t have reason to follow them 24/7 eiither, plus it would have been easy enough for one parent to appear and give interviews while other was elsewhere. Even Britney has times when she’s not followed by press.
Just chiming in to say firstly, how sad I feel for the little girl regardless of what happened. This is primarily because I only have one child, a lovely beautiful daughter very similarly aged and also similar in appearance - hence the story has resonated with me quite a bit since it broke.
I might also add how creepy this latest development has made me feel regarding a totally honest and accidental mishap with my daughter last week. As I was carrying her to bed, she wiggled at just the wrong time as I was lowering her and she somehow tumbled out of my arms and feel with her face down the side of the mattress and clonked her head on the metal frame of her bed. A little 8mm cut, just like a boxer’s cut opened up and I drove her to an after hours clinic to have it glued up. I’m sure there are now traces of my daughter’s blood somewhere now in the back of my car. It’s an example of how stories like this recent development really get to you in funny ways.
in the trunk?
That verbage about the DNA match drives my dh nuts, he keeps saying it doesn’t make any sense (blah blah method blah blah, I can’t follow it). I figure the reporters aren’t bothering to use accurate terminology.
The point I was trying to make about the diary is that maybe she’s one of those moms who feel a lot of pressure to present a false front to the world, hence the disparity between her diary (if that leak is true) and how people characterize her. Being driven batty by one’s small children seems absolutely normal to me, too.
I’m sure the British Press Tabloid Jackals have done their level best to follow them 24/7 since the story broke. It’s what they do.
If the parents are involved I’d like to know where they stashed a decomposing corpse for 25 days without anyone noticing. You couldn’t just stuff it in a suitcase.
Large conspiracy is highly unlikely. It is rare enough to find a parents willing to kill or dispose of a child’s body. Two or more in a group would be phenomenally freaky.
It’s utterly bizarre… if I’d killed my child (even accidently) the last thing I’d do would be to tour round the world ensuring that the spotlight was kept on me.
I’d make a single public appeal - cos not to do so would look odd - then I’d make a statement to the press saying “well, it’s in the hands of the police now… we will never give up hope, but we will return to the UK to grieve, and we request privacy”.
Story would have dropped off the front pages in days, police would have chalked it up to abduction and the investigation would trundle on until it was quietly shelved.
At any point the McCann’s could have withdrawn out of the public eye - why would they continue to keep every focus on them if they’d done it??
It makes perfect sense only not in a good way. It seems there wasn’t enough DNA available to test, so they used a method called PCR to multiply the available DNA. >quick and dirty explanation follows<
DNA loves to multiply, it’s its favorite thing. It will duplicate itself in any situation which even remotely approximates the situation under which it is supposed to. However, to test DNA we have to rip it in little bitty pieces and torture it unmercifully and so on to get it to unbundle and to line up all those pretty sections row on row. So the thing we add to it to get it to multiply has to be able to withstand the coming torture also.
So we induce a Polymerase Chain Reaction which sets the DNA to multiplying. Problem is, DNA likes to play the parachute game, even if all the stuff on the playground isn’t all there. So any bits of DNA or DNA like stuff in the area will also be duplicated and incorporated into the result. Then the “diverse” DNA will be torn apart and set up row on row. And you have a result which hopefully makes no sense, tipping you off to the fact that an error was made.
So the PCR multiplied DNA is ripped apart and tested. You don’t test the whole DNA strand, that’s too complicated. DNA has constant sections (which are the same for everybody) and variable sections (which, um, vary). So you test for an "x"number of known variable segments and look to see if they all match up with the DNA you already have.
A contaminated result from PCR *usually *has a lot of blanks where the comparison DNA has loci. It can also have something, just not the same thing as the comparison DNA.
So 20% of the sites selected for comparison did not match up to the DNA they have known to be from the child.
At least that’s how I read what I have, um, read. Crappy sentence I know but I’m typing in a hurry.