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Post by Admin on May 6, 2015 5:19:18 GMT
A sinister new web craze in which teenagers are dared to vanish and not be found for 72 hours could be behind the disappearance of teenagers Siobhan and Sammy Clarke. The schoolmates, who were not related, were found on Monday morning around 20 miles away from their homes in Maldon, Essex , after going missing after leaving lessons on Friday. Their vanishing sparked a major police search in which 22-year-old friend Keiran Hartley-Anderson was also being searched for by officers. The trio were found together in Westcliff, Southend-on-Sea yesterday morning after police were tipped off by members of the public who recognised them. Essex Police later confirmed a 22-year-old man had been arrested in connection with the girl's disappearance. Friends on social media have now linked the incident with a chilling new Facebook craze in which youngsters dare eachother to complete 72 hours as a missing person without being caught. News of its existence only came to light when a 13-year-old French girl went missing for three days in the north of the country, before turning up safe and well at her home. The teen, named as Emma by the French press, apparently wouldn’t tell police or her parents where she’d been or who she’d been with - all she would say is she’d been playing the Facebook game. Westcliff resident Jo Gillet, 43, told the Daily Mail : "We heard the girls went missing and that it might be part of this new craze in the area. Keiran Hartley-Anderson, 22, was also found at the address and is understood to have been arrested and placed in police custody. The force had been conducting interviews with friends and family and were searching along the Essex coast.
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Post by Admin on May 10, 2015 5:16:29 GMT
The 1979 disappearance of a young boy that stunned the nation has ended in an agonizing stalemate, with just one juror unconvinced that a former stock clerk was guilty of the crime that has confounded authorities for decades. The deadlocked jury spent 18 days in painstaking deliberations poring over evidence and testimony, trying to decide whether to believe Pedro Hernandez's confession that he choked 6-year-old Etan Patz to death and dumped his body a few blocks away. But jurors said Friday for a third time that they were hopelessly deadlocked — 11-1, in favor of conviction. The judge declared a mistrial as the 54-year-old Hernandez sat impassively. The Maple Shade, New Jersey, man was a teenage stock clerk at a Manhattan convenience store near where Etan vanished May 25, 1979. Etan would become one of the first missing children ever pictured on milk cartons. The mistrial left Etan's parents, who became national advocates for the cause of missing children, to await another trial. And one of the nation's most wrenching missing-children cases remained still unresolved after nearly two generations. "We are frustrated and very disappointed the jury has been unable to make a decision. The long ordeal is not over," said his father, Stanley Patz. But "I think we have closure already," he added. Prosecutors immediately asked to set a new trial date in the case, which frustrated authorities for decades before a tip led them to Hernandez — never before a suspect — and he confessed in 2012. His lawyers said the confession was false and concocted by mental illness, and they said another longtime suspect was the more likely killer. Stanley Patz tried for years to bring the earlier suspect to account for Etan's death, but after the trial, he said: "I am so convinced Pedro Hernandez kidnapped and killed my son. ... His story is simple, and it makes sense." After Etan's disappearance, his parents helped shepherd in an era of law enforcement advances that make it easier to track missing children and communicate among agencies. The Patzes were at the White House when President Ronald Reagan named May 25 National Missing Children's Day.
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Post by Admin on May 12, 2015 5:37:27 GMT
A curious intersection between violent, crack-epidemic-era New Orleans ghetto life and the uppermost strata of Manhattan’s art gallery world lies at the center of “Missing People.” David Shapiro’s first directorial feature since the very different “Keep the River on Your Right” (2000) offers a tangled tale of mortality, obsession, creativity and acquisition, as well as the kinds of shared personal grief that can bond otherwise greatly dissimilar people. Hard to encapsulate yet sure to engross audiences who find their way to it, this nonfiction character study/mystery should excite interest on the fest circuit, with tube, download and possible niche theatrical sales to follow. Martina Batan was a Manhattan art school student in 1978 when her 14-year-old brother was found stabbed to death outside an apartment complex in their native Queens, having never returned home from a nearby diner the night before. The tragedy tore apart their surviving family (though no Batans other than Martina are interviewed here). Decades later, she’d risen to become director of Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, a prestigious institution that has represented some of the leading visual artists of recent decades. But even the Feldmans themselves admit there remains something guarded and mysterious about their longtime protegee/employee. When we meet Batan, she’s newly divorced, confessing she finds the company of her dogs more manageable than any human intimacy. Plagued by nightmares and insomnia since her brother’s demise decades earlier, she compulsively builds a massive Lego cube in her living room on sleepless nights — one of several OCD-type behaviors. Another is her collecting of drawings by the late New Orleans “original gangster” (or so he claimed) Roy Ferdinand, who before his 2004 death turned to making blunt, technically unpolished yet powerful depictions of life in his ‘hood. They offer a panorama of violence: police-inflicted, domestic, drug- and gang-related, all bent on annihilating a fragile African-American community. While seemingly no one else in the art world has picked up on this “outsider” talent to date, Batan is determined to push him posthumously into the limelight. Her fixation eventually pulls her to the Big Easy, where she meets Ferdinand’s sisters. Communication is wary at first, with the surviving sibs uncertain just what this upscale New Yorker’s intentions are. But once they drag some confidences out of her, the women realize they have some potent overlaps in their histories of familial dysfunction and loss.
