John wrote the song for his new wife Veronica Tetzlaff, who he had married in January 1975. It is unashamedly romantic, dedicated to a woman he tells, “You make me live” and “You’re all I see”.
John’s love for Veronica and desire to buy a family home had actually just precipated the band’s split from their previous management.
Freddie said: “We had best-selling albums but we were still living in crummy basement flats on fifty pounds a week.”
Apparently, the breaking point was when John wanted an advance to buy a house. When he was denied the band decided to break their contract.
Astonishingly, this only happened in 1975, in a very acrimonious split just before the release of A Night At The Opera album. After that, John became the main financial and business adviser for the band in the subsequent period, and still played an important role after John Reid came in as their new manager.
Freddie said; “John Deacon kept a very close eye on all our business affairs. He knew everything that should and shouldn’t be going on.
“If God had forsaken us, the rest of the group wouldn’t do anything unless John said it was alright.”
Madeleine McCann: Expert discusses missing person investigation
Madeleine McCann would have been celebrating her 18th birthday with her family tomorrow had she not suddenly disappeared on a family holiday in 2007. The mystery surrounding her disappearance remains unsolved, 14 years after the infant went missing in Praia da Luz, Portugal. The case has been a source of anguish for Madeleine’s parents ever since — her mother, Kate, even wrote a memoir in 2011 detailing the difficulties that came with her daughter’s unexplained absence.
Related articles
In the book, ‘Madeleine: Our daughter’s disappearance and the continuing search for her’, Kate explained her “horror” when she found a note from her holiday apartment complex in Portuguese police files a year after their doomed holiday.
She wrote: “It wasn’t until a year later, when I was combing through Portuguese police files, that I discovered the note.”
She and her husband Gerry were not allowed to look at the investigation files until more than a year after Madeleine vanished.
When the documents were released to the public, Kate said she spent six months examining the 5,000 pages of information — one of which pointed to a particular message.
It was a message left by a member of staff, after the McCanns and their seven adult friends made an 8.30pm booking at the tapas restaurant where they had been eating every evening.
Kate McCann’s ‘horror’ at what hotel staff wrote before Madeleine McCann’s disappearance (Image: Getty)
A picture of Madeleine relaesed after her 2007 disappearance (Image: Getty)
It was difficult for the restaurant to accommodate the nine adults alone, so “after having a word with the receptionist at the pool and tapas area”, the group were pencilled in for a table for the rest of their week.
All of the adults collectively agreed to go back and check on their own children — there were eight in total — back at the nearby resort at various times throughout each mealtime.
Kate continued: “The note requesting to get a block booking was written in a staff message book, which sat on a desk at the pool reception for most of the day.
“This book was by definition accessible to all staff and, albeit unintentionally, probably to guests and visitors, too.
“To my horror, I saw that no doubt in all innocence and simply to explain why she was bending the rules a bit, the receptionist had added the reason for our request: we wanted to eat close to our apartments as we were leaving our young children alone there and checking on them intermittently.”
Kate and Gerry McCann hold up an artist’s impression of what Maddy may have looked like in 2012 (Image: Getty)
She added “we now bitterly regret” this decision, and “will do so until the end of our days”.
This month on their website, findmadeleine.com, Kate and her husband Gerry wrote: “Every May is tough — a reminder of years passed, of years together lost, or stolen.
“This year it is particularly poignant as we should be celebrating Madeleine’s 18th birthday.
“Enough said.
“The Covid pandemic has made this year even more difficult for many reasons but thankfully the investigation to find Madeleine and her abductor has continued.”
Kate and Gerry with their memoir ‘Madeleine’ in 2011 (Image: Getty)
Kate and Gerry say they “hang on to hope” as their daughter’s 18th birthday approaches (Image: Getty)
They added that they “hang on to the hope” that they will see their beloved daughter again.
In 2014, the McCanns also spoke to the BBC’s Fiona Bruce and explained why they still had some optimism that Madeleine would be found one day.
Gerry said: “Very early on we got advice from NCMEC, saying that there are a whole lot of reasons children get taken, that’s the first thing.
“They’ve recovered hundreds of children in unusual circumstances.
“I suppose the scenario, and it’s not been ruled out, Madeleine was taken by someone who wants a child and she’s being loved and cared for, that’s the best scenario, but of course there are many others.”
Kate and Gerry speaking to the BBC’s Fiona Bruce on the 10th anniversary of Madeleine’s disappearance (Image: Getty)
Related articles
Kate also wrote in her memoir about the other cases of abduction where the children were recovered many years later.
