child

Three websites used to create abuse imagery had received 100,000 monthly visits from Australians, watchdog says.

Internet users in Australia have been blocked from accessing several websites that used artificial intelligence to create child sexual exploitation material, the country’s internet regulator has announced.

The three “nudify” sites withdrew from Australia following an official warning, eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said on Thursday.

Grant’s office said the sites had been receiving approximately 100,000 visits a month from Australians and featured in high-profile cases of AI-generated child sex abuse imagery involving Australian school students.

Grant said such “nudify” services, which allow users to make images of real people appear naked using AI, have had a “devastating” effect in Australian schools.

“We took enforcement action in September because this provider failed to put in safeguards to prevent its services being used to create child sexual exploitation material and were even marketing features like undressing ‘any girl,’ and with options for ‘schoolgirl’ image generation and features such as ‘sex mode,’” Grand said in a statement.

The development comes after Grant’s office issued a formal warning to the United Kingdom-based company behind the sites in September, threatening civil penalties of up to 49.5 million Australian dollars ($32.2m) if it did not introduce safeguards to prevent image-based abuse.

Grant said Hugging Face, a hosting platform for AI models, had separately also taken steps to comply with Australian law, including changing its terms of service to require account holders to take steps to minimise the risks of misuse involving their platforms.

Australia has been at the forefront of global efforts to prevent the online harm of children, banning social media for under-16s and cracking down on apps used for stalking and creating deepfake images.

The use of AI to create non-consensual sexually explicit images has been a growing concern amid the rapid proliferation of platforms capable of creating photo-realistic material at the click of a mouse.

In a survey carried out by the US-based advocacy group Thorn last year, 10 percent of respondents aged 13-20 reported knowing someone who had deepfake nude imagery created of them, while 6 percent said they had been a direct victim of such abuse.

LOUISE Thompson has revealed she will never be able to carry another child due to severe health issues following the birth of her son Leo.

The Made In Chelsea star, 35, came close to dying after going into labour with her son four years ago.

The harrowing ordeal led to a myriad of health issues, the most recent of which saw Louise bravely reveal she had a stoma.

Following Leo’s birth she suffered multiple injuries including a post-natal haemorrhage, developing Asherman’s Syndrome, in which scar tissue in the uterus becomes ‘glued’ together, worsening bowel problems and emergency surgery.

Her injuries mean that she cannot carry another child.

Louise also has post-traumatic stress as a result of the horrific complications she endured and now relies on a stoma bag.

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She believes women are being deterred having children due to a growing number of horror stories.

She told Daily Mail: “It’s something that a lot of people within my circle are talking about fairly regularly – the population problems we have.

“Thousands of women are crying out to me about this topic.

“Speaking on my own personal experience, I won’t be able to carry another child.

“So immediately that puts us in a position where we are part of that problem now.”

She is now an advocate for women’s health and maternity rights, and has spoken about her ordeal to the Birth Trauma All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG).

Louise teamed up with former Conservative MP Theo Clarke to set up the APPG and is now launching a petition urging the Government to appoint a commissioner dedicated to overseeing maternity care.

Their goal is to reach the 100,000 signatures needed to trigger a Parliamentary debate.

Louise has spoken about her distressing birth experience in the past.

The former reality star lost three-and-a-half litres of blood following the arrival of her son Leo by emergency C-section.

Things got even worse when Louise eventually returned home and suffered another haemorrhage, during which she lost five litres of blood and woke up in intensive care.

She previously spoke about the “uncertainty” around having another child.

She said last year on Lorraine: “It’s still fairly inconclusive. I will never mentally be strong enough to carry a child and, physically, I have something called asherman syndrome where my uterus is glued together with scar tissue.

“I suppose in one sense, it’s a bit of a miracle that I didn’t have to have a hysterectomy, so I do still have a womb.

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“I had a year with no periods, then I had a surgery to try and fix that and then that ended up in another haemorrhage so where I am left currently is that the hospital have sort of said ‘It would be too threatening.

“We wouldn’t want to do another surgery in that area. Let’s let you live’. Equally I am so grateful to have one beautiful, healthy child who has lots of friends and cousins. I do have ovaries and embryos so there is a chance I could freeze some eggs… when I am ready…”

Self-centered news anchor Tulio Triviño and his reporter best friend Juan Carlos Bodoque, who has a gambling problem, have amused audiences for 22 years. Neither has aged a day. That’s because they are hand puppets — a monkey in a suit and a red rabbit in a striped shirt, respectively — at the forefront of the beloved Chilean TV show “31 Minutos.”

First conceived as a children’s program for Chile’s public television, “31 Minutos” debuted in March 2003, and now spans four seasons. A parody of a traditional newscast, the irreverent concept features dozens of peculiar puppets who populate the fictional town of Titirilquén. Their sharply absurdist misadventures and reportages are accompanied by pun-heavy, humorous original songs.

“The Muppets and ‘Sesame Street’ have been great inspirations for us,” says co-creator Pedro Peirano speaking in Spanish from Santiago, Chile, during a recent Zoom interview. “But we mixed that with a more Latin American idiosyncrasy, so it’s familiar but very different.”

Peirano voices and puppeteers Tulio, while Álvaro Díaz, the show’s other co-creator, gives life to Bodoque (who started out as a green toad before taking on his rabbit form). Among their fabric-made pals are Patana, Tulio’s niece who is a duck, field reporter Mario Hugo, a Chihuahua in a suit, and Juanín, a fuzzy white creature with no visible eyes, the newscast’s producer.

“What we set out to do, I don’t know if consciously, was to create characters who are not role models of anything,” says Peirano. “They have their flaws and their virtues; in fact, they have more flaws, especially Tulio, who is a villain, but he’s also the face of the show.”

Over the years, as the show’s popularity grew across Latin America, “31 Minutos” has transcended the small screen and spilled into other formats. Through Aplaplac, their production company, Díaz and Peirano have created “31 Minutos” live shows that tour the region, a theatrically released feature film, and even an ambitious museum exhibit.

This fall, “31 Minutos” sets its sights on the global market with the release of “Calurosa Navidad” (One Hot Christmas), their first special for Prime Video, streaming on Friday. The Spanish-language film comes on the heels of another big moment for the puppet troupe, when they performed some of their hits on NPR’s “Tiny Desk” last month.

Co-creators Álvaro Díaz, left, and Pedro Peirano on the set of “31 Minutos: Calurosa Navidad.” (Sebastian Utreras)

Although “31 Minutos” emerged as kids’ programming, Díaz and Peirano sidestepped expectations for message-driven storylines.

“In Latin America we tend to confuse children’s television with educational television, as if everything has to be an extension of school,” says Díaz. “We wanted to quickly transform it from that into more of a family show.”

The duo met while studying journalism at the Universidad de Chile in the late 1980s, as the country transitioned from a dictatorship to a democracy. It was their compatible humor, a shared interest in film, and a desire to explore a variety of mediums that brought them together.

“We had a lot of free time to develop our interests,” says Díaz. “And you connect through those interests, even more so that’s based on your personality or your origins.”

Before “31 Minutos,” Díaz and Peirano already had experience working in written media and television, so their impulse was to parody the news world they were familiar with.

When first developing the show, which they produced after winning public funding, the puppets appeared somewhat organically, Díaz says, because neither he nor Peirano wanted to be on camera. And since the project was originally geared toward children, it seemed appropriate.

A scene from Prime Video’s “31 Minutos: Calurosa Navidad.” “We believed that by putting puppets in front of the camera — initially very simple puppets — children would immediately identify with them,” says co-creator Álvaro Díaz.

(Amazon MGM Studios)

“We believed that by putting puppets in front of the camera — initially very simple puppets — children would immediately identify with them, and we wouldn’t be forced to emphasize the children’s tone so much,” recalls Díaz. “On the contrary, the puppets were a vehicle that allowed us to tell stories that interested us.”

