Category: News

LONDON, UK – A UK court on Thursday will hear the appeals of the father and stepmother of a murdered British-Pakistani girl, who were jailed for life after killing the child following years of torture.

The trial of Urfan Sharif and his wife Beinash Batool caused waves of revulsion in the UK as the horrific abuse suffered by the 10-year-old girl was revealed in a London court.

There was anger too at how the bright, bubbly youngster had been failed by all the authorities supposed to be in charge of her care.

London’s Old Bailey court heard that her body was found in her bed in August 2023 covered in bites and bruises with broken bones and burns inflicted by an electric iron and boiling water.

Passing sentence in December after the trial, judge John Cavanagh said Sara had been subjected to “acts of extreme cruelty” but that Sharif and Batool had not shown “a shred of remorse”.

They had treated Sara as “worthless” and as “a skivvy”, because she was a girl. And because she was not Batool’s natural child, the stepmother had failed to protect her, he said. “This poor child was battered with great force again and again.”

– ‘Most distressing case’ –

Sara’s father, 43, was sentenced to 40 years in prison while her stepmother, 30, was ordered to remain in jail for at least 33 years.

Both are now appealing their terms at the Royal Courts of Justice, along with Sara’s uncle, Faisal Malik, 29, who lived with the family and was sentenced to 16 years after being found guilty of causing or allowing her death.

The Solicitor General, Lucy Rigby, is also appealing the sentence imposed on Urfan Sharif, maintaining it was “unduly lenient”.

A post-mortem examination of Sara’s body revealed she had 71 fresh injuries and at least 25 broken bones. She had been beaten with a metal pole and cricket bat and “trussed up” with a “grotesque combination of parcel tape, a rope and a plastic bag” over her head.

A hole was cut in the bag so she could breathe and she was left to soil herself in nappies as she was prevented from using the bathroom.

Police called the case “one of the most difficult and distressing” that they had ever had to deal with.

The day after Sara died, the three adults fled their home in Woking, southwest of London, and flew to Pakistan with five other children.

Her father, a taxi-driver, left behind a handwritten note saying he had not meant to kill his daughter.

After a month on the run, the three returned to the UK and were arrested after landing. The five other children remain in Pakistan.

There has been anger in the UK that Sara’s brutal treatment was missed by social services after her father withdrew her from school four months before she died.

Sharif and his first wife, Olga, were well-known to social services.

In 2019, a judge decided to award the care of Sara and an older brother to Sharif, despite his history of abuse.

The school had three times raised the alarm about Sara’s case, notably after she arrived in class wearing a hijab, which she used to try to cover marks on her body which she refused to explain.

Since December, the government has moved to tighten up the rules on home-schooling.

Sara’s body was repatriated to Poland, where her mother is from, and where a funeral was organised. – AFP

Australia is reviewing an American influencer’s visa after she posted video of her snatching a baby wombat from its mother.

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

She lifts the wombat joey by its front legs in darkness from a roadside 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.

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said her visa was under review.

“The department is now working through the conditions on her current visa and determining whether immigration law has been breached,” Burke said in a statement received by The Associated Press on Friday.

“I can’t wait for Australia to see the back of this individual, I don’t expect she will return,” he added.

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,” Albanese told reporters.

“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,” Albanese added.

Jones, who also uses the name Samantha Strable, closed her social media channels to messages and couldn’t be reached for comment Friday.

The wombat appears to be 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 mom and baby actually found each other again,” Vermaak told Australian Broadcasting Corp.

Vermaak also called on 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,” Vermaak said.

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Adolescence ’s Stephen Graham has issued a warning to parents about the dangers of the internet.

The 51-year-old is the star and co-writer of the new acclaimed Netflix series, which follows the family of 13-year-old schoolboy, Jamie Miller, who is accused of the brutal murder of a young girl. Graham plays Jamie’s father, Eddie.

Shot in one-take, each episode follows characters in real time as they attempt to get to the bottom of the incident. Exploring topical issues including incel culture, misogyny and the online “manosphere”, Graham was inspired by news reports of stabbings of young girls.

“I read an article about a young boy stabbing a young girl,” the A Thousand Blows star told The Independent. “And then maybe a couple of months later, on the news there was [another] young boy who’d stabbed a young girl, and if I’m really honest with you, they hurt my heart.”

