Madeleine: are the parents suspects?
Updated on 07 September 2007
Newsroom blog: inside the morning meeting...
A big movement on the Madeleine McCann story - her mother is due to be named as a 'suspect' today.
She emerged last night from a gruelling 11 hour interview, and her husband is expected to face a similar grilling today.
The key question is whether the Portuguese police think the McCanns might actually be responsible, or whether being 'treated as a suspect' - arguido in Portuguese means something else.
It's a technical procedure under Portuguese law, which doesn't necessarily mean they think they're guilty, but gives them certain rights when being questioned.
Lots of unanswered questions buzzing around today, so it's probably time for a recap of the whole case. How many times have the police questioned the McCanns? What light does this throw on some of the other leads the police have been following up - like the British expat Robert Murat?
And are we any closer to finding Madeleine, and the truth?
There's a foot-and-mouth report out today - it was a dodgy drain wot done it, as we already know through leaks of a different kind. It seems the lab was in bad shape before the outbreak hit, with poor morale, staff cuts, three different bosses in three years, and tales of underfunding.
As British troops withdraw from Basra, Lt Col Patrick Sanders, commander of the troops who pulled out earlier this week, said that British troops had been fighting a 'proxy war with Iran'. Not a surprise, but interesting that he's come out and said it.
Johan Eliasch, sports tycoon and massive Tory funder until this week, is being unveiled as Gordon Brown's adviser on deforestation and clean energy. It's an astonishing coup for Brown, and prompts much nodding of heads in amazement at Brown's Machiavellian skill.
But given how much else is happening today, his timing is dreadful, as he's likely to be kicked into touch by a huge weekend of sport. The Rugby World Cup starts today, and as you might expect of a sport so beloved of lawyers and accountants, Rugby Union is enjoying a financial boom at the moment.
The rights holders are throwing their weight around, and bullying the news agencies about what they can and can't cover. So that's probably the angle we'll tackle it from (ho ho!).
The best candidate for fun story of the day comes in the form of a new website with the testimonies of Victorian child labourers.
It's a fascinating dispatch from the days before PlayStation, stranger danger and jelly beans spiked with Tartrazine cast their shadow across British childhoods. And it turns out that Kingsley and Dickens had it wrong.
The young scamps sent to clean cotton scraps off the giant whirring blades of Victorian mills had a whale of a time. Chimney sweeps recount with delight the tales of their working days, and 11-year-old Stakhanovite pin-makers boast of their love of 12-hour shifts.
I exaggerate slightly - but it suggests that the lives of working kids, warm and well-fed, were often better than those forced to languish half-starved in crowded tenements, or cram Latin grammar with cruel schoolmasters.
Either that, or the mill owners were sitting in on the interviews, gently flexing their canes...