And while it was Díaz who first suggested puppets, Peirano, who is also a comic book author, was a lifelong fan of Jim Henson and the worlds he created, including more adult fare like “The Dark Crystal.” The first puppets they used were those that Peirano had made as a child. As self-taught puppeteers, Díaz and Peirano honed their craft along the way.

“It’s much cheaper and faster to make puppets and create this fantastical world than to produce animation,” says Peirano. “Puppets have an immediacy that also makes them fun to perform with and to improvise with.”

As is often the case with children’s shows, they needed to incorporate music. Peirano brought along his friend Pablo Ilabaca, the guitarist and composer of Chilean rock band Chancho en Piedra, who tangentially had created tracks that could work for the show.

“He showed us that music, and we immediately felt that the sound of the ’31 Minutos’ was there,” says Díaz. “There was a lo-fi quality about it. It had something candid that didn’t necessarily have an infantile tone but had a lightness. And we could add lyrics to that music.”

The editorial line for the songs was to validate childhood experiences without trying to impart any life lessons, acknowledging those feelings through comedy.

“There is a song called ‘Diente Blanco’ [White Tooth], for example, which is not about the importance of brushing or taking care of your teeth but, rather, about a child saying goodbye to a tooth he was very fond of,” explains Díaz.

As a father of three (who he hopes will eventually take on the show’s mantle), Díaz operates from a conviction that young audiences deserve quality content that’s not patronizing nor simplistic.

“The entertainment options for children in Latin America, and generally everywhere, are very poor,” says Díaz. “It’s mostly about extracting money from parents with disappointing offerings. As kind of a governing principle for ’31 Minutos,’ we want these options to improve.”

“31 Minutos” rapidly became entrenched in Chilean popular culture. Peirano remembers the exact moment when he realized its cross-generational influence.

“I heard someone whistling the show’s theme song, and it wasn’t a child — it was an adult sweeping the street,” he says. “That was the first time I said, ‘How strange, someone is actually watching it!’ ”

Pedro Peirano remembers the moment he realized “31 Minutos” was becoming entrenched in Chilean pop culture. “I heard someone whistling the show’s theme song, and it wasn’t a child — it was an adult sweeping the street,” he says.

(Sebastian Utreras)

For Díaz, it was when he heard the album with the first batch of songs, released about four months after the show’s debut, playing in multiple record stores around Santiago. Not long after that, they saw the first bootleg merchandise: a toy version of Mico, el Micófono, a character that is just a microphone with googly eyes that street vendors could easily replicate.

Internationally, Mexico became a key market for “31 Minutos.” The creators first realized that country’s adoration for the show when an email address where viewers could write to Tulio was flooded with more messages from Mexico than Chile.

A tribute album, “Yo Nunca Vi Television” (I Never Watched Television), where Mexican and Chilean bands reinterpreted songs from “31 Minutos,” was released in 2009. The show’s museum exhibit, “Museo 31,” visited two Mexican cities (Mexico City and Monterrey) between 2024 and 2025 after its time in Santiago at Centro Cultural La Moneda.

Díaz believes that “31 Minutos” benefited from evolving in front of a young audience who accepted the show’s peculiarities at face value. The industry these days, he thinks, demands every narrative choice be justified with substantial meaning.

“You now have to write with an explicit intention and give everything coherence, as if life is a series of very coherent interconnections,” Díaz says. “It’s impossible to make something like ‘31 Minutos’ today.”

That’s especially true, in their eyes, of the U.S. entertainment industry where one must “understand fun down to its smallest detail” even before anything has been produced.

“Much of the fun of making ’31 Minutos’ has to do with spontaneity,” says Díaz.

Nevertheless, their “Tiny Desk” concert and the Christmas special have brought them to their closest proximity yet to American audiences.

To prepare for their “Tiny Desk” performance, which features some of the show’s most emblematic puppets, the “31 Minutos” team re-created the set in Santiago — a famously tight space where bands are sandwiched between a desk and overflowing bookshelves. “We had to reduce the idea of ‘31 minutes’ to 20 minutes in a small space, without lighting, without special effects,” explains Díaz.

Tapping into current events, the running joke of their “Tiny Desk” appearance is that their work visas will expire immediately after performing.

“We didn’t intend to make a political statement, but since we were in the United States, what’s the joke in the air? That they are going to kick us — as Latin Americans, the joke is always that the U.S. wants us out,” says Peirano. “In the end, it still ends up being a commentary, and we included this crocodile puppet [as an immigration agent] because that’s the satirical nature of ‘31 Minutos.’ ”

Meanwhile, making “Calurosa Navidad” for Prime Video fulfilled their goal of entering the streaming realm. Amazon was interested in genre films, and they opted for a Christmas one.

Fans of “31 Minutos” will recognize that the story, in which Bodoque has to search for Santa and bring him to heat-stricken Titirilquén; it’s the expansion of a story from an earlier special Christmas episode that later evolved into a Christmas live show. The cheeky charm remains intact, but now it’s going to be accessible to a global audience.

Currently, Peirano splits his time between Santiago and Los Angeles. In the U.S., away from the media empire that “31 Minutos” has built in Latin America, he works as a screenwriter. His credits include the HBO series “Perry Mason.” He’s working on a project for horror outfit Blumhouse with collaborator Mauricio Katz. The two recently signed an exclusive overall deal with Sony Pictures Television.

But don’t expect Tulio or Bodoque to speak English anytime soon or for their adventures to be crafted outside of their South American homeland. Díaz has no desire to leave Chile.

“I live five kilometers from the hospital where I was born. And that’s the farthest I can be,” he says. “Chile is the reality that I understand, and, above all, that nourishes us. I like to travel and go on tour, but I hope things always happen here, with the people we know here.”

Díaz cites director Peter Jackson’s ethos to establishing WETA FX, a world-renowned digital effects company, in his home country of New Zealand instead of moving abroad, as a mindset that resembles their own — in admittedly a smaller scale.

“What we advocate for in ‘31 Minutos’ is artistic excellence from Chile,” Díaz adds. “From Chile to Latin America first, and hopefully from Chile to the world.”

THIS former Disney Channel star had her first taste of stardom back in 2016 appearing in hit teen drama Backstage.

But it was her dazzling vocal talent that really piqued people’s attention with her most popular hit, the viral Princesses Don’t Cry, going on to rack up over 250 million streams.

But despite her notable accolades, child star Aviva Chiara Mongillo, who released music under the name ‘CARYS’, is now back living at her parent’s house.

The now 27-year-old, who played Alya Kendrick in Backstage, shared a candid moment about her current living situation with fans online.

Aviva took to TikTok to share a meme about the complete U-turn her life seems to have taken, while simultaneously expressing gratitude for the way her life is today.

“When you were on Disney channel, signed to a major label and had a viral song before the age of 20 and now you’re 27 living with your parents,” the actress-turned-musician quipped, smiling at the camera in a red jumper.

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She quipped: “To be honest, I don’t know what happened but we need a re-do”.

There didn’t seem to be any real ill feeling towards her current lifestyle though, as Aviva thoughtfully captioned the post to say she “wouldn’t change a thing”.

“for real though… I wouldn’t change a thing. I’m grateful that this is my life.”

The post has currently been liked around 90,000 times, with fans flooding the comments section with praises.

“Aviva Mongillo you will always be famous to me,” gushed one user in a comment Aviva has hearted.

“Backstage is one of my favourite disney shows ever!!!,” exclaimed another.

Though one of the most common comments was people shocked to learn that Aviva was the voice behind Princesses Don’t Cry, as she wasn’t recognisable.

“YOU’RE THE ONE WHO MADE PRINCESSES DONT CRY???,” said one of the post’s top comments with over 4,200 “likes”.

