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The bond between sisters Luan Moreton, Kim Jones and Jemma Dennis could not be any stronger. Losing their 32-year-old mother, Rita, to breast cancer in 1986, when they were 12, seven and four, they share an exceptional closeness. What they didn’t know until five years ago, however, is that they share something else too; something [...]

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A 13-year-old schoolboy who was accused of sexual assault for touching two fellow pupils, has had the charges against him dropped. The youngster is alleged to have to have squeezed the breasts and bottoms of two 12-year-old girls during a break. Yesterday the six sex charges against the boy, from Honiton, Devon, were dismissed by a [...]

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Scotland’s chief medical officer has said children aged six months to five years should be taking daily vitamin D drops. Sir Harry Burns has also warned that pregnant women should be taking the vitamin to protect against bone disease and other illnesses. He has written to health professionals about the risk of vitamin D deficiency. [...]

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Share When Hollie Arnold was born with just one arm, she never let it hold her back. Now the determined teenager has been fitted with a special weighted prosthetic arm to allow her to fulfill her dream of throwing a javelin in the London 2012 Paralympics. Hollie, 17, has spent years perfecting her javelin technique [...]

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Frantic parents of the now 15 teens who have been showcasing worrying Tourette-like symptoms are looking for answers as to what exactly is making their children sick. Over the weekend, lawyer Erin Brockivich hypothesized that environmental toxins may be to blame, though officials have reportedly stonewalled her up to this point. But now researchers are [...]

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A mother who claims she does not remember abandoning her two young sons at a gas station said her son later told her ‘Mommy you lost me’. Sarah Hatfield disappeared for 12 hours after leaving her children aged two and four in her van in Colorado along with her car keys, purse and mobile on [...]

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It was a day like any other. I got back from work, called out my wife’s name, Kim, and waited for my little boy, Jobe, then two, to come running up to me as usual. Nothing happened; the house was silent. The washing was still on the line, so I assumed they’d popped out. Day turned [...]

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A campaign warning of the risks nappy sacks pose to babies is to be adopted by the NHS nationally. It follows the deaths of two babies in Cornwall and the concerns raised by coroner Dr Emma Carlyon. Eleven babies in the UK are believed to have died in the past 10 years from suffocation after [...]

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Being annoyed by Gwyneth Paltrow is the very definition of pointlessness – like railing against the existence of death, or buying anti-cellulite cream. Yet at times it’s impossible to resist. The multi-millionaire film star usually doles out impractical lifestyle advice through her website, Goop. But this week she gave an interview to the fashion magazine [...]

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This is an unexpected treat: an intelligent, unsettling view of what could happen if three ordinary teenagers developed super powers. It contains a powerhouse performance by Dane DeHaan, looking like a young Leonardo DiCaprio, who is bullied at school but gains revenge in spectacularly misconceived fashion. Scroll down for trailer Powerful stuff: Chronicle is a [...]

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It’s often said that as we get older, our reactions and thought-processes become much slower. But try saying that to 70-year-old ‘supergran’ Agnes Crystal. The pensioner recently averted disaster when she steered a 12-tonne runaway bus out of the path of an oncoming car. The brave great-grandmother jumped from her seat when the bus began [...]

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Singles who long for children without the obligation of romantic involvement can now search for their perfect ‘co-parenting’ match online, thanks to a new website. Launched last week, Modamily calls itself: ‘The first online community to facilitate introductions between responsible, like-minded adults committed to co-parenting a child.’ So far the New-York based service that caters [...]

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Even now, I can still remember the exact spot in my bedroom where my mother was standing as she announced she was divorcing my father. My parents had been due to emigrate to Australia for a ‘fresh start’ after years of affairs, separations and recriminations. I was ten so I still believed in ‘happily-ever-afters’. I [...]

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Fathers will get improved contact with their children following divorce, amid plans to rewrite the law governing custody disputes. A ministerial working group will decide how to amend the Children’s Act 1989 and might include in it a “presumption of shared parenting”. The changes are part of an overhaul in family law that is described [...]

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New rules will be “much clearer that it is vital for children to have an ongoing relationship with both parents”, the Department for Education said. However ministers looked set to disappoint fathers’ rights campaigners by ruling out any legal guarantee of equal access. A review led by former mandarin David Norgrove last year rejected the [...]

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Ministers intend to rewrite the law in an attempt to ensure that fathers get improved access to their offspring after a marriage breaks down. Currently, family courts decide to leave children with their mothers in the vast majority of divorce cases. Campaigners have long complained that without a legal right to see their children, fathers [...]

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Drug users hooked on crack cocaine may have inherited their vulnerability to addictive behaviour, scientists claimed yesterday. Researchers found that drug addicts and their non-addicted siblings share certain features of the brain, meaning it may be hard-wired for addictive behaviour. Scientists who scanned the brains of 50 pairs of brothers and sisters of whom one [...]

