Category: News

An American influencer left Australia on Friday after the government announced it was reviewing her visa over a video she posted of her snatching a baby wombat from its mother.

Sam Jones, who describes herself as an “outdoor enthusiast & hunter”, made her Instagram account private on Thursday after she was widely condemned for the video.

“There’s never been a better day to be a baby wombat in Australia,” home affairs minister Tony Burke said in a statement after a government official confirmed Ms Jones had flown from the country voluntarily.

In the video, Montana-based Ms Jones lifts the wombat joey by its front legs in darkness from a roadside and then runs away from its mother.

“I caught a baby wombat,” she said as a man filming her laughs.

She returns the wombat to the roadside after several seconds.

Mr Burke said earlier on Friday the conditions of her visa were being reviewed to determine whether immigration law had been breached.

“I can’t wait for Australia to see the back of this individual, I don’t expect she will return,” he said in the statement received by The Associated Press.

Prime minister Anthony Albanese added his voice to the criticism.

“To take a baby wombat from its mother, and clearly causing distress from the mother, is just an outrage,” Mr Albanese said.

“I suggest to this so-called influencer, maybe she might try some other Australian animals. Take a baby crocodile from its mother and see how you go there. Take another animal that can actually fight back rather than stealing a baby wombat from its mother.”

Ms Jones, who also uses the name Samantha Strable, closed her social media channels to messages and could not be reached for comment on Friday.

The wombat appears to be a common wombat, also known as a bare-nosed wombat. It is a protected marsupial found only in Australia.

Yolandi Vermaak, founder of the animal care charity Wombat Rescue, said separating the young wombat from its mother created a risk that the mother would reject her offspring.

“My biggest concern is that we didn’t actually see mom and baby getting reunited. When she put it down, it looked disoriented. It was turned away from where the mother was last seen. So we don’t know if mum and baby actually found each other again,” Ms Vermaak said.

Ms Vermaak also called on Ms Jones to say where the wombat was after the video showed the joey had a skin disease.

“The baby has mange and it’s a matter of time before it dies of mange, so it’s important for us to find where this happened and to get this baby and its mom treated as soon as possible,” Ms Vermaak said.

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The event, called “Our Fathers,” is organised by Man Alive Theatre in collaboration with Norwich-based men’s charity, MensCraft.

It is scheduled for Saturday, March 29, from 11am to 4pm at Kemp’s Dojo, next to MensCraft.

The workshop will use theatre techniques and processes to delve into the relationships between sons and fathers.

The workshop is open to all, regardless of theatre or drama experience (Image: ManAlive Theatre) The aim is to understand how these relationships have shaped or influenced the men we are today.

The workshop is open to all, regardless of theatre or drama experience.

It will employ a technique known as the Theatre of Self Expression to reflect upon and gain a better understanding of the influence fathers have on personalities, values, ambitions and self-esteem.

The workshop will be led by Thom Bailey and Andy Wood, who have been running Theatre of Self Expression workshops together for more than a decade.

Thom is a theatre director based in Lowestoft, while Andy has been running men’s groups for MensCraft for more than 20 years.

A theatre workshop exploring the son-father dynamic is being held in Norwich (Image: ManAlive Theatre) Thom Bailey, one of the directors of Man Alive, said: “Man Alive has produced theatre before which looks at fathers and sons, but this is the first time we will use participants own experiences and relationships as basis of self-expression and as a foundation to create drama that is transformative, cathartic and multi-faceted.

“This is more about the group process as opposed to putting on a show.”

For those who find the workshop beneficial and wish to further explore this key relationship in their personal development, a series of evening workshops will be offered subsequently.

Tickets for the event can be found on Eventbrite by searching for “Our Fathers.”

The organisers hope that the workshop will provide a platform for participants to unpick their relationships with their fathers and gain a deeper understanding of their influence.

Young dad, Dylan Beattie, has woken up from his coma.

A young dad who was placed in a coma after a football header injury has been left unable to recognise the mother of his son.