He explained that the storyline explores a complexity of topics, and that parents need to be “mindful” of the external influences working on their children.

“It’s just being mindful of the fact that not only we parent our children, and not only the school educates our children,” he said. “But also there’s influences that we have no idea of that are having profound effects on our young culture, profound effects, positive and extremely negative. So it’s having a look at that and seeing that we’re all accountable.”

Graham wanted to explore the wider influences affecting young boys from “ordinary” backgrounds.

“We wanted him to come from an ordinary family,” he said. “We wanted to be mindful from the very beginning that there was no way you could point the finger. Dad wasn’t particularly violent in the house and didn’t raise his hand to mum or the boy or his daughter. Mum wasn’t an alcoholic. Jamie wasn’t abused sexually or mentally or physically.”

He said the series then asks the question: “Who is to blame? Who is accountable?”, and the answer is not straightforward. “Maybe we’re all accountable family, school, society, community, environment.”

The Boiling Point actor went on to unpack the “microcosm of the home” and “the macrocosm of the world outside”, explaining that the separation no longer existed.

“When we were kids, if you got sent to your room or if Kenny Everett was on the telly, and it got a bit racy, you’d be sent to your room and then you couldn’t watch it,” he reflected. “But today even within the context of that home, when lads and girls go to their bedrooms, they have the world at their fingertips.”

Adolescence does not deal with Andrew Tate or incel culture directly, an intentional decision by writer Jack Thorne to shed light on the complex influences impacting young people and explore “male rage”.

“The kids aren’t watching Andrew Tate,” he sid. “They’re watching a lot more dangerous stuff than Andrew Tate. We were trying present a portrait of complexity of this kid that had been made by all sorts of different influences and the thing about incel culture is there’s a logic to it.”

Brisbane, Australia
CNN
 — 

An American tourist who was reportedly filmed picking up and running off with a wild baby wombat fled Australia after officials threatened to cancel her visa in a firestorm of criticism over the incident.

A video shared widely on social media purports to show Sam Jones, who has 92,000 followers on Instagram, running with the baby wombat towards a car while its distressed mother chases after her.

It’s not clear when the video was shot, and neither is the location, but it was at night on what appears to be a country road somewhere in southeastern Australia, where most wombats reside.

Horrified Australians called for Jones to be deported, and on Thursday Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said his department was reviewing her visa, which would be canceled if she was found to have breached the conditions of her stay.

On Friday it was confirmed Jones had voluntarily left the country, with Burke declaring: “There’s never been a better day to be a baby wombat in Australia.”

Experts say the animals in the video were common wombats, the only one of three species of the Australian marsupial which is not threatened or endangered. But like all Australian native animals, they are protected by law.

CNN has reached out to Jones but has not received a response. A post on a new TikTok account purporting to belong to the Montana-based traveler said in part: “You have all gone crazy… the hate is currently too much for me to handle.”

The criticism came from the very top of Australian politics, with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese suggesting Thursday that Jones should try her luck with another Australian animal that was more likely to put up a fight.

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

The video, reportedly deleted from an Instagram account that’s since been made private, and TikTok on a now-deleted account, shows a woman running across the road while holding a baby wombat.

“Just caught a baby wombat,” a man laughs off-camera, apparently referring to Jones.

“Look at the mother, chasing after her,” he laughs again, referring to the adult wombat, which chases the woman onto the road.

Shocked ecologists and wildlife carers said the sudden separation of the wombat and her baby, known as a joey, would have triggered stress reactions in both animals.

“Yanking a baby away from its mother, running away with it, and having the baby dangling in hands, is sort of pretty high up there in what not to do,” said Professor Barry Brook, an ecologist with the University of Tasmania.

Wombats do not typically attack humans, but they have incredibly strong claws they use to burrow into the ground. If used on human skin, they could cause major damage and infection, Brook said.

“It’s not a situation you or any other member of the public should put yourself in for both the animals’ sake and your own sake. And broadcasting this on social media to get likes and hits and so forth as an influencer is totally counterproductive,” he added.

Wildlife veterinarian Tanya Bishop, from the Wildlife Information, Rescue and Education Service (WIRES), says the video doesn’t show the animals reuniting, or if the joey sustained injuries from being carried by its front legs.

