Lucy Never Came Home

Lucy Partington Never Came Home.
On December 27, 1973, a 21-year-old Exeter University student called Lucy Partington set off from a friend’s house in Cheltenham to catch a bus back to her home in Gretton, about nine miles away.
And then what?
When her older sister Marian came home the next day, she was greeted by their mother, her voice full of panic.
“Lucy didn’t come home last night”.
Lucy never came home.
No one knew what had become of her.
She was officially classified as a missing person.

Marian was 26 when Lucy disappeared.
It was not for another 20 years, when she was 46, that she finally found out what had become of her.
Lucy had been offered a lift by Fred and Rosemary West, taken back to their house, imprisoned, gagged, tortured, raped and murdered.
In Marian’s plain words, the Wests then ‘beheaded and dismembered her and stuffed her into a small hole, surrounded by leaking sewage pipes, head first, face down, still gagged.
Her flesh decomposed into a tarry black slime that stained the clay walls of the hole and coated the bones.
The rope that held her in bondage, two hair grips, a few strands of hair and the masking tape gag survived with most of her bones.

After Lucy’s remains were found, they were kept by the police, so the funeral was long delayed.
Marian felt the urgent need to know where Lucy’s bones actually were.
She traced them to a mortuary in Cardiff.
At her request, the kindly mortician unscrewed the lid of the coffin and allowed her to see them.
“I will never forget the look of understanding that come into his eyes when I emphasised that I wanted to place some special objects in with Lucy’s bones. It was a chance to reclaim her from her murderers and the hugely disrespectful hole in the cellar of 25 Cromwell Street”.

Who Murdered Penny Bell?
In the summer of 1991, Penny Bell, a 43-year-old mother of two, was found in the car park of a sports centre in Greenford, Middlesex.
Penny was stabbed more than 50 times as she sat in the front seat of her stationary car.
Not content with inflicting multiple wounds from the passenger seat, her killer got out, walked round to the driver’s door, pulled it open then continued the onslaught.
Despite the ferociousness of the attack (which would have surely left the murderer soaked in blood), and despite the fact it happened in broad daylight in a busy area, Penny’s killer has never been caught.
Her murder remains one of the biggest unsolved crimes of modern Britain.

Hundreds Of Sahrawis Murdered By Morocco’s Secret Police.
UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg faces embarrassment after it was disclosed that his wife represents a firm that has been accused of trampling on the human rights of ‘Africa’s last colony’.
A ‘substantial’ part of lawyer Miriam Clegg’s work, for which she is paid up to £500,000 a year, is understood to come from Moroccan mining giant OCP.
The company is at the centre of international controversy over the treatment of the Sahrawi nomadic tribesmen of the Sahara.
Morocco, which runs the mining firm, annexed Western Sahara, where the tribesmen live, in 1975, enabling it to seize the world’s biggest phosphate reserves worth billions of pounds.
It embarked on a ruthless campaign of forced removals of Sahrawis to refugee camps and Moroccans were brought in to run the mines.

The United Nations has called for the ‘illegal occupation’ of Western Sahara to end and demanded the Sahrawis are given a vote on independence.
Morocco has failed to comply with both requests.
It has also been accused of an orchestrated programme of ‘disappearances’ of independence campaigners in Western Sahara.
Pressure groups including Amnesty International claim that hundreds of Sahrawis ‘disappeared’ in Western Sahara at the hands of Morocco’s feared secret police.