Dylan Beattie, 25, woke up after four days on life-support following the sickening incident, which took place on March 2 as his team Glasgow North United played against Hillwood.

Medics previously warned his partner Megan O’Donnell, 23, that memory loss or a permanent mental disability may be a possible consequence of his injuries, but the young mum said nothing could have prepared her for the heartache she is now facing.

She told the Record: “He doesn’t know I am. I have to keep reintroducing myself. He is also having difficulty speaking and doesn’t know what year it is.

“When he first woke up he said ‘hello’ and I asked him what year it was. He replied that it was 2027.

“But but I haven’t heard him speak since.”

Megan, who has been with Dylan for eight years and is mum to his 14-month old son Taio, said she does believe the dad can recognise his little boy.

She added: “Dylan’s eyes lit up when he saw Taio. He even tried to wave to him.

“I could tell he recognised him and all Taio did the entire time they were together was smile.

“He was so, so happy.”

Health staff also warned Dylan’s loved ones that he may be left unable to walk or do basic tasks for months.

Megan continued: “They’ve tried to start physio with him, but it is not going too well.

“He’s also being scheduled for an MRI and some other tests to check on the swelling on his brain.

“It will be at least a couple of weeks before we really know where we stand.”

Dylan clashed with an opposition player in the match day incident which knocked him unconscious before he suffered a further blow to his head as he crashed to the ground.

The landscape gardener from Maryhill in Glasgow, was placed in the coma for four days after medics found swelling and a bleed on his brain.

Best friend and teammate Brandon Imran, 27, was playing alongside Dylan when the incident unfolded and has since launched a Gofundme page to help his family.

He added: “We have been best mates for years. We played centre back together that day.

“He doesn’t usually play that position and although he’s 6ft 1, he never usually jumps to head the ball.

“With ten minutes to go, we were 5-2 up and he jumped up and was knocked-out mid-air. He turned sideways in the air and came down and smacked his head off the ground.”

The fundraiser for Dylan has reached over £12,000.

Visit the fundraiser here – https://gofund.me/369a6a10

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It’s accepted that parents, not the government, have the primary right and duty to raise and protect their children. While most Americans would not dispute this notion regarding parenting in the physical world, it has become surprisingly controversial in the digital one.

In Congress and legislatures nationwide, proposals have proliferated to wrest control of children’s digital lives from their parents. These are proposals that would “not enforce parental authority over children’s” behavior but “impose governmental authority, subject only to a parental veto,” to borrow the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s words in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association (2011).

They include bills to require online age verification, micromanage social media’s algorithmic interactions with minors and bar children from social media altogether.

Such a bill is the Kids Off Social Media Act (KOSMA), introduced recently by a bipartisan coalition of senators. KOSMA would erect two main pillars: to disallow children under the age of 13 from social media and to disallow platforms from offering “personalized recommendation systems” to teens. Parents should look suspiciously at both.

Barring children from the category of online platforms that KOSMA labels “social media” will probably harm the children it intends to protect.

“The act would inadvertently make children less safe,” TechFreedom writes, pointing out that it “makes no exception for parent-managed kid-safe accounts. … It would ban platforms that allow supervised child access — like YouTube Kids.”

Similarly, the provision to remove personalized recommendations would prevent algorithms from keeping objectionable material from minors.

TechFreedom explains: “By mandating chronological-only feeds for teens, KOSMA inhibits the ability of a platform to cultivate a safer online space — e.g., by downranking controversial or distasteful content that a teen has requested.”

The law of unintended consequences and the limitations of lawmakers’ foresight remain the unconquerable foes of the would-be central planner.

In addition, despite the supporters’ paper-thin protestations to the contrary, KOSMA’s age-specific requirements would act as an age-verification requirement — an unconstitutional burden on speech. KOSMA’s promise that it does not intend mandatory age verification would do little for tech firms that see a deluge of litigation on the horizon. How else might a platform adequately assess a user’s age? The bill’s gapingly broad “knowledge fairly implied” standard serves as an invitation to attorneys.

