For those who never duck their heads outside of UK and/or US events, may I proffer this piece of reactionary stupidity from the Southern hemisphere:

[www.csamuel.org]

• Cornelia Rau goes missing from Manly Hospital in Sydney, reportedly with schizophrenia.
• She makes her way from NSW to northern Queensland, where she is found by Aborigines.
• In NSW the police list her as a missing person and the media is alerted.
• The Aborigines became concerned for her safety and wellbeing, and took her to the local police for help.
• The police find out she speaks German, and apparently says she’s a German called Anna in Australia on a temporary visa (she’s actually lived here since she was 18 months old, and is Australian).
• QLD police detain her, and she is passed over to DIMIA and detained as a suspected illegal immigrant.
• At some point the police and/or DIMIA contact the German embassy, who (unsuprisingly) have great problems identifying her as a citizen.
• The QLD police (or DIMIA) fail to contact the NSW police to check their missing persons list.
• In detention she is sent for psychiatric care to a hospital in Brisbane, but they fail to spot any problems and label her as having "behavioural problems".
• Six months into her detention she is moved to the Baxter detention center, where she comes to the attention of BaxterWatch activists as "Anna".
• Eventually Cornelias family eventually see pictures of "Anna" in detention, provided by activists, and identify her.
• Cornelia is released to them, and is now being treated at Adelaides Glenside psychiatric hospital.

There is a very telling comment from her sister:

“The two groups who were kind to Cornelia in all this time were the two most downtrodden groups in society — the Aborigines in Cairns and the refugees in Baxter — there’s an irony in that,”

Chris’s posting even got picked up by a member of the Australian Senate which is a level of citation that not many bloggers achieve.

The situation, though, is atrocious. More and more I think that the world, or rather the mass-media-fed politicians who think they are the world, is/are going potty.