The star simply responded with “YOU BETCHA”.

Princesses Don’t Cry came out in 2019 and immediately gained popularity through TikTok and other social media platforms.

Sung under the artist name CARYS, the song subverts traditional fairy tales by asserting that princesses are strong and independent, not “crying over boys with pretty eyes”.

Meanwhile, Aviva’s stint on Backstage saw her star in sixty episodes where she frequently sung and played guitar.

Initially, Aviva was discovered by a music producer who was looking to craft music to feature on Backstage.

But later on she was encouraged to audition for a role instead, eventually landing the part of Alya Kendrick.

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Aviva ultimately left backstage in season two to go on tour with the cast of La Boheme.

After her Disney days, Aviva went on to star in comedy-drama Workin’ Moms as the recurring character Juniper.

A 15-year-old Palestinian boy was shot by Israeli troops in the occupied West Bank and was not given medical attention, leading to his death. He is among dozens of children who have been targeted and killed by Israeli troops in the occupied territories.

Hundreds of thousands of times each year in California, farmers and their contractors spray pesticides on fields and orchards in the state’s agricultural heartlands.

Farmworkers young and old can be exposed to dangerous concentrations of toxic chemicals if they are not properly trained, left uninformed about when they can safely enter sprayed fields or exposed to pesticide applications — because of factors such as wind drift or operator error.

Yet California’s system of protecting farmworkers from pesticide dangers is anything but a tight safety net. Through interviews, public records and data analyses, an investigation by Capital & Main has found that:

• Enforcement of pesticide safety rules is splintered among dozens of county agriculture commissioners, resulting in piecemeal citations. Companies that operate in multiple counties were not fined for hundreds of violations — many of them pertaining to worker safety.
• County inspections to enforce pesticide safety are minimal in the state’s farm belt. In 2023, there was one inspection for every 146 times that pesticides were applied in eight of California’s top 11 producing counties, according to data provided by those counties.
• In interviews, more than two dozen underage farmworkers and parents described feeling sick and dizzy or suffering from skin irritations after being exposed to pesticides. Although state law requires illnesses resulting from pesticide exposure to be reported to the state, experts and labor advocates say the number of cases is surely undercounted, in part because laborers fear retaliation from employers if they report unsafe working conditions.

Asked about these findings, state officials said the data does not reflect some of the broader actions they have taken to protect farmworkers. County regulators contend that their enforcement has improved safety conditions for laborers and noted that use of toxic pesticides has decreased significantly over the last decade. Yet groups that have researched pesticide enforcement say the state of California is not using its powers to fine repeat offenders for safety violations — and hold them accountable.

“It’s especially troubling because it means workers aren’t being protected,” said Anne Katten, director of the Pesticide and Work Health and Safety Project for the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation.

Exposure to pesticides and laboring in extreme heat are problematic for all farmworkers, but the long-term effects on the neurological system and vital organs can be more pronounced for younger laborers, according to medical experts.

“Children are still developing, and so we don’t want to mess with that development,” said Dr. Jose Suarez, a physician and associate professor of public health at UC San Diego, who has researched the effects of pesticides on adolescents.

Araceli, who started working the fields of the Santa Maria Valley four years ago when she was just 13, said that some of her most disturbing experiences involved planting vegetables in fields that reeked of chemicals.

“Sometimes, it would be really, really pungent,” she recalled, adding that she’d get headaches and feel like throwing up.

At times, Araceli said, skin peeled off her fingers and they turned white.

Her mother, in a separate interview, said in Spanish that her “head began to hurt” after she entered a lettuce field where a tractor had sprayed liquid that smelled like chemicals.

A 17-year-old strawberry picker at one of the many berry fields in the Salinas Valley.

(Barbara Davidson / Capital & Main)

Unlike in other states, California’s system to protect farmworkers is split between local and state agencies.

Enforcement at the local level is the responsibility of 55 county agricultural commissioners, who are appointed by their boards of supervisors and have a dual role of promoting agriculture and enforcing state pesticide safety laws. The state Department of Pesticide Regulation enforces pesticide safety across California and provides guidance and training to agricultural commissioners.

In interviews, agricultural commissioners said the dual regulation system works because crops and growing seasons vary in each county and they can focus on the specific needs in their jurisdictions.

Yet when agricultural commissioners take enforcement action against a company for pesticide violations, they are not required by the department to check whether the firm has committed violations in other regions of California. In a statement, the department said that it “monitors compliance for repeat offenders as well as trends that may occur throughout the state.”

Capital & Main analyzed 40,150 records detailing pesticide enforcement actions across California from January 2018 through the first quarter of 2024.

According to the records, more than 240 businesses were cited for at least 1,268 violations of state pesticide laws in three or more counties. But for at least 609 of these violations — or 48% — the businesses paid no fines and received only notices or warnings.

Pesticide safety violations

Over six years, California cited more than 240 businesses across the state for at least 1,268 violations of pesticide safety laws in three or more counties.

But for nearly half of those violations the companies paid no fines and only received warnings or notices to correct the problems.

Analysis is from more than 40,000 state enforcement records from 2018 through early 2024.

Lorena Iñiguez Elebee LOS ANGELES TIMES

Craig Cassidy, a spokesperson for the Department of Pesticide Regulation, said in a written response that the number of violations with no fines “does not account for broader actions [that state and county regulators] may have taken to address the violations or to support compliance,” including warning letters or required training.

“Issuing fines is one tool in an effective enforcement program, which may be used in conjunction with other strategies to support compliance with statewide pesticide use laws and regulations,” he said.

Still, according to the data, there were repeated cases in which businesses were cited for multiple violations in separate counties but were never fined.

Agricultural contractor Nextcrop Inc., for example, was cited for 10 violations in four counties within a span of three years, but it was never ordered to pay a fine and received only warnings and notices to correct the problems, the records show.

All the violations pertained to requirements such as failing to provide pesticide safety training for workers, not posting information to inform employees about which pesticides were used on crops and failing to post information about when it was safe for workers to enter pesticide-sprayed fields.

The chief executive of Nextcrop and another company official did not respond to requests for comment.

Nutrien Ag Solutions, which is operated by a leading global supplier of agricultural services and products, is a company known to state regulators. In 2018, the firm agreed to pay $331,353 to U.S. officials in connection with 52 federal pesticide safety violations, some of them at seven facilities in the San Joaquin and Santa Maria valleys. The Department of Pesticide Regulation was involved in the investigation, according to federal regulators.

And from 2018 to 2022, agricultural commissioners cited the company for 35 separate violations of state law in 12 counties, the records show. They included failing to provide decontamination facilities and protective gear for workers, not following label instructions for pesticide use and failing to post emergency medical information in fields.

The firm paid fines for only 10 of the violations for a total of $14,700, according to the records.

In a statement, Nutrien Ag Solutions said that the violations “were resolved years ago, with prompt action taken at the time to address and correct them.”

“Nutrien upholds high standards in our operations,” the company said, “and remains dedicated to supporting farmers globally with the tools and expertise they need to produce safe and healthy crops.”

On two separate occasions, in 2018 and 2021, the Fresno County agricultural commissioner referred Nutrien Ag Solutions to the Department of Pesticide Regulation for enforcement action, the records show. Yet even after the second referral, the business continued to operate and was cited for 16 additional state violations in more than a half-dozen counties, the majority for which it was not fined.

The department said the case was referred to a regional office in Fresno County, but that it was never forwarded to headquarters in Sacramento for review.

“This was an error,” Cassidy said, “and we are looking into this matter.”

He added that the department is planning to propose regulations that would require agricultural commissioners to check a company’s statewide compliance history when taking enforcement actions, as well as justify the amount of their fines.