“My concern is whether or not that joey had a temporary, painful, debilitating injury or something that could have been permanent,” she said. Bishop said wildlife officials are trying to determine where the video was shot.

According to Australia’s national broadcaster, the ABC, Jones responded to some of the criticism online before turning her social media channels private by saying the baby was “carefully held for one minute in total and then released back to mom.”

“They wandered back off into the bush together completely unharmed,” she reportedly wrote. “I don’t ever capture wildlife that will be harmed by my doing so.”

Common wombats, the species seen in the video, are not considered vulnerable, unlike the southern hairy-nosed wombat, which is “near threatened,” and the northern hairy-nosed wombat, which is listed as “critically endangered” by the IUCN Red List.

Bishop said while they’re not endangered, common wombats are coming under increasing stress from busy roads, habitat loss and mange – a potentially fatal skin disease.

“All of our wildlife needs as much protection as we can give it,” said Bishop. “Over the 25 years that I’ve been a wildlife vet, I’ve seen so many species go from being least concerned to being endangered, threatened and potentially going to go extinct.”

Bishop’s advice to people who come across Australian wildlife: “Stay quiet and enjoy watching them from a distance.”

“Take video quietly if you want to; you’re going to see really beautiful interactions. And honestly, in the case of wombats, some of them are pretty funny, because baby wombats are very cheeky and naughty.”

CNN’s Angus Watson contributed reporting.

Min Se-hee, a 26-year-old motivated to follow her late father’s footsteps, was appointed a police lieutenant Thursday.

“My father’s colleagues looked after me when I was young. I want to return the favor to the society,” said Min. Her father died in a car accident during service in 2002 when she was only 3 years old. She added that, as a police officer, she wished to help underprivileged children.

Her 33-year-old brother, Senior Patrol Officer Min Seung-gi, also joined the force in 2016.

Lt. Min was among the 150 police officers newly appointed as police captains and lieutenants Thursday in a ceremony held at the Korean National Police University in Asan, South Chungcheong Province. This included 91 graduates of the police university, 51 candidates who passed the public recruitment process, and eight former lawyers and accountants.

South Korea has conducted a special hiring process for licensed legal experts, specifically lawyers since 2014 and certified public accountants, since 2019. Graduates of the KNPU start their careers as lieutenants, as do former licensed CPAs, while licensed lawyers begin as captains.

This graduation marks the first batch of students entering the school without the gender quota. The university previously allocated only 12 percent of its slots to women; the policy was abolished in 2021.

This year, 34 percent of the new hires (51) were women, the highest percentage in the country’s history. The top-scoring candidates among both the KNPU graduates and the public recruits Thursday were women, Lt. Heo Ga-yeong and Lt. Kim Ga-yeong.

Fifty-six of the newly appointed KNPU graduates were men while 35 were women.

As of September 2024, 15.8 percent of the police officers nationwide were women.

minsikyoon@heraldcorp.com

A 16-year-old boy’s heartfelt “converse education” to his mother, in which he urged her to prioritise self-love, has resonated deeply with mainland Chinese internet users.

The touching one-minute speech by secondary school student Wang Nanhao was captured in a viral video during a conversation at home, where his mother expressed her reluctance to buy expensive items for herself, preferring instead to save money for him, as reported by news portal ThePaper.

“Mum, your mindset is far too harmful! You deserve a coat that costs 1,000 yuan (US$140) and face cream worth 3,000 yuan,” the teenager asserted. “If you feel pressured to make those purchases, that’s my father’s issue, or mine.”

The family lives in Ningbo in eastern China’s Zhejiang province.

He elaborated: “The most profound lesson I learned from you is not about doing countless household chores or sacrificing your own happiness. Rather, it is about your relentless pursuit of joy in any situation and your commitment to becoming the best version of yourself.”

Dissatisfied mums and dads are being shut out of information portals and going without crucial communications because schools’ policies and processes aren’t designed to cater to separated families, a pioneering study has concluded.

Spurred on by her own dislocating experience in the system, Renee Desmarchelier from the University of Southern Queensland led the project, unearthing a string of obstacles that are hindering separated parents’ engagement in their children’s schooling.

She tells EducationHQ it was concerning to find parents’ satisfaction with the home-school relationship came down to the health of their own co-parenting union and how well they were communicating with their ex-partner.

