Police search for missing sisters

POLICE are becoming increasingly anxious to locate two girls who went missing last week.

Sisters Nicole and Bobbie-Jo Critchley, who are both under the care of social services, are believed to be with their mother somewhere in Stoke-on-Trent.

The pair went missing on Friday, April 17 from an address in Stone and officers have carried out a number of enquiries in the Potteries in the past week.

Twelve-year-old Bobbie-Jo is described as white, slim build, and about 5ft 2ins tall. She has shoulder length blonde hair and was last seen wearing black jeans, black Ugg boots, a black strap top and a black zip-up hooded jacket.

Her sister, 13-year-old Nicole, is also white, of medium build and about 5ft 3ins tall. She has shoulder length dark brown hair and was last seen wearing black jeans, black jumper and a belt.

Sergeant Dave Ingham, of Stone Neighbourhood Policing Unit (NPU), said: “Nicole and Bobbie-Jo have links within the Stoke area as well as in Stafford and while we believe they are with their mother, we are appealing to the public for their help in locating them.

“We would also urge the pair to make

Anyone with information on Nicole or Bobbie-Jo’s whereabouts is urged to contact Stone police on 0300 123 4455.

Razing Yahoo!’s GeoCities

Content isn’t king at Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO). In fact, it may not even be fit to be a jester. It’s more like the messenger getting slain, if we go by the struggling online titan’s move to close down its GeoCities site.

Believe it or not, a company that is clearly hungry for traffic and pages to populate with ads — given its 15% revenue slide this past quarter — is axing a source of free content generation. GeoCities has stopped taking in new registrations, and is advising existing users to move out before the bulldozers come in later this year.

As anyone who has surfed through GeoCities over the years will tell you, an Internet without GeoCities is like a world of celluloid without Keanu Reeves flicks. The absence of GeoCities won’t create a cultural void. Few will miss its passing. It’s loaded mostly with hobbyist tribute pages, authored by penny-pinching cybersurfers who put up with primitive tools and gaudy ads in exchange for free hosting. Many of the pages were created years ago, and abandoned like bunny rabbits after Easter Sunday, Ugg boots after winter, and anything Reeves did after the first Matrix movie.

Let’s not harp on the fact that Yahoo! acquired GeoCities 10 years ago in a deal originally valued at $3.6 billion — on the pricey side of the dot-com bubble. Everyone was overpaying at the time.

Yahoo!’s real crime was in neglecting its costly municipality. Instead of making GeoCities more attractive and fleshing out its potential as a social destination for niche audiences, Yahoo! appears to have dusted it under the rug as it moved to sell commercial hosting services instead.

Stupid, right? The guy in GeoCities who is showing off his collection of hissing Madagascar cockroaches or the YMCA basketball coach posting game-day snapshots is never going to upgrade to a paid hosting plan. However, a site like GeoCities can still nurture loyalty from its authors and appreciation from folks who stumble on sites put up by like-minded souls. That has to be worth something, right?

Killing GeoCities is just an invitation for bad karma, even if it’s already clear that Yahoo! did something to anger the gods several years ago. 

WOMANS DEATH IN SEA ISLE STILL A MYSTERY

SEA ISLE CITY— The Cape May Co. Prosecutors Office appealed to the public for assistance, on Friday, regarding the death of a Pennsylvania woman whose body was found near a boat ramp in Sea Isle City last Sunday.

Shortly before 8:00 am Sunday morning (Feb. 15) the body of 35 year old Tracy Hottenstein was discovered on a tiny sliver of marsh next to a public boat ramp at the street end of 42nd Pl.

The Conshohocken Pa. resident had been in town for Saturday’s annual Polar Bear Plunge.

According to the Cape May Co. Prosecutors Office, Hottenstein was at the Ocean Drive Bar, on Landis Av. later Saturday night, and was last seen leaving the OD around 2:15 Sunday morning.

Although her body had been in the water at some point, an autopsy has failed to determine how Hottenstein died — furthermore, sources tell NBC 40 that the cause of death is not drowning.

Authorities are still waiting for the results of toxicology tests.

On Thursday and again Friday morning, Middle Twp. and State Police divers searched the bay near where Hottenstein was found.

Described as 5′4″ tall and weighing approximately 135 pounds, she was last seen wearing a pink plaid hat, pink scarf, a black long sleeved top and a black vest, along with dark jeans and tan Ugg boots.

Anyone with information about this case is asked to contact the Cape May Co. Prosecutors Office — Major Crime Unit, at: (609) 465-1135.

Boot haul helps stamp out crime

A £2,000 haul of designer boots was found by police during their clean up Cardiff operation.

The Ugg boots were recovered alongside stolen motorbikes and industrial tools, many of which have been traced back to burglaries in Cardiff and Penarth.

Police released the details after the latest leg of their Operation Clean Sweep in Llanrumney and Rumney.

The operation is moving through the city area by area.

Warrants were executed in Llanrumney and Trowbridge and five arrests made for offences ranging from handling stolen goods to burglary.

The Uggs, which may have been fake, have been handed over to the council’s trading standards department.