California agriculture has long depended on chemical-based pesticides to reduce crop damage and boost yields. Although organic farming has grown over the years, it accounts for less than 10% of all cropland statewide, far from the 20% goal by 2045 that California has adopted.

Commissioners in eight of California’s top 11 agricultural-producing counties agreed to provide estimates for the total number of times pesticides were sprayed in their jurisdictions — a figure they are not required by the state to track.

According to the estimates, pesticides were sprayed more than 687,000 times in the eight counties in 2023. That same year, 4,720 total inspections were performed in those counties — or less than 1% of the time that fields and orchards in those jurisdictions were sprayed with pesticides, according to enforcement records filed with the state.

Pesticide inspections

Agricultural commissioners provided estimates for the number of pesticide applications for 2023 in eight of the top 11 counties for agricultural production in California. The data and state enforcement records showed that these counties performed a small number of inspections compared with overall pesticide applications.

= 1,000 pesticide applications

Safety inspections were performed less than 1% of the time

Agricultural commissioners in Fresno, Imperial, Kern, Merced, Monterey, San Joaquin, Santa Barbara and Tulare counties and state pesticide enforcement records.

Lorena Iñiguez Elebee LOS ANGELES TIMES

In interviews, six agricultural commissioners said the pesticide regulatory system is too complex to be measured by a single metric, such as the number of inspections.

“I don’t think it’s a realistic way to gauge effectiveness,” said Melissa Cregan, the commissioner in Fresno County.

She and other commissioners pointed to illnesses from pesticide exposure as a key indicator of their success. Of the 859 cases reported in California in 2021, the most recent figures available, 210 — or 24% — were agricultural workers.

But experts and worker advocates say that such figures are probably undercounted, noting that more than half of the state’s farmworkers lack documentation.

“There are many, many cases that are not reported because the workers are afraid of being deported or retaliation from the employer,” United Farm Workers President Teresa Romero said.

Commissioners also said that farmers are using less dangerous chemicals, citing a 56% increase in use of biopesticides over the last decade.

In the last 10 years, they said, use of carcinogenic substances has dropped by 20% statewide, groundwater contaminants have been reduced by 77% and the use of reproductive toxins has dropped by 45%.

Commissioners said that most of their field enforcement is focused on so-called restricted use pesticides, which represent a relatively small percentage of all pesticides used but have a higher potential to harm people, wildlife and the environment and include chemicals that can cause cancer.

Yet even by that measure, relatively few inspections are conducted.

The hands of this 17-year-old strawberry picker are a testament to the physical nature of the work.

(Barbara Davidson / Capital & Main)

In Monterey County, where 14-year-old Jose and his family labor in Salinas Valley strawberry fields, the number of all agricultural pesticide safety inspections in 2023 equaled just 3% of the total number of times that restricted-use pesticides were used, according to state records. That equates to just one inspection for every 35 times that the toxic chemicals were applied on farmlands.

From 2021 to 2023, the Monterey County agricultural commissioner approved more than 53,800 “notices of intent,” which businesses are required to file prior to applying restricted-use pesticides. That was the highest number of approvals among the top agricultural counties in California — and more than three times the number in the next-closest county, according to enforcement records.

Monterey County’s agricultural commissioner, Juan Hidalgo, said that, unlike other counties in the state, his jurisdiction has multiple growing seasons. He added that “we do review every single one of those notices of intent.”

The Salinas Valley stretches for about 90 miles across the county and is lined with rows of berries, lettuce, spinach, artichokes and cauliflower.

The valley is where, in 1970, Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers launched their Salad Bowl strike, the largest farmworker labor action in U.S. history.

Today, the Salinas Valley’s biggest cash crop is strawberries, accounting for more than 20% of Monterey County’s $4.9-billion annual production value from agriculture.

A dozen minors interviewed in Monterey County described picking berries in fields that smelled of chemicals or working in fields where tractors had sprayed liquids with a strong chemical odor. Under state law, the amount of time that pickers are supposed to stay away from treated fields generally ranges from four hours to several weeks, depending on the pesticide.

Jose and his sister Raquel, 19, described entering a field in 2022 after a tractor had sprayed in rows next to where they were working.

“It smelled like chemicals, really strong … It made me dizzy,” said Raquel, who graduated from high school with a 4.0 grade point average and now attends college. She wants to become a nurse and work in the region, where she can use her Spanish and Mixteco language skills to help her community.

The California Strawberry Commission, which represents hundreds of growers, said that the state has the nation’s most stringent workplace safety laws and that protecting berry pickers is a top priority.

“The health and safety of farm workers is paramount in all aspects of production and prioritized by farmers and federal, state and local regulatory agencies,” Chris Christian, a vice president with the commission, said in a written response. “Farmers are also working in the fields, and their families live, work, and go to school in the communities where they farm.”

Hidalgo, the county agricultural commissioner, said worker safety is also his top priority.

He acknowledged that his 20 inspectors can’t cover all of the 314,000 acres in the county used to grow fruits and vegetables, but he said they know the growing cycles for different crops and when pesticides are most likely to be used.

“We just show up,” Hidalgo said, “and start doing an inspection.”

The inspections include a check of company records to confirm that workers receive required pesticide safety training. Yet underage workers don’t necessarily understand the documents they are told to sign, according to youths and their parents.

When she was 16, Raquel recalled, she was handed a stack of documents that had something to do with pesticides. “They just told us to sign it and to just get ready to work,” she said.

“I didn’t really know what it was because I was young,” she added, “but I signed it.”

Lopez is an independent journalist and fellow at the McGraw Center for Business Journalism. Data journalist Cherry Salazar analyzed state pesticide records for this report.

Sydney, Australia – Ju-rye Hwang grew up assuming her parents in South Korea were dead and that she was alone in the world after being adopted to North America at about six years of age.

That was until a phone call from a journalist in Seoul turned her world upside down.

“He told me that I was not an orphan,” Hwang said.

“And it was most certain that I was illegally adopted for profit,” she said.

The journalist went on to tell Hwang about the notorious Brothers Home institution in South Korea, a place where thousands had endured horrific abuse, including forced labour, sexual violence, and brutal beatings.

Hwang discovered that she had spent time at the institution as a child, before being offered for overseas adoption.

The journalist also explained how his investigative team had uncovered a file from the home’s archives containing a list of international adoptions, and among the clearly printed names was that of her adoptive mother.

Hearing “the truth”, Hwang said, “made me break down and lose my breath”.

“I felt physically ill,” she told Al Jazeera.

“I believed that my parents were not alive.”

‘Beggars don’t exist here’

Hwang is now a successful career woman in her mid-40s. But her origins link back to South Korea during the 1970s and 80s, when government authorities in the rapidly industrialising nation cracked down brutally on those considered socially undesirable.

Kidnapping was rampant among the children of the poor, the homeless and marginalised who lived on the streets of Seoul and other cities.

Children as well as adults were abducted without warning, bundled into police cars and trucks and hauled away under a state policy aimed at beautifying South Korean cities by removing those designated as “vagrants”.

By clearing the streets of the poor, South Korea’s government sought to project an image of prosperity and modernity to the outside world, particularly in the lead-up to the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul.

The then-president and military leader, Chun Doo-hwan, famously boasted of South Korea’s economic success when he told reporters: “Do you see any beggars in our country? We have no beggars. Beggars don’t exist here.”

The president’s push to “cleanse” the streets of the poor and homeless combined toxically with a police performance system based on the accumulation of points that propelled a surge in abductions.

At the time, police earned points based on the category of suspects they apprehended. A petty offender was worth just two performance points. But turning in a so-called “beggar” or “vagrant” to institutions such as the Brothers Home could earn an officer five points – a perverse incentive that prompted widespread abuse.

“The police abducted innocent people off the streets – shoe shiners, gum sellers, people waiting at bus stops, even kids just playing outside,” Moon Jeong-su, a former member of South Korea’s National Assembly, told Al Jazeera.