“So, it wasn’t necessarily anything the schools were doing, it was whether they had an amicable co-parent relationship and were communicating [amongst] themselves.

“Which is a problem in itself, because it was relying on the parents to get along to share the information, which we know is often not the case.”

Blunt management systems not fit-for-purpose

A key issue is that student management systems do not allow for the nuanced needs of separated families, leaving some out in the cold, Desmarchelier says.

The researcher knows how this can play out first-hand. When student report cards went online for the first time in Queensland, she says she never received the log-in details as promised.

“My ex-partner was the person who lived in the school catchment area, so he was the primary parent in the system. So, when I emailed the school, they said, ‘oh no, you will need to get the log-in details off [him]’,” she recalls.

“I thought, ‘hang on a minute, I’ve got just as much right to that information’ … both parents have rights to that information.”

After some digging with the help of the school, Demarchelier discovered that if you report your child lives with both parents, the management system assumes you all live together and offers up just one set of communication.

The concept of visiblity – or rather the lack thereof – was woven throughout parents’ responses in the study. 

As one father expressed: 

“I guess my partner at the time had, unbeknownst to me, actually contacted the school, changed the point of contact, and changed payments . . . Then, when I contacted the school and said that I either wasn’t receiving any information or that all the notices suddenly weren’t coming to me, they said, ‘Oh, we’re not going to get involved’. And so, I was left completely out of it. The school wasn’t prepared to discuss any matters, unless it was jointly, or through something pre-arranged.” 

The ‘primary parent’ problem

Schools’ in-built assumptions about the family unit emerged as a key issue in the research.

“We heard a lot about this need for a primary parent in most student management systems as particularly problematic…

“And it often meant the mothers were prioritised. We had some fathers reporting to us that the school told them they weren’t allowed to be the primary parent in the system because that had to be the mother,” Desmarchelier flags.

Another parent interviewed said conflict had erupted when only one set of information was provided at a classroom open day.

“That led to things that neither parent really wanted to experience in the classroom, in front of the teacher, in front of the other parents…” the researcher says.

“Just thinking through the implications of even small interactions like that can be really important. So, how are you going to effectively communicate with both parents?”

Make no assumptions

Schools ought to also remain cognisant of perhaps not knowing everything about the dynamic at play within a separated family, Desmarchelier adds.

“We saw lots of incidences where the parent filling out [our] survey was reporting family and domestic violence, but there were no court orders involved in that.

“I think schools need to be really conscious of the fact that they are not necessarily going to be aware where that has taken place in families. It’s not necessarily something that’s going to be disclosed to them.

“So saying to parents, ‘you two just need to sort it out yourselves’, can be particularly damaging for people in those sorts of situations – and parents will go without the information rather than expose themselves to those sorts of dangers again.”

Avoid deficit language 

It’s important to consider the language used to describe separated families too, the researcher argues.

“We even had an incident where a mum had gone to a potential new school for an interview with the principal, and the principal talked about all these ‘terrible broken families that had moved into the area’.

“She just looked at her and said, ‘I don’t think this is a school for us, thank you very much’.

“That language where you’re framing diverse family structures as deficit can be quite damaging to parents’ confidence as well.”

‘We need to get this experience on record’ 

The study plugs a clear gap in the research literature focused on parent engagement with schools.

“Nowhere is there anything around what that experience is for separated parents, and that was really a prompt for me to go, ‘well, actually we need to get this experience on record’, because it hasn’ t really been recorded before,” Desmarchelier says.

The charge now is to look at how schools might more inclusively communicate with all families – regardless of how they might deviate from the nuclear norm, the academic shares.

“I really think we need to look at the way we manage student information and family information.

“We started in this separated parent space, but we want to start looking at diverse family structures more broadly…”

Sam Jones, an American influencer who briefly snatched a baby wombat from its distressed mother and uploaded the footage to social media has left Australia.

Australia’s Home Affairs minister Tony Burke had earlier said his department was reviewing if it could revoke Ms Jones’ visa, but the BBC understands that she left the country of her own accord.

“There has never been a better time to be a baby wombat,” Burke said in a short statement on Friday celebrating Jones’ departure.

Anger erupted across Australia after Jones posted a video of her taking a baby wombat from the side of a road while laughing and running away from the distraught mother wombat.