The victims included pregnant women, children and the elderly, according to a 1996 Amnesty International report.
Some were thrown out of helicopters or buried alive, it was reported in Spanish newspaper El Mundo in 2008, with hundreds more held in secret detention centres.
The remains of 43 Sahrawi ‘disappeared’ were exhumed from secret prisons.
Two years ago, seven corpses were found by workers in a phosphate mine in Bou Craa, the centre of OCP’s operations.
They were thought to be the remains of Sahrawi murdered by Moroccan forces.
( Simon Walters and Glen Owen )

Tall Chimneys Bleed Waste-Burning Gases Into The Atmosphere.
Two million square miles at the top of the northern hemisphere that’s home to 140,000 species of plants, wildlife, insects and micro-organisms.
The Canadian forest in Alberta is second only to the Amazon in size.
It’s critical in absorbing the Earth’s mounting deposits of carbon dioxide and carbon.
Over 500 Indian tribes have lived and hunted here for thousands of years.
Where once stood towering spruce and conifer are now lifeless sand dunes, the landscape a sickly black.
The search for tar sand deep below the forest floor, is the third-largest oil field in the world.
More trees are culled as the mine spreads.
Tall chimneys bleed waste-burning gases into the atmosphere.
It takes two tons of tar sand to produce just one barrel of oil, which is then refined into petroleum.
Around 1.6 million barrels of oil are produced every day.
The oil companies, with British support, hope to increase that seven-fold in coming years.
But according to environmentalists this is the dirtiest oil anywhere in the world.
Up to five barrels of water are needed to extract every barrel of oil.
Worse still, a gallon of petrol produced from the sands releases 20% more carbon dioxide than conventional oil.
The European Union tried to label the tar sands as a dirty fuel because of the increased emissions, but amid intense lobbying from the Canadian government and oil companies the vote ended in stalemate.
Locals claim that evaporation from the ponds results in acid rain and that the toxins seep into water supplies.
Fisherman started to notice problems with their catches – fish with large heads and small bodies, lesions, boils and oversized jaws.
They tasted of oil.
When they boiled river water it left brown sediment in the kettle.

Elevated Levels Of Mercury And Arsenic In The Local Fishes.
A report, ‘Does the Alberta Tar Sands Industry Pollute?’ in the Open Conservation Biology Journal found increased mercury in walleye fish, higher than Canadian health recommendations, and levels of hydrocarbons that are known to cause cancer.
The report stated:  “Elevated levels of mercury and arsenic in the local fishes are a concern’.
It concluded:  ‘Arsenic is a known carcinogen linked with human bile duct, urinary tract and skin cancers, vascular diseases and Type 2 Diabetes’.
The report confirmed what visiting doctor John O’Connor had been finding for several years.
O’Connor said he started to notice a very high prevalence of rare, aggressive cancers which can be linked to petroleum products.
The doctor went public in 2006 as a whistle-blower and was immediately attacked by the Alberta government.
An independent study was done by Alberta Health Services.
A peer review analysis of the report was then carried out by the National Resources Defense Council, which found a 30% increase in cancers in Fort Chipewyan.
Leukaemia and Lymphomas had increased three-fold and bile duct cancers seven-fold.

The Creator is angry.
Everyone is going to be sorry for what they have done.
A day of reckoning is coming.
And it’s going to affect everyone on the planet.
It will make no distinction for religion or creed.
Something is going to happen.
( Al Lameman, 80, former chief of the Beaver Lake Cree Indians )

The Perfect Working Day.
Mention the name Winston Churchill and you will think cigars and fighting them on the beaches.
You do not think bricklayer.
And yet there he was for months on end in the Kentish apple orchards at Chartwell, with a trowel and cement, taking Churchillian pride in building a wall that wouldn’t topple over.
It was one of the things he did to get away from his wife, and to ward off his depressions.
In Churchill’s autobiography he claimed that his unhappy time at Harrow would have been better employed as a bricklayer’s mate.
He once told Stanley Baldwin that he had arrived at the definition of a perfect working day: ‘2000 words and 200 bricks’.

The People’s Princess.
Lady Diana Spencer was 20 when she married Prince Charles at St Paul’s Cathedral in July 1981.
She battled loneliness, self-doubt and eating disorders and the fairy-tale didn’t last long.
The marriage collapsed in 1992 but the world had fallen in love with the doe-eyed beauty.
Diana’s work with Aids victims, the homeless and the campaign to ban landmines was pioneering and her death in 1997 aged just 36 sparked a massive wave of public grief.
( Beth Neil )