Brothers Home of horrors

Located in the southern port city of Busan, Brothers Home was founded in 1975 by Park In-geun, a former military officer and boxer.

It was one of many government-subsidised “welfare” institutions across South Korea, established at that time to house the homeless and train them in vocational skills before releasing them back into society as so-called “productive citizens”.

In practice, such facilities became sites of mass detention and horrific abuse.

“State funding was based on the number of people they incarcerated,” said former Busan city council member Park Min-seong.

“The more people they brought in, the more subsidies they received,” he said.

At one stage, up to 95 percent of the Brothers Home’s inmates were delivered directly by police, and as few as 10 percent of those confined were actually “vagrants”, according to a 1987 prosecutor’s report.

In a recent Netflix documentary dealing with the events at Brothers Home, Park Cheong-gwang, the youngest son of the facility’s owner, Park In-geun, admitted that his father had bribed police officers to ensure they sent abducted people to his facility.

Records reviewed by South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established to investigate historical abuse at Brothers Home and similar centres, revealed that an estimated 38,000 people were detained at the home between 1976 and its closure in 1987.

Brothers Home reached peak capacity in 1984, with more than 4,300 inmates held at one time. During its 11 years of operation, 657 deaths were also officially recorded, though investigators believe the toll was likely much higher.

The home was known among inmates as Park’s “kingdom”. It was a place where the founder wielded absolute control over every aspect of their lives. The compound had high concrete walls and guards stationed at the towering front gate. No one was permitted to leave without express permission.

Inside, children were forced to work long hours in on-site factories producing goods such as fishing rods, shoes and clothing, while adults were sent out for gruelling manual labour at construction sites.

Their labour was not supposed to be free.

A 2021 investigation by Al Jazeera’s 101 East investigative documentary series revealed that Park and members of his board of directors at Brothers Home had embezzled what would amount to tens of millions of dollars in today’s value, and which should have been paid to inmates for their work.

Those operating Brothers Home also profited from the country’s lucrative international adoption trade, with domestic and foreign adoption agencies frequently visiting the facility.

Former inmate Lee Chae-shik, who was held for six years at the home, told 101 East that young children, just like Hwang, would simply disappear overnight.

“Newborns, three-year-olds, kids who couldn’t yet walk … One day, all of those kids were gone,” Lee said.

‘The child said absolutely nothing’

Hwang’s intake form at the Brothers Home states that she was found in Busan’s Jurye-dong neighbourhood and “admitted to Brothers Home at the request of the Jurye 2-dong Police Substation on November 23, 1982”.

A black-and-white photo of a very young Hwang is affixed to the top corner of the document, which was seen by Al Jazeera.

Her head is shaved. The form is stamped with her identification number: 821112646, with a line in the comments section: “Upon arrival, the child said absolutely nothing.”

The document notes Hwang’s “good physique”, “normal face shape and colour”, and she is marked on the form as “healthy – capable of labour work”.

At the bottom of the page are Hwang’s tiny fingerprints. She was about four years old at the time.

“That girl is probably scared and in shock,” said Hwang, looking at her own intake document and the picture of her childhood self. Her voice quivering as she spoke, she referred to the “innocent” child who already “has a mugshot”.

“I 100 percent believe that I was kidnapped,” she said. “I know I was never supposed to be at Brothers [Home] as a four-year-old.”

A deeply unsettling discovery was also made in her adoption records: Her name, Ju-rye, was given to her by the home’s director, Park, who named her after the Jurye-dong neighbourhood where police say she was found – the same neighbourhood where the Brothers Home was located.

“I felt violated. I felt sick in the stomach,” she said, recalling the origins of her name.

Growing up, Hwang said she had fragmented memories of South Korea.

Of the few she could recollect, one was of a towering iron gate. The other was of children splashing in a shallow underground pool. For years, she dismissed those memories as probably imagined. Then, in 2022, six years after the call with the journalist, she finally mustered enough courage to investigate her past with the help of a fellow adoptee from South Korea, who had sent her links to a website detailing what the Brothers Home once looked like.

“I was just toggling through the different menus of that website when two vivid images clicked for me,” Hwang said, snapping her fingers.

“The large iron gate – that was the entrance. The underground pool was inside the facility,” she said, matching her unexplained dreams with the images featured on the website.

“It was overwhelming to know that I was not imagining my memories of Korea,” she said.

Hwang would discover that she was kept at the Brothers Home for nine months before being sent to a nearby orphanage, where she was deemed a “good candidate” for international adoption.

In the consultation notes for eventual adoption, the circumstances of Hwang’s so-called abandonment and her admission to Brothers Home, as well as details of her health, were all provided by Park. She was recorded as being in good health, weighing 15.3kg (33.7lb), measuring 101cm (3.3ft) in height, and having a full set of 20 healthy teeth.

Adoption records also described her as an outgoing and well-behaved young girl. Hwang was noted for her intelligence: she could write her own name “perfectly”, was able to count in numbers, recognised different colours, and was also capable of reciting verses from the Bible from memory.

“It seems odd that I had those skills and was well nourished, and yet the police claimed I was a street kid. It just doesn’t add up,” said Hwang, who is convinced she was well looked after before she was taken to the Brothers Home.

In 2021, Hwang submitted her DNA to an international genetics registry and was immediately matched with a fully-related younger brother who had also been adopted to Belgium. She describes her first video call with her long-lost brother as “surreal”.

“For an adopted person who has never had any blood relatives their entire life, coming face-to-face with a direct sibling was jaw-dropping,” Hwang recalled.

“There was no denying we were related,” she said.

“He looked so much like me – the shape of his face, the features, even our long, slender hands.”

Hwang soon learned that she had another younger brother, and both had been adopted to Belgium in early 1986.

Their adoption files, also seen by Al Jazeera, state the brothers were “abandoned” in Anyang, a city about 300km (186 miles) from Busan, in August 1982, about three months before Hwang was taken to Brothers Home.

The timing of her brothers’ adoptions made her wonder whether her parents may have temporarily left her with relatives in Busan, a common practice in Korean families, possibly while they searched for their missing sons, who may also have been taken off the streets in similar circumstances.

Among the few vivid memories that Hwang still retains from her very early childhood, before the Brothers Home, is of a woman she believes may have been her biological mother.

“The only image that stayed with me,” she said, her eyes filling with tears, “is of a woman with medium-length permed hair. I only remember her from the back – I have no memory of her from the front.”

Hwang still holds on to hope that one day she will be reunited with her mother and will discover her true identity.

“I would love to know my real name – the name my parents gave me,” she said.

Truth and Reconciliation

In 2022, South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission declared that serious human rights violations had occurred at Brothers Home. This included enforced disappearances, arbitrary confinement, forced labour without pay, sexual violence, physical abuse, and even deaths.

In the report, the commission stated the “rules of rounding up vagrants to be unconstitutional/illegal”, that “the process of inmates being confined to be illegal”, and “suspicious acts” were discovered “in medical practices and the process of dealing with dead inmates”.

Most children at the home were also found to have been excluded from compulsory education.

The commission concluded that such acts had violated the “right to the pursuit of happiness, freedom of relocation, right to liberty, the right to be free from forced or compulsory labour, and the right to education, as guaranteed by the Constitution”.

The government, the commission said, was aware of such violations but “tried to systematically downscale and conceal the case”.

The commission also confirmed for the first time earlier this year that Brothers Home had collaborated with other childcare centres to facilitate illegal overseas adoptions.

Although many records were reportedly destroyed by the home’s former management, investigators verified that at least 31 children had been illegally sent abroad for adoption. The inquiry eventually identified 17 biological mothers linked to children sent for adoption overseas.