The video also shows the baby wombat hissing in distress before Jones then returns it to the bush.

Jones, who also goes by the name Samantha Strable, has nearly 100,000 followers and describes herself as an “outdoor enthusiast and hunter” on her Instagram profile. She has since made her account private and deleted her post.

Her video was swiftly met with widespread condemnation, with Australia Prime Minister Anthony Albanese calling the incident an “outrage”.

Foreign minister Penny Wong called the video “dreadful”.

On Friday, opposition leader Peter Dutton said he thought it was “a cruel act” and that he was “glad” the influencer has now left.

An online petition demanding Jones be deported from Australia garnered more than 30,000 signatures.

However, as Jones had not been charged nor been deemed a threat to the country – the government may not have had any grounds to cancel her visa.

In since-deleted comments, Ms Jones said “the baby was carefully held for one minute in total and then released back to mom”.

“They wandered back off into the bush together completely unharmed,” she wrote. “I don’t ever capture wildlife that will be harmed by my doing so.”

But wildlife experts have deemed Jones’ act a “blatant disregard” for native wildlife.

The Wombat Protection Society said it was shocked to see the “mishandling of a wombat joey in an apparent snatch for ‘social media likes’”.

“Snatching a screaming baby wombat from their mother is not just appalling, it’s very possibly illegal under state or national laws,” Suzanne Milthorpe, Head of Campaigns at World Animal Protection Australia, said in a statement online. “Wombats are not a photo prop or plaything.”

Wombats, which are native to Australia, are a legally protected species across the country. Baby wombats share a strong bond with their mothers, and any separation can be distressing and harmful, conservationists say.

The Creative Inspirations Behind The Father Of Make Believe by Claudio Sanchez

Meghan Markle and her mother, Doria Ragland, are incredibly close, with the 68-year-old standing by her daughter’s side through thick and thin.

Doria even lived with Meghan and her husband, Prince Harry, for over a month in Frogmore Cottage after they welcomed their son, Prince Archie. 

The social worker passed down several of her own traits to her daughter, including her love of food.

Her choice of Christmas gift lent itself perfectly to Meghan’s cooking hobby, as the mother of two revealed in episode six of her Netflix show, With Love, Meghan. 

While Meghan was busy dehydrating citrus fruits for her margaritas, she shared that Doria had gifted her and Harry a food dehydrator for Christmas. 

“My home also has a lot of fruit trees,” she said in the episode. “We share it with friends and donate to a local food bank.”

Doria also made an appearance on the show when she joined Meghan’s garden party in the series finale. 

Decked out in a sleeveless caramel-coloured knit vest and loose leopard print pants, she looked radiant as she greeted her daughter. 

While admiring Meghan’s brunch spread, Doria asked: “Are the greens from the garden?” to which the Duchess replied: “Yes, greens are from the garden.” The proud mother replied: “It’s lovely. Nice job!”

Meghan explained on the show how much Doria’s cooking influenced her growing up, despite the pair moving around a lot. 

“I have a very, very high tolerance for spicy, and I love it,” she said. “I crave it. Even at a young age, we didn’t have a lot, but we travelled. My mom was a travel agent. We would just try so many different flavours in so many different places.”

She continued: “My mom would make gumbo, and soul food has a lot of flavour and a lot of kick to it. I crave that, and I always gravitate to that level of heat. So I am ushering my family into my palate, but I love it.” 

Meghan has never failed to gush about the yoga instructor, who welcomed the Duchess when she was 25 years old. 

In 2014, she praised her mother’s strength in an emotional post on The Tig, Meghan’s now-defunct blog. 

“She was keeping me safe. She was teaching me to take care of my body. She was introducing me to history, and fostering a love of being outdoors,” the 43-year-old shared. 

“She was planting the seed for me to become a foodie. She was showing me how to be a daughter, not just in that moment, but for when I became that grown woman. For right now. And 30 years from now. She was loving me. So tightly.” 

Doria split from Meghan’s father, Thomas Markle, two years after her birth in 1981, and they officially divorced in 1987. He had previously welcomed kids Samantha and Thomas Jr. with his first wife, Roslyn Loveless. 

Just days before Meghan and Harry’s wedding in 2018, Thomas underwent heart surgery and was unable to walk his daughter down the aisle.