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A father has attacked a celebrity culture which ‘glorifies and trivalises’ drug taking after his 16-year-old son died from taking ecstasy sold to him at a nightclub. Public school deputy head Tom Simons said his son, Joe, was the victim of a ‘complacent’ approach to drug use, which he said was ‘spreading like a cancer’. [...]

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Londoners were urged to check on elderly neighbours and friends today as temperatures were predicted to drop to -3C. Forecasters said there is a risk of snow in the capital today and over the next few days, as winter finally arrived. The Met Office warned the freezing conditions could increase “health risks to vulnerable patients” [...]

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A teenager has been found guilty of murdering a school friend he claimed had pestered him for sex. Craig Roy, 19, was convicted over the death of 16-year-old Jack Frew in woodland near their school in East Kilbride, South Lanarkshire, in May 2010. He stabbed the younger boy 20 times and slashed his throat with [...]

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This is the touching moment a young daughter tenderly cuts her cancer-stricken mother’s hair to prepare her for chemotherapy. In the intimate video Lola Etchells, 6, is also shown shaving the head of her mother Sarah, 44, who was diagnosed with breast cancer last September. Intimate: Lola carefully clips her mother Sarah’s hair The footage [...]

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Parents were today warned of the deadly dangers of nappy sacks, after it emerged eleven babies have suffocated after pulling the bags over their faces. Doctors said infants have an automatic reflex to grab things within reach and bring them to their mouths. Nappy bags are made from thin plastic that can cling to a [...]

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A teenager banned from 30 square miles of London has become the first person to be jailed for breaching a gang Asbo. Dylan Martin, 19, was sentenced to 15 months yesterday but his mother today claimed he was “victimised” by police and Enfield council. The civil injunction, a so-called “Gangbo”, was enforced after the authorities [...]

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Suddenly, babies are back, with a sharp rise in the birth rate. Michael Blastland tells the extraordinary statistical story of the original 20th Century baby boomers. You were born into the most dramatic population change in UK history. At every age throughout your life, you stood out for sheer numbers. But you were not born [...]

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Doctors are calling for newborn babies to be given vitamin D, to protect them from bone disease and other illnesses. The chief medical officer for England wrote to doctors, nurses, and other health professionals, advising them to consider vitamin D supplementation for certain at risk groups- including pregnant mothers. via BBC News – Doctors recommend [...]

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There is no such thing as a good divorce when children are involved, a study has concluded. The analysis of almost 1,000 families found that children suffer when their parents’ marriage ends – no matter how amicable the split. The researchers said their finding contradicts the widely-held belief that it is possible to have a [...]

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A mother eyed me curiously at my sons’ school fair, where I was manning the kitchen, baking baguettes and heating up soup. ‘You’re a real Beta Male, aren’t you?’ she said. For a moment, I thought I’d misheard her. ‘You mean a Better Male?’ I asked. ‘No,’ she replied. ‘A Beta Male, as in, not [...]

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Miss Paltrow, who won an Oscar for her role in Shakespeare in Love, said she cooks for her husband, Coldplay star Chris Martin, and bathes their children, Apple, 7, and Moses, 5. She rises at 7am and works on her website and cookery books while her children are at school, before preparing dinner for her [...]

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John Goldup, Deputy Chief Inspector at Ofsted, said in the past the quango had failed to concentrate on the most important aspects of the treatment for vulnerable children. He said inspectors were assessing adoption providers within an “inappropriate straitjacket” that ignored how quickly adoptive parents could be found, and people were right to question why [...]

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Squeezed into a four-bedroom council house in Guernsey lives a woman branded the UK’s most prolific single mother. Joanne Watson, 40, has 14 children, ranging in age from three to 22 and survives largely on state benefits after the breakdown of her marriage in 2010. Once celebrated in endless articles in the press for her [...]

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Now that he is walking Alicia Keys’s son Egypt was keen to take a stroll around Kauai airport today. The 15-month-old toddler kept his mother on his toes as they prepared to leave the Hawaiian island after a week long vacation. Under the watchful eye of the 30-year-old singer, the adorable boy tottered around, fascinated [...]

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A babysitter who wiped party drug Meow Meow on the mouth of the six-year-old girl she was looking after was today warned she could face jail. Chelsea Taylor, 17, was supposed to be looking after the girl – but instead snorted the drug, also known as bubbles or mephedrone, with friends. She then wiped her [...]

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Millions of teenagers may have to receive a booster jab to protect against the bacteria, which causes meningitis and septicaemia, the Joint Committee on Vaccine and Immunisation (JCVI) has consequently advised. At the moment children get three doses of the MenC vaccine – at three and four months with a booster at 12 months. Introduced [...]