In one case, the commission uncovered evidence of a heavily pregnant woman who had been forcibly taken to Brothers Home. She gave birth inside the facility, and her baby was handed over to an adoption agency just a month later and then sent overseas three months after that.

Investigators found a letter of consent to adoption signed by the mother. But the adoption agency had taken custody of the baby the very day the form was signed, leaving no opportunity for the mother to reconsider or withdraw consent.

The commission noted the high likelihood of the mother being coerced into consenting to the overseas adoption of her child while held inside the Brothers Home, from which she could neither leave nor care adequately for her newborn under the home’s oppressive conditions.

Brothers Home’s former director, Park, died in June 2016 in South Korea. He was never held accountable for the unlawful confinement that occurred at his facility, nor did he ever apologise for his role in it.

The commission’s 2022 report strongly recommended that the South Korean government issue a formal state apology for its role in the abuses committed at the home. To date, neither the Busan city government nor the South Korean national police have apologised for involvement in the abuses or the subsequent cover-up, and, despite mounting pressure, no president of the country has issued a formal apology.

In mid-September, however, the government withdrew its appeals against admitting liability for human rights violations that occurred at the facility, following a Supreme Court ruling in March. The move is expected to expedite compensation for a number of the victims who had filed lawsuits against the state over the abuse they suffered.

Justice Minister Jung Sung-ho described the decision to drop the appeals as a “testament to the state’s recognition of the human rights violations [that occurred] due to the state violence in the authoritarian era”.

This week, the Supreme Court further ruled that the state must also compensate victims who were forcibly confined at Brothers Home before 1975, when a government directive officially authorised a nationwide crackdown on “vagrants”.

The court found that the state had “consistently carried out crackdowns and confinement measures against vagrants from the 1950s onwards and expanded these practices” under the directive.

Hwang submitted her case to the commission for investigation in January 2025, and she received an official response confirming that, as a child, she was subjected to “gross human rights violations resulting from the unlawful and grossly unjust exercise of official authority”.

‘Child-exporting nation’

In the decades after the 1950-53 Korean War, more than 170,000 children were sent to Western countries for adoption, as what started as a humanitarian effort to rescue war orphans gradually evolved into a lucrative business for private adoption agencies.

Just last month, President Lee Jae Myung issued a historic apology over South Korea’s former foreign adoption programme, acknowledging the “pain” and “suffering” endured by adoptees and their birth and adoptive families.

Lee spoke of a “shameful chapter” in South Korea’s recent past and its former reputation as a “child-exporting nation”.

The president’s apology came several months after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission released another report concluding that widespread human rights violations had occurred within South Korea’s international adoption system.

The commission found that the government had actively promoted intercountry adoptions and granted private agencies near total control over the process, giving them “immense power over the lives of the children”.

Adoption agencies were entrusted with guardianship and consent rights of orphans, allowing them to pursue their financial interests unchecked. They also set their own adoption fees and were known to pressure adoptive parents to pay additional “donations”.

The investigation also revealed that agencies routinely falsified records, obscuring or erasing the identities and family connections of children to make them appear more “adoptable”. This included altering birthdates, names, photographs, and even the circumstances of abandonment to fit the legal definition of an “orphan”.

Under laws in place at the time of Hwang’s adoption, South Korean children could not be sent overseas until a public process had been conducted to determine whether a child had any surviving relatives.

Adoption agencies, including institutions such as the Brothers Home, were legally required to publish public notices in newspapers and on court bulletin boards, stating where and when a child had been found. This process was intended to help reunite missing children with their parents or guardians, and to prevent overseas adoption while those searches were still under way.

However, the commission found that in cases involving the Brothers Home, such notices were published only after formal adoption proceedings had begun. This indicated that the search for an orphan’s relatives was considered a procedural formality rather than a genuine safeguard to protect children who still had family.

The notices were also published by a district office in Seoul rather than in Busan, where the children had originally been reported as found.

The commission concluded that the government had failed “to uphold its responsibility to protect the fundamental human rights of its citizens” and had enabled the “mass exportation of children” to satisfy international demand.

‘Right your wrongs’

Hwang now lives in Sydney, Australia, and her new home is coincidentally the same city where some of the extended family of the late Brothers Home director, Park, now live.

An investigation by 101 East revealed that the director’s brothers-in-law, Lim Young-soon and Joo Chong-chan, who were directors at the Brothers Home, migrated to Sydney in the late 1980s.

Park’s daughter, Park Jee-hee, and her husband, Alex Min, also moved to Australia and were operating a golf driving range and sports complex in Sydney’s outer suburbs, 101 East discovered.

Noting the coincidence of living in the same city as relatives of the late Brothers Home director, Hwang said she believed “things happen for a reason”.

“I’m not sure why, but maybe there’s a reason I’m here,” Hwang told Al Jazeera, adding that if she ever had the opportunity to speak with the Park family, her message would be simple: “Right your wrongs.”

Park’s son, Park Cheong-gwang, admitted in the Netflix documentary series about Brothers Home – titled “The Echoes of Survivors” – that abuses had taken place at the centre.

But he insisted that the South Korean government was largely responsible and that his father had told him that work at the home was carried out under direct orders from the country’s then-President Chun, who died in 2021.

Park Cheong-gwang also used his appearance in the Netflix show to issue the first formal apology of any member of his family.

He apologised to “the victims and their families who suffered during that time at the Brothers Home, and for all the pain they’ve endured since”.

Other relatives living in Australia have dismissed the reported abuses at the home.

Hwang said their lack of remorse “was sickening”.

“They’re running away from their history,” she said.

“It’s not only the adoption, but it’s the fact that everything in my life was erased,” she added.

“My identity, my immediate family, my extended family, everything was erased. No one has the right to do that.”

WAG Taylor Ward has shared a first photo of her newborn baby boy, after giving birth to her second child with footballer Riyad Mahrez. 

This summer Taylor, 27, gathered friends and family for a lavish celebration, where she and husband Riyad, 34, opened a giant box to discover they’re expecting a baby boy.

And now the star has announced his arrival, by posting a sweet black and white snap of them together in the hospital. 

Taylor, daughter of RHOC star Dawn Ward, revealed their son’s name, as she penned to fans: “Khayri Mahrez 🤍 Everything we dreamed of and more.” 

The blonde beauty looked content as she cradled her bundle of joy, with Riyad by her side in the hospital. 

In a second black and white snap, Taylor posted a photo of their daughter Mila, who was born in July 2022, holding her brother.

It’s A…

WAG Taylor Ward shares gender of second child with footballer Riyad Mahrez

HAPPY NEWS

WAG Taylor Ward reveals she’s expecting second child with Riyad Mahrez

Fans and friends flooded the comments with messages of congratulations.

Footballer Jack Grealish penned: “congratulations guys,” followed by blue heart emojis.

And Molly-Mae Hague wrote: “Congratulations special mumma !!!!”

Loose Women star Denise Welch wrote: “Taylor!!! The first boy!!! So wonderful.”

And Taylor’s mum Dawn commented a string of heart eye emojis.

Right winger Riyad – who plays for the Saudi Pro League club Al-Ahli – has two other children from a previous marriage with internet personality, Rita Johal.

She initially tied the knot with the footballer in an intimate and low-key religious ceremony in January 2022.

The duo then officially wed in a legal ceremony in September 2023 at The Londoner Hotel.

This was before they celebrated with their family and friends at a lavish ceremony at Lake Como in Italy.

CHICAGO — A Chicago day-care center employee who was detained by immigration agents at work as children were being dropped off last week has been released, according to her attorney.

Diana Santillana Galeano was detained Nov. 5 at the Rayito de Sol Spanish Immersion Early Learning Center on the north side of Chicago. A video showed officers struggling with her as they walked out the front door. Her attorneys said in a statement Thursday that she was released from a detention center in Indiana on Wednesday night.

