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Five family members were arrested after authorities found a one-year-old child and 58 dogs living in near squalor and surrounded by filth. Teresa Weldon, 48, from Springtown, Texas, claimed to run an animal rescue operation from her home and had as many as 200 dogs sent to her over the space of two years. However, [...]

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Some people are born a success, scientists believe. Research shows that much of our predisposition towards determination, sociability and self-control and sense of purpose is in our genes. In fact, our DNA plays a bigger role in influencing these traits than our upbringing and the company we keep. Taken together, these facets of personality can [...]

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Police missed chances to bring a takeaway owner to justice earlier for a string of sexual offences against under-age girls, a judge said today. Several witnesses, including a 12-year-old girl, complained about Azad Miah pestering them for sex in exchange for money but no action was taken and he continued his “corrupting and degrading” sexual [...]

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Parents were warned today to prepare for a Furby invasion this Christmas. Yes, that furry mechanical friend, which resembles a malevolent hamster crossed with a chimp, has had its first makeover in six years. Makers Tiger Electronics aren’t giving anything away, just this image of the next generation friend called Taboo. Whether the company can [...]

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Plans to change the “special needs” system in schools will have a big impact upon teachers like me, as well as millions of pupils and their parents. That said, the system does need an overhaul. Far too many pupils are judged as having “special educational needs” (SEN). Last year, an Ofsted investigation found that one [...]

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A “wicked and controlling” man who murdered his “fun-loving, mischievous” stepson has been ordered to serve at least 17 years in prison. Elvis Lee, 34, was found guilty yesterday of murdering Tyler Whelan, five. Lee admitted he kicked and bit Tyler on the day of his death but denied murder. The kick was so hard [...]

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After giving birth to her third child last summer, one could forgive Claudia Winkleman for wanting to take it easy. However, the Strictly Come Dancing presenter tells Mandrake the new child has made her so broody her husband has had to impose a baby ban.   “I’d like another baby but my husband has banned [...]

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The survey also found that one in five women were not offered a choice of where to have their baby, despite this being a key pledge in maternity care. The Royal College of Midwives said the findings highlighted the shortage of midwives and called for 5,000 more to be appointed.   The Coalition has been accused [...]

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Fifteen-year-old cellist Laura van der Heijden has won the BBC’s Young Musician prize for 2012. The teenager played Sir William Walton’s Cello Concerto with the Northern Sinfonia at the competition’s final at The Sage in Gateshead. Accepting the £2,000 prize, van der Heijden, from East Sussex, said she felt “amazing” and “so, so lucky”. She [...]

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A man accused of murdering his wife said their children would soon forget her as relatives waited for news about her disappearance, a trial has heard. Nat Fraser, 53, denies murdering his wife Arlene. Mrs Fraser was 33 when she disappeared from her home in New Elgin, Moray, on 28 April 1998. Her father, Hector [...]

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Thousands of parents whose children fall behind in reading will get vouchers to spend on private tutors under plans unveiled by Nick Clegg today. It marks a major new drive to provide “catch-up lessons” for struggling youngsters from poorer families in their first year of secondary school. Mr Clegg hailed the Evening Standard’s Get London [...]

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The week of eager boys performing household tasks in exchange for a few pennies was brought to an end in 1992 over health and safety fears and child protection legislation.   But the concept has now been brought back, as more than 40,000 young male and female Scouts this week take to the streets to [...]

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Grownup children still living with their parents get a pretty bad press. In Britain and America they’re labelled “Kippers” (Kids In Parents’ Pockets Eroding Retirement Savings) or “Yuckies” (Young Unwitting Costly Kids). In Australia it’s “Slops” (Singles Living Off Parents). In Italy it’s “Bamboccioni” (Big Babies). The Japanese are even less delicate: their “parasaito shinguru” [...]

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The advertising campaign has made no difference to the travel plans of more than two thirds of respondents in survey a carried out by YouGov for the prepaid currency card provider Caxton FX.   The research, which was completed by more than 2,000 people, asked if the campaign – which reportedly cost £4million – had [...]

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Simon Cowell predicts Britain’s Got Talent winner Pudsey will become the most famous dog in the world. He’s probably right. I can just see Hunger Games star Jennifer Lawrence being cast as Ashleigh and Pudsey portraying himself – and maybe Colin Firth playing Simon since he’s putting up the money? There simply isn’t a Hollywood [...]

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A homeless man was discovered sleeping on an “all mod cons” children’s ward at Great Ormond Street Hospital. Bosses launched an investigation after the man wandered on to the site in Bloomsbury through a fire door. Staff had apparently confused him for the parent of a patient, the hospital said today, because he was “smartly [...]