She concluded: “How many more children are out there waiting to be found?”
Last June, Madeleine’s case came back into the public eye when German authorities revealed a 43-year-old German prisoner, identified as Christian B, was considered a suspect.
German investigators classed it as a murder inquiry, with one prosecutor Hans Christian Wolter telling the BBC that the public would “come to the same conclusion” as him that Madeleine was likely to be dead if they “knew the evidence we had”.
‘Madeleine: Our daughter’s disappearance and the continuing search for her’ by Kate McCann was published in 2011 by Transworld Publishers Ltd and is available here.
Author: Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica
This post originally appeared on Business Latest
Most of the scribes who copied the text contained in the Dead Sea Scrolls were anonymous, as they neglected to sign their work. That has made it challenging for scholars to determine whether a given manuscript should be attributed to a single scribe or more than one, based on unique elements in their writing styles (a study called paleography). Now, a new handwriting analysis of the Great Isaiah Scroll, applying the tools of artificial intelligence, has revealed that the text was likely written by two scribes, mirroring one another’s writing style, according to a new paper published in the journal PLOS One.
As we’ve reported previously, these ancient Hebrew texts—roughly 900 full and partial scrolls in all, stored in clay jars—were first discovered scattered in various caves near what was once the settlement of Qumran, just north of the Dead Sea, by Bedouin shepherds in 1946-1947. (Apparently, a shepherd threw a rock while searching for a lost member of his flock and accidentally shattered one of the clay jars, leading to the discovery.) Qumran was destroyed by the Romans, circa 73 AD, and historians believe the scrolls were hidden in the caves by a sect called the Essenes to protect them from being destroyed. The natural limestone and conditions within the caves helped preserve the scrolls for millennia; they date back to between the third century BC and the first century AD.
Several of the parchments have been carbon-dated, and synchrotron radiation—among other techniques—has been used to shed light on the properties of the ink used for the text. Most recently, in 2018, an Israeli scientist named Oren Ableman used an infrared microscope attached to a computer to identify and decipher Dead Sea Scroll fragments stored in a cigar box since the 1950s.
A 2019 study of the so-called Temple Scroll concluded that the parchment has an unusual coating of sulfate salts (including sulfur, sodium, gypsum, and calcium), which may be one reason the scrolls were so well preserved. And last year, researchers discovered that four fragments stored at the University of Manchester, long presumed to be blank, actually contained hidden text, most likely a passage from the Book of Ezekiel.
The current paper focuses on the Great Isaiah Scroll, one of the original scrolls discovered in Qumran Cave 1 (designated 1QIsa). It’s the only scroll from the caves to be entirely preserved, apart from a few small damaged areas where the leather has cracked off. The Hebrew text is written on 17 sheets of parchment, measuring 24 feet long and around 10 inches in height, containing the entire text of the Book of Isaiah. That makes the Isaiah Scroll the oldest complete copy of the book by about 1,000 years. (The Israel Museum, in partnership with Google, has digitized the Isaiah Scroll along with an English translation as part of its Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Project.)
Most scholars believed that the Isaiah Scroll was copied by a single scribe because of the seemingly uniform handwriting style. But others have suggested that it may be the work of two scribes writing in a similar style, each copying one of the scroll’s two distinct halves. “They would try to find a ‘smoking gun’ in the handwriting, for example, a very specific trait in a letter that would identify a scribe,” said coauthor Mladen Popović of the University of Groningen. Popović is also director of the university’s Qumran Institute, dedicated to the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
In other words, the traditional paleographic method is inherently subjective and based on a given scholar’s experience. It’s challenging in part because one scribe could have a fair amount of variability in their writing style, so how does one determine what is a natural variation or a subtle difference indicating a different hand? Further complicating matters, similar handwriting might be the result of two scribes sharing a common training, a sign the scribe was fatigued or injured, or a sign the scribe changed writing implements.
“The human eye is amazing and presumably takes these levels into account too. This allows experts to ‘see’ the hands of different authors, but that decision is often not reached by a transparent process,” said Popović. “Furthermore, it is virtually impossible for these experts to process the large amounts of data the scrolls provide.” The Isaiah Scroll, for instance, contains at least 5,000 occurrences of the letter aleph (“a”), making it almost impossible to compare every single aleph by eye. Popović thought pattern recognition and artificial intelligence techniques would be well suited to the task.