“We are thrilled that Ms. Santillana was released, and has been able to return home to Chicago where she belongs,” attorney Charlie Wysong said in the statement. “We will continue to pursue her immigration claims to stay in the United States. We are grateful to her community for the outpouring of support over these difficult days, and ask that her privacy be respected while she rests and recovers from this ordeal.”

Her case reflects the Trump administration’s increasingly aggressive enforcement tactics. But her detention at a day care was unusual even under “Operation Midway Blitz,” which has resulted in more than 3,000 immigration arrests in the Chicago area since early September. Agents have rappelled from a Black Hawk helicopter in a middle-of-the-night apartment building raid, appeared with overwhelming force in recreational areas and launched tear gas amid protests.

“I am so grateful to everyone who has advocated on my behalf, and on behalf of the countless others who have experienced similar trauma over recent months in the Chicago area,” Santillana Galeano said in the same statement. “I love our community and the children I teach, and I can’t wait to see them again.”

The Department of Homeland Security said last week that the woman, who is from Colombia, entered the U.S. illegally in June 2023 but obtained authorization to work under the Biden administration. The department denied that the day care was targeted.

PIXIE Lott oozed elegance in a bejewelled LBD just two weeks after giving birth to her second child.

The Mama Do hitmaker, 34, welcomed her second baby boy with husband Oliver Cheshire, 37, in October.

The popstar beamed as she stepped out in London for the premiere of her new movie, Christmas Karma.

She opted for a floor-length frock with a roll neck and huge silver sequin balloon sleeves for the event at Curzon Mayfair.

Pixie swept her blonde hair into a stylish up-do with front pieces left free to frame her face, and kept her make-up fresh and natural.

She took time to pose for the cameras on the Red Carpet, flashing a cheeky glance over her shoulder before placing her hands on her hips.

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HOT MUMMA

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The glowing parent-of-two was then joined by hubby Oliver for a few joint snaps.

Pixie stars in the festive movie based on a modern-day Christmas Carol.

She plays Mary Cratchit, Bob Cratchit’s wife, in the flick to be released today.

The pop princess’ role in the festive flick comes after she revealed she’d written a Christmas song dedicated to her newborn.

Pixie gave the first play of the tune on her Instagram page, as the soundtrack to a video showing her enjoying some tender moments with the tot.

Speaking of the tune, First Christmas, she wrote in the caption: “I just wrote a song for our new baby boy especially for this time of year.

“Pre save now in my bio and get tickets to my Christmas show in December to see it live.”

BABY JOY

Off-screen, the All About Tonight singer announced her happy baby news on her Instagram page last month.

Pixie posted a sweet video of her newborn baby boy and wrote: “He’s here,” with a blue heart emoji.

The clip showed her newborn’s little feet and hands for the first time.

Pixie’s close celebrity pals were quick to congratulate the star.

Gaby Roslin wrote: “Ahhh huge congratulations to you beautiful and your whole family. Big love.”

AJ Odudu posted: “Awww CONGRATULATIONS.”

Earlier this year, the singer revealed she and husband Oliver were expecting their second child.

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The couple are already parents to son Albert, who was born in October 2023.

Previously, Pixie and Oliver only revealed their son’s name a month after his birth when they celebrated his christening.

Google

Sexual exploitation charges

‘Huge shock’

Eddie Murphy has solidly been established as Hollywood royalty after a decades-long career stretching from “Saturday Night Live” to “The Nutty Professor” to “Dreamgirls” and beyond.

A key hallmark of Murphy’s status is his voluminous gallery of offbeat characters — an impeccably attired prison convict, a clumsy professor, a wisecracking donkey, an elderly Jewish man and even an obese, abusive wife.

In Netflix’s “Being Eddie,” now streaming, Murphy lifts the veil on the persona he feels the closest to — Eddie Murphy.

Directed by Angus Wall (an executive producer of “The Greatest Night in Pop”), the documentary traces the meteoric rise and triumphs of Murphy, who seldom grants interviews and is fiercely private about his creative process and personal life.

With his trademark humor and probing insight, the entertainer offers candid perspective of his trajectory from a kid in New Jersey performing stand-up to joining “Saturday Night Live” right out of high school, his string of hit films (“48 Hrs.,” “Trading Places,” “Eddie Murphy Raw”) and his transition from foul-mouthed provocateur to family-friendly films.

Eddie Murphy, left, with his brothers Vernon Lynch and Charlie Murphy.

(Photo from Eddie Murphy / Netflix)

He also addresses some of his misfires (“Vampire in Brooklyn”), and throws more than a little shade at “Saturday Night Live” and the Academy Awards (“I haven’t gotten an Oscar, and I’ve done everything”).

The film is largely set at Murphy’s castle-like estate, where he’s seen hanging out with his 10 children and second wife, Paige Butcher. (“My legacy is my children, not what I did at work,” he says. “My kids are the center of my life. It’s all about them… If you put your family first, you will never make a bad decision.”) Jerry Seinfeld, Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Kevin Hart and Pete Davidson are among the numerous entertainers who comment on Murphy’s influence on popular culture.

The following are some of the more fascinating takeaways from “Being Eddie.”

Cleto Escobedo III, the bandleader of Cleto and the Cletones, the house band for “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” has died. The musician and lifelong friend of Kimmel was 59.

Kimmel confirmed Escobedo’s death early Tuesday morning in an Instagram post later that day, writing that “we lost a great friend, father, son, musician and man.”

“To say that we are heartbroken is an understatement,” Kimmel continued. “Cleto and I have been inseparable since I was nine years old. The fact that we got to work together every day is a dream neither of us could ever have imagined would come true. Cherish your friends and please keep Cleto’s wife, children and parents in your prayers.”

The news of Escobedo’s death comes after “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” was abruptly canceled Thursday , reportedly due to a “personal matter.” The cause of Escobedo’s death was not immediately released.

Escobedo had led the band through the late-night show since its premiere in 2003, playing alongside a group of musicians that included his father, Cleto Escobedo Jr.

Escobedo was an accomplished professional musician, having toured with Earth, Wind and Fire’s Philip Bailey and Paula Abdul and recorded with Marc Anthony, Tom Scott and Take Six. When Kimmel got his own ABC late-night talk show in 2003, he pushed for Escobedo to lead the house band, he told WABC in 2015.

“Of course I wanted great musicians, but I wanted somebody I had chemistry with,” Kimmel told the outlet. “And there’s nobody in my life I have better chemistry with than him.”

In an August 2016 episode, Kimmel wished Escobedo a happy 50th birthday and highlighted his long-standing relationship with the musician. They met in 1977 when Kimmel’s family moved in across the street from the Escobedos in Las Vegas. “We began a lifetime of friendship that was highlighted by the kind of torture that only an older brother can inflict on you without being arrested,” Kimmel said before sharing a series of stories about their sibling-like bond and Escobedo’s antics.

“I can’t wait till your kids turn 12 and see this, and find out their father is a secret maniac,” Kimmel said. The host also shared photos of them as children, including one of Escobedo playing the saxophone and Kimmel playing the clarinet.

In addition to his father and other family members, Escobedo is survived by his wife, Lori, and their two children.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

For Zuri Crawford, the last several weeks have been an emotional whirlwind — swinging from fears to frustration to now partial relief.

A 20-year-old single mother and Riverside City College student, Crawford depends on the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to buy groceries for herself and her young son. Earlier this week, she braced herself for the possibility that — because of the federal shutdown — she would not receive the $445 that typically gets loaded onto her state-issued debit card on the sixth day of every month.

“I really feel like I’m going to be burnt out. I feel like it’s going to be hard on me because I am a single mom,” she said on a recent afternoon. “I have to push through, but I am going to be overwhelmed.”