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It took Muscadeu, a small, portly white horse, and his rider, Luke Tucker, a teenager from Yorkshire, almost six months to trek from the Camargue region of France to England. For both the trip was a job of work: they were part of the 2008 Caravan of Hope, a charitable mission to deliver Camargue horses, [...]

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A married couple living in Spain masterminded the kidnap of a British boy by an armed gang in Pakistan, a court heard today. Four masked men wielding assault rifles and hand grenades seized Sahil Saeed, five, while he was visiting his grandmother’s home in Punjab, prosecutors said. Muhammed Zahid Saleem and his wife Monica Neruja [...]

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During the second Indio-China War, 270,000,000 submunitions were dropped on Laos inside cluster bombs. Cluster bombs are bombs that instead of having one block of explosives at the tip contain dozens of small tennis ball-sized capsules that are made to detonate on impact. Of these submunitions dropped on Laos from cluster bombs, 80,000,000 failed to [...]

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The year was 1948. The world was still reeling from the atrocities committed in the second world war, which left many people missing their relatives, their homes and some, their lives. The world’s answer to this was a bit of paper, containing 30 articles that all humans should be entitled to. So on a rainy [...]

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I’m cold. I’m shattered. My hands are searing with the coldness. I’ve got no job, and nowhere to live. I’m all on my own, with no one to comfort me. Every night I go through this agony. Will I be mugged? Will I be kidnapped? Will I be hurt? No one cares about the homeless. [...]

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Levi Brailsford’s grandmother was reportedly driving when she heard him unbuckle the harness in his car seat and friends say she was trying to pull over to re-fasten the buckle when the door opened and he fell out.   Police are investigating the possibility that Levi was then crushed under the wheels of the car [...]

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Marvel’s The Avengers movie won big on Twitter and in the box office when it premiered May 4. However, one joke from the movie has set off bloggers from the adoption community and fueled an online petition seeking an apology from Marvel Comics. Jamie Berke created a Change.org petition, “Marvel Comics – Apologize to Adoption [...]

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A workman who cut the base of a lamp post that later fell, fatally injuring a baby, wishes he had died instead, an inquest heard today. Tommy Hollis suffered severe head injuries when he was struck by the falling lamp post as he was sleeping in a pram being pushed by his nanny in Chiswick, [...]

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Pupils are being distracted from exam studying due to their college sending them ‘top revision tips’ by text, Twitter, and Facebook, it was claimed today. Students at Havering Sixth Form College in Hornchurch, Essex, say the ‘obvious’ messages are ‘annoying’ and are actually interrupting their A-level preparation. Daily tips aimed at revising pupils include ‘buckle [...]

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Were you breastfed as a baby and if so, do love or hate your mother? Do you have children of your own and if so, do you or did you breastfeed them? And for how long? And if it was a long time ago, do they still speak to you? And did you ever do [...]

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Model Sasha Pivovarova has given birth to a baby girl just two days after posting the first picture of her pregnant bump. The Russian-born 26-year-old, who has yet to reveal her new baby’s name, announced the birth via Twitter yesterday, telling her fans: ‘It’s a beautiful baby girl… ’ It is a first baby for [...]

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Under the biggest shake-up of the system for 30 years, ministers will toughen up rules on the diagnosis of behavioural and learning problems. It follows concerns that schools are abusing the system to disguise poor teaching and climb league tables. For the first time, rigorous screening measures will be introduced to prevent pupils from being classed [...]

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The Government will not ring-fence the £2.5bn a year to be handed to schools for the most disadvantaged pupils to ensure all of it is spent on them, Nick Clegg admitted yesterday. The Deputy Prime Minister said it would be wrong to “micro-manage” every school from Whitehall by dictating how money allocated under his “pupil premium” scheme [...]

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When Maria Concetta Cacciola drank the bottle of acid that would kill her in August last year, one can only imagine what was going through her mind. The mother of three, 31, had effectively been imprisoned in the family home in the dreary town of Rosarno, in the southern Italian region of Calabria, and probably [...]

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Social media: It’s not just for college kids anymore. Families use Facebook to stay in touch across generations. Friends well into middle age share photos on Instagram. There’s even an 80-year-old grandmother on a quest for 80,000 Twitter followers. But how does social media’s widening reach affect the family unit? The brand-engagement firm GMR Marketing [...]

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No three-year-old’s birthday would be complete without a brightly-coloured cake with candles on top. But Oscar Barlow was left in tears when police swooped on his party at a play centre – after staff said his cake was a health and safety risk. Bosses at Rumble Tumble play centre said the candles constituted a safety [...]