Knowing the costs of a deluge of lawsuits better than the precise meaning of the law’s text, litigation-averse tech companies will treat KOSMA as what it is: a de facto — if cleverly obscured — age-verification mandate. In practice, only with age verification could platforms be sure to avoid liability under KOSMA; ergo, age verification will ensue.

Judges have long considered mandated age verification — implicit and explicit — unconstitutional. Age verification usually requires users of all ages to proffer sensitive personal data or biometrics, and enforcing it, courts have ruled, imposes unconstitutionally heavy burdens on online speech. KOSMA’s denial of its obvious effects will not save it in court.

Far from possessing rock-solid, unassailable answers, KOSMA’s supporters seem lost at sea, searching desperately for land. They have convinced themselves that something, anything, must be done to keep children from the internet.

Despite the certainty of child safety advocates, just how social media affects children’s psychology remains unclear. Many claim that “the science is settled.” It is not.

When the government trespasses into a sphere “better left to a private individual or institution” — in this case, the family — the attendant harms usually dwarf whatever good might be accomplished. The government does not know much about American children, it has little just authority over most aspects of American children’s lives, and it certainly does not love American children.

Pretending otherwise, as if nobody exists who might do better by them, leads directly to unconstitutional, interventionist nanny statism — and likely to many judicial injunctions.

David B. McGarry is the research director at the Taxpayers Protection Alliance. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.

My Florida family ventured north and rented a home for two weeks in my resort community along the Jersey Shore. Teenagers now, the grandkids are immersed in their generational lifestyle.  

Friends rule. Family time is endured, even enjoyed, until teen goings-on beckon. Their parents’ lifestyle is not a lot different. With friends who live in the Northeast, a shore vacation offers an opportunity to reconnect and mix fun, sun, and social time.

That leaves the older generation, my husband and me, AKA Grandpa and Grandma. We are tolerated for intervals between teen and grown-up time. I am not complaining. Anytime spent with the young’uns is a terrific time.

But as a Baby Boomer, I am starting to grapple with becoming irrelevant.

Halfpoint / Shutterstock

The kids age, we age, and relationships transform.

My sister and I spent our childhood summers at my grandparents’ bungalow in the Catskill Mountains. How did we view the adults? Boring, old, un-energetic? Probably. 

RELATED: Boomer Grandma Shares The 8 Traits That ‘Define’ Her Generation Of Grandparenting — ‘Love You To Bits, But This Is My Time’

The only athletic-like activity recalled is long walks (or they seemed long to a little girl) along country roads. There were other pastimes spent together — card games, mah-jongg, trips to the library, and of course meals and nightly bowls of ice cream.

Fast forward to a 21st-century generation that savors summer break. The kids love to walk to the ice cream parlor to indulge in their favorite dessert, especially when the old folks pay. 

The old folks enjoy sharing meals with the kids; any meal I don’t prepare is appreciated. The teens link with friends in person or via electronic means I am only vaguely familiar with. There are additional active activities — old folks uninvited. We are favored for brief periods, fleeting moments of connection.

RELATED: 10 Sweet Traditions Slowly Disappearing With Younger Generations

The transition from babysitting grandparent and game companion to the spectator and occasional participant is disheartening.

It’s a transition not welcomed due to the realization that, on the part of us oldsters, it is one more sign of aging into … extinction. Obscurity? Irrelevance? Invisibility? All of the above?

I understand why some people want to live in a 55+ community where everyone is on the same page, and folks are not regularly reminded of their creeping maturity.

We oldsters may be young at heart, but let’s face it — our faces and our bodies betray us. We chug along, keeping an eye on the kids and watching their energy soar as ours dissipates. And life goes on.

RELATED: 8 Significant ‘Rites Of Passage’ Millennials Experienced That Younger Generations Will Never Understand

Meryl Baer lives at the Jersey Shore, where relatives and friends descend all summer, but no one visits in winter, so she writes. Her work has appeared in anthologies and journals, on Medium, and her blog, Musings of a Shore Life.