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Post by Admin on May 16, 2015 5:12:54 GMT
A Texas woman who has been searching for her daughter for eight years found her in Mexico, according to the Michoacán state prosecutor's office. DNA testing proved Alondra Diaz, 13, is the daughter of Dorotea Garcia, a Houston resident, office spokeswoman Magdalena Guzman said. “The results came back late last night and proved she was the real daughter of Dorotea Garcia,” Guzman told ABC News today. Garcia had been looking for Alondra since the girl’s father allegedly took her to Mexico in 2007, according to The Associated Press, which reported that her father recently delivered the teen to family members, who presented her to authorities. Mexican Judge Cinthia Elodia Mercado returned the girl to Garcia today, according to the AP, saying, "The recovery of a minor by an applicant mother has happened. This is over." The judge has not responded to ABC News’ request for further comment on the case and the fate of the teen’s father is unclear. But Garcia has indicated that she would drop legal complaints against the father if she got custody, the AP reported. The story was thrown into the spotlight in April because of a case of mistaken identity. That’s when a judge ordered another teenage girl, Alondra Luna Nunez, to go to Texas to stay with Garcia before authorities realized she was not Garcia’s child. It is unclear how Garcia directed officials to the wrong girl, who has the same first name as her daughter. Cellphone videos taken in April by Alondra Luna Nunez’s family members, included in the video at the top of this page, show the girl kicking and screaming as authorities took her away from her family in Mexico. She is back with her family in Mexico, where her family traveled to the Los Reyes courthouse today to demand an apology, the AP said. "We have been here since 9 a.m. and the judge does not want to see us, nor will she open the door, and she says that if we remain here she will call police to remove us," said Susana Nunez, the girl's mother. "We want to make it clear that my girl's rights were trampled." Nunez said the family intended to file formal complaints next week but wanted to meet face-to-face with the judge first to express their displeasure, according to the AP.
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Post by Admin on May 23, 2015 5:20:24 GMT
Soaps can provide a powerful platform for debating issues, but they’re also under pressure to get it right. While soaps have a certain artistic licence, and characters can come back from the dead at will, when it comes to tackling real-life issues they need to get it right. Careless plotlines – a miracle recovery, a police investigation concluded too swiftly – risks alienating the viewer. The key to making a story work is to make sure it’s well researched. An unsung army of advisers and researchers is used by each soap. Writers work off commissioning documents, which outline the characters to appear and roughly what happens to them within a single episode. The writer then writes everything from dialogue, action and even the state of their make-up to bring the story alive. To help them is a raft of research notes detailing everything from what energy levels or hair regrowth a post-chemo patient might have that week to what the Church of England say Dot might do at a foot-washing service on Maundy Thursday. Often these notes come from a close working relationship with the charities, who advise on scripts. Coronation Street worked with mental health charity MIND for the Steve McDonald depression plotline, Hollyoaks worked with the Terrence Higgins Trust when its young gay character Ste was diagnosed as HIV-positive, and EastEnders collaborated with Rape Crisis over the attack on Linda. Rape Crisis provided invaluable materials and insights, including case studies, blogs from rape survivors and research explaining what motivates a rapist. These inspired the storylining team to include scenes such as Linda scrubbing herself with bleach in the shower, and suffering flashbacks triggered by the scent of a flower that had been on the table when she was raped. It also shaped the dialogue for the key characters. The same charity also advised Emmerdale on its sexual assault storyline in which a 14-year- old boy attacked a woman as she slept. Again, care was taken not to sensationalise the issue. The day the episode aired, 3,265 people visited the Rape Crisis website – a 70 per cent increase. Although some calls to the charity have been made by sexual violence survivors distressed by the stories, reveals Katie Russell, the national spokeswoman for Rape Crisis, Linda’s story clearly encouraged women to speak out: “Some people who call in to the helplines are people who have been motivated to talk to someone and seek support for an experience in their past. Sometimes that’s for the first time. Some people will have watched Linda’s story and realised they’re not alone, that other people have experienced something similar to them.” Harrowing subjects such as child abuse have been covered, although these have been in retrospect, with adult characters, such as EastEnders’ Kat Slater, revealing what happened to them as a child. EastEnders was the first to involve a young actress in such a storyline when schoolgirl Whitney was abused by her stepfather Tony – though it’s rare to find as mature and talented a young actress as Shona McGarty, who was able to handle such dark material. Some soap viewers seem to have problems distinguishing reality from fiction. Online abuse of soap actors is common after controversial plots, and not everyone is willing to accept the stigma of some storylines.
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