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A teenager has become the first person charged by Scotland Yard with the offence of rioting over last summer’s disorder. Jerome Amankwah, 19, of Griffin Road, Tottenham, north London, will appear on bail at Highbury Corner Magistrates’ Court on February 9, police said. He is accused of rioting in Tottenham High Road on August 6 [...]

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Women who eat fish during pregnancy are more likely to have brainy and sociable children, according to new EU-funded research. Those mothers-to-be who tucked into oily fish like tuna, sardines and salmon produced infants who scored better in various tests of skill and intelligence, it found. As part of a £5 million European Commission study [...]

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These three sisters look a picture of health – but they have had to take drastic action to stay that way. Luan Moreton, Kim Jones and Jemma Dennis lost their mother to breast cancer when she was only 32, and tests revealed that they had inherited the same faulty gene. They decided to have preventive [...]

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A girl of five whose pregnant mother was mugged by two teenage thugs told a judge in a handwritten note that she  saw one of them ‘hit the baby in her tummy’. The girl added that she hoped that Nathaniel Moffett and Thaberi Francis ‘don’t hurt any more people’. The pair assaulted the youngster’s mother [...]

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Cassie McCord, the teenager killed by a driver who failed an eye test, gave away her corneas and scleras to help others see, her mother has revealed. Other organs the 16-year-old donated included a life-saving liver, pancreas and kidneys – and Jackie McCord has already received a letter from the recipient of some of the [...]

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What makes an entrepreneur? BBC Arabic’s Marwa Amer and Tom Santorelli spoke to Yasmine El-Mehairy about setting up an Egyptian website designed specifically for mothers. When Yasmine El-Mehairy looked online for pregnancy advice for her sister-in-law in 2010, she was bombarded with conflicting opinions and what she thought were old wives’ tales. She identified a [...]

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Non-identical twins Emilie Falk and Lin Backman – strangers until last year – were separated nearly 29 years ago. According to a DNA test the pair had done two months after reuniting in January last year, and which they shared with AFP, there is a 99.98 per cent chance of them being sisters. A complex [...]

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For a while now I’ve been longing to write a spoof middle-class misery memoir, a necessary corrective to the depressing tales of abuse, poverty and triumph over adversity that have dominated the bestseller charts for so long. The only obstacle, apart from laziness, has been deciding which of the many delicious potential titles is best. [...]

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They say the customer is always right. But not many can claim to being so right they forced a supermarket to change one of its products. Little Lily Robinson can, however, after the three-year-old got Sainsbury’s to rename its tiger bread after writing a letter saying it looked more like the markings of a giraffe. [...]

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Two teenagers who attacked one of their schoolmates are likely to face justice after they filmed themselves beating the other boy and posted the footage on Facebook. The horrific video received a warm welcome from the teens’ friends, however – more than 25 of them clicked the ‘Like’ button on the post. But the mother [...]

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A teen transsexual who is celebrating after getting the green light to become a woman has revealed how he was inspired by singer Lady Gaga. Cambell Kenneford, 16, dreamed of being a female model – despite being born a man. Now the student, from Leighton Buzzard in Bedfordshire, plans to get gender realignment surgery following [...]

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The Paris criminal court ordered Prince Sattam al-Saud from the kingdom’s founding royal family, to hand over custody of his daughter Aya to her French mother, Candice Cohen-Ahnine, and provide child support of €10,000 (£8,300) a month. For the past three-and-a-half years, the prince has kept Aya in a Riyadh palace despite efforts by the [...]

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Shamima was bundled into a car by sisters Nadiya, 25, Nazira, 29, and brother Kayum Mohammed-Abdul, 24, outside a Basingstoke restaurant when they saw her kissing work colleague Gary Pain on April 1 last year. The jury heard how an “extremely aggressive and threatening” Mohammed-Abdul grabbed Mr Pain by the neck as Miss Akhtar was [...]

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She was rarely been seen out and about during her family’s time in LA. But Mel B’s beautiful daughter Madison certainly made an impression as she left US shores yesterday. The 5-month-old looked angelic in a Harper Beckham-style headband as she, her mother and father Stephen Belafonte made their way through LAX, beginning their journey [...]

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The risk of heart damage in unborn babies is doubled if the mother-to-be is an overweight smoker, scientists are warning. A study found women with both risk factors were more than twice as likely to give birth to a child with congenital heart disease – a general term to describe a range of birth defects [...]

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Babies are being brought into classrooms to cut bullying and teach children empathy. Primary schools in Lewisham and Croydon will be the first in England to use infants to educate children as young as four about emotional literacy. Babies have been brought into lessons before to highlight the realities of teenage parenthood, but this is [...]

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Youth unemployment, over a million now, is the most painful feature of the recession; a breach of the promise one generation makes to the next. But it’s not new – unemployment among the young was rising even in the tail end of the boom years. There’s a deeper change going on here. The brutal truth [...]

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