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Like most loving parents, Chris and Kathy Coker were anxious when their son Bradley embarked on his gap-year trip around the world. Even though they knew he was sensible, it was hard not to worry about what could go wrong. And so, the Cokers recall, they breathed a sigh of relief when they learned that [...]

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They came armed with rubber gloves, wellies and lashings of Dunkirk spirit. And the brigade of volunteers who took our battle against litter to the beaches managed to fill an astonishing 3,200 bin bags with rubbish. In total, more than 60 miles of coastline was cleared of litter after thousands of volunteers turned out to [...]

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Thousands of children have lost the chance of a decent life because of the ban on mixed-race adoption, the state equality chief has admitted. Trevor Phillips said it was his greatest regret that he failed to challenge the race rules which denied children the chance of a loving family and instead left them at the [...]

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Mega-wealthy Chinese parents are paying out hundreds of thousands of pounds for their children to have lessons in the art of chit-chat – to help them get into Oxbridge. The families are doing their utmost, including paying out the huge sums to British ‘education consultants’ based in China in order to give their children the [...]

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A Carlisle takeaway boss has been convicted of attempting to recruit four girls aged between 12 and 16 into prostitution. Azad Miah, 44, was also found guilty at Carlisle Crown Court of running a brothel from his business and paying for the sexual services of teenagers. The owner of the former Spice of India restaurant [...]

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A teenager has taught herself how to speak, stand and eat again after she suffered a massive stroke during an operation to remove a brain tumour. Hannah Jones was 15 when doctors found a four-centimetre growth spreading behind her right eye. But after two operations to remove it, surgeons told her they would have to [...]

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As many as 450,000 children could be removed from school special needs registers because they have been wrongly labelled as requiring extra help, the Government will announce today. Campaigners fear the cuts could leave thousands of children “cut adrift”. One in five schoolchildren in England is on the register. The rules are designed to toughen [...]

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A 10-year-old girl, Eliana Mann, is like a “new child” after having a massive tumour that weighed more than 3kg removed. Her mother said Eliana, from north London, had been transformed by the operation at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. Surgeons said the growth had reached the size of a small football. The tumour [...]

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A lesbian couple desperate for one child have given birth to four – two sets of twins who arrived a few weeks apart. Laura Calvin and Sheri Green, from Naples, Florida, defied the odds when they both became pregnant through artificial insemination and were amazed to discover later that they were both expecting twins. The [...]

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Babies born this year will not get their state pension until the age of 77 – and their own children will have to wait until they are in their eighties, a shock report has revealed. The findings raise the prospect of a baby girl, born today, retiring nearly two decades older than her grandmother who [...]

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Overweight mothers-to-be could be condemning their unborn children to decades of ill health. Babies whose mothers were carrying extra pounds when pregnant are more likely to be fat and unhealthy  as adults, researchers say. While it is well known that overweight mothers-to-be risk having big babies who grow into overweight children, this study is one [...]

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The 14-year-old half-brother of six children who died in a Derby fire says the family is “struggling” to come to terms with their loss. Five children aged between five and 10 died in the early hours of Friday after the blaze at a property on Victory Road in the Allenton area. A sixth child, 13-year-old [...]

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Parents in England are to be given control over their children’s special educational needs (SEN) budgets, allowing them to choose expert support rather than local authorities being the sole provider. In what the government described as the biggest reform of SEN for 30 years, the measures will also legally force education, health and social care [...]

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It was a simple gesture; a child’s innocent hug that brought a smile to the face of the Queen.   Amid the grandiose surroundings of St George’s Hall in Windsor Castle — 4,000 miles and a world away from her village in Uganda — Lydia Amito stood in line waiting to meet the monarch.   [...]

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A study by the Welsh Institute of Social and Economic Research, Data and Methods (WISERD) suggests undergraduates completing the course fare less well than those who have not. The findings are revealed on BBC Radio Wales’ “Eye on Wales” programme. The Welsh Government says it will widen research into the Welsh Bacc’s impact. The qualification [...]

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The primary school was in Surrey, the head teacher recalls, but its catchment area was far removed from the affluent image enjoyed by much of the county. Among the four-year-olds joining the reception class, she had several who had not been toilet-trained. She put it down to inadequate parenting and sent them home until they [...]

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After a long and successful career in political spin, Tigryulia the tiger decided it was time to paws and focus on being a stay-at-home mum. The white feline became a household name in Ukraine after being a poster cat for the now jailed Yulia Tymoshenko’s presidential campaign Tigryulia is now back in the spotlight after [...]

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First they blamed the child, then the parents, then even the doctors. A few later pointed to modern life: computer games or too much television. But after decades of work begun by two remarkable British women, we are now closer than ever to understanding that genetics are responsible for the prevalence of autistic spectrum disorders [...]

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