On Thursday, however, Crawford was surprised to learn that the $445 payment had showed up on her card. Soon after, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that, because of a court victory, “food benefits are now beginning to flow back to California families” — at least temporarily.

Crawford is one of roughly 5.5 million statewide who depend on this food aid — known in California as CalFresh — and one of 42 million people nationwide. In recent weeks, this group has been caught in the crosshairs of a political battle that has shifted from Congress to courtrooms amid a federal shutdown that has now lasted more than five weeks.

As of early Friday, two federal judges had ordered the U.S. Department of Agriculture to use billions of dollars in contingency funding to continue providing SNAP support — the reason Crawford and many others nationwide received their full benefits Thursday. On Friday the Trump administration asked a federal appeals court to block one of those orders. The appeals court let the order stand, and then late Friday the Trump administration succeeded in persuading the Supreme Court to block the judicial rulings and — at least temporarily — withhold food benefits from millions of Americans.

Many recipients in California already have their payments, but the legal drama late Friday may add to their anxieties. Many were already improvising, and may have to do so again.

Zuir Crawford, 20, loads groceries bought using gift cards supplied by Riverside City College.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

In Crawford’s case, she already juggles college coursework, picks up shifts as an UberEats driver and cares for her 1-year-old. When she learned her food aid would be delayed this month, she made a plan: She would drop two classes and then pick up additional work as a caregiver so she and her son could afford to eat. She would use that money to supplement the support she is receiving from her school and community.

Even with food aid, she depends on food pantries to help her obtain items such as canned ravioli, Rice-a-Roni and frozen dinners for the last two weeks of the month.

Single parents could be hit especially hard by the delay in food benefits. Nationwide, single-adults make up nearly two-thirds (62%) of all SNAP households with children, according to the USDA. In California, almost a quarter of single working parents (23.2%) are in poverty, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

Households headed by single mothers are especially vulnerable amid a worsening gender wage gap and rising costs for education, housing and child care, said Jesseca Boyer, vice president of policy and strategic initiatives for the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. “All of those factors require a single mother to stretch their already limited dollars even further,” she said.

In the Bay Area city of Mountain View, Abigail Villavicencio usually gets between $500 and $700 each month loaded onto her CalFresh cards, she said. It depends on her fluctuating income delivering food for apps such as Uber Eats. A single mom with three children, she first qualified for SNAP in 2021, and at that time was able to stretch the money to cover groceries for an entire month.

“But over the last year, it hasn’t been enough. I spend $500 in 2 weeks. I noticed prices were going up,” she said, and her weekly grocery trip often now costs $200 to $300. “I have two weeks when I have to figure out what to do.”

Villavicencio said she augments her benefits by collecting donated food at her son’s school twice a month.

The last few weeks have been particularly hurtful, she said, when she sees commenters on social media deriding food stamp recipients as “lazy.” She notes that she has to show her bank accounts every six months to qualify for CalFresh. For the past three years, she’s been home with her twin daughters as they went through intensive behavior therapy for autism.

News of the delayed SNAP benefits gutted her carefully calibrated food plan. She dipped into her savings for the last grocery trip and bought enough to make meals she could sell to construction workers to earn a few extra dollars.

Now that her twin daughters are in kindergarten, she’s also been searching for more consistent work — but it’s been challenging, she said, to find one that will allow her to drop off and pick up her children from school.

Holding her dog Bear, Zuir Crawford, 20 fears losing her SNAP benefits because of the federal government shutdown. “I really feel like I’m going to be burnt out. I feel like it’s going to be hard on me because I am a single mom,” she said on a recent afternoon. “I have to push through, but I am going to be overwhelmed.”

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

As for Crawford, she said she experienced “trauma after trauma” growing up, bouncing between homes in Los Angeles and Riverside counties. She has sought stability since becoming a teen mom to her son, whom she affectionately calls Baby Z.

She is in her second semester at Riverside City College, where she is taking prerequisite courses to pursue a nursing career. She makes “little to nothing” driving for Uber Eats, she said, “but it’s enough for me to at least put gas in my tank.”

Without the financial support of her family or a partner, she relies on a patchwork of government programs.

Two months ago, she, her son and her fluffy white dog Bear moved into a one-bedroom apartment that she obtained through a county housing program for the homeless. She uses the nearly $900 a month she receives through CalWorks, a state welfare program, to cover her rent, utilities and phone bill. Along with CalFresh, she gets a monthly allotment of healthy food through the Women, Infants and Children program.

She said she’s also sustained by her Christian faith. She attends regular Bible studies and uses a portion of her food budget to make meals for the homeless.

Inside the college’s Basic Needs Resource Center on Wednesday afternoon, Crawford filled a black basket with peanut butter, jelly, oatmeal, a can of pozole and hygiene products. While students can typically access the pantry every two weeks, they can collect staples once a week during the shutdown, a volunteer explained.

Crawford is in her second semester at Riverside City College, where she is taking prerequisite courses to pursue a nursing career.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

As a community college student and single parent receiving public assistance, she is also eligible for additional support including meal vouchers and grocery gift cards.

With SNAP beneficiaries becoming pawns in the shutdown fight, she said she’s grateful for the public assistance, which she views as a “stepping stone” to a more financially secure life.

“It’s not my fault that I was born into the family I was born into,” she said later that day, as she sliced and spiced chicken and steamed vegetables for a low-cost meal. “I can’t control that. But what I can control is my outcome. And I know that if I keep on working hard, if I keep on persevering through all the hardships, I’m going to be OK.”

Zuir Crawford, 20, carries groceries from a local market and also from a food pantry to her apartment in Riverside.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

Up until Thursday, both Villavicencio and Crawford were preparing for hard times. The Mountain View mom was worried about telling her children about a diminished Thanksgiving this year. Crawford was calculating how to further improvise on using her food budget wisely.

Both women were relieved that, on the sixth day of the month, their benefits had fully reloaded.

“I can breathe now,” Villavicencio said Friday.

“I’m super-shocked,” added Crawford with a laugh. “I feel relieved. I just feel happy.”

This article is part of The Times’ equity reporting initiative, funded by the James Irvine Foundation, exploring the challenges facing low-income workers and the efforts being made to address California’s economic divide.

It’s the one-two punch of an earthquake and a piece of scrumptious white chocolate from Belgium, a country famous for its sweet confections, that awakens 2½-year-old Amélie (voiced by Loïse Charpentier) to the wondrous and perilous world around her.

Rambunctious and astute, the toddler heroine of the sublimely beautiful animated film “Little Amélie or the Character of Rain” first communicates in voiceover from the void of nothingness before birth. She declares herself a powerful deity and explains that God is essentially a “tube” that constantly ingests and secretes experiences and things. That description could also apply to human existence in a general sense if you take away the philosophical complications that give us meaning. (We are, thankfully, more than all-consuming vessels.)

But until she’s stirred by the earthquake and chocolate, Amélie refuses to engage with reality, observing without making any effort to move or talk, as if displeased with having been born. Her absolutist views of what it means to be alive slowly peel away in the life-affirming first feature from co-directors Liane-Cho Han and Maïlys Vallade, a screen adaptation of Amélie Nothomb’s autobiographical 2000 novel “The Character of Rain,” popular in French-speaking countries.

Akin to impressionistic paintings, the animation here decidedly lacks intricate designs and opts for flat hues coloring figures without visible outlines. The stylistic choices result in a striking, distinctly pictorial aesthetic in line with earlier projects that Han and Vallade worked on, such as “Long Way North” and “Calamity,” both directed by Rémi Chayé.

The third child of a Belgian family living in 1960s Japan, young Amélie develops an endearing relationship with housekeeper Nishio-san (Victoria Grobois). While her parents have their hands full with her older siblings, Amélie explores nature and becomes enamored with Japanese culture. That the affectionate Nishio-san doesn’t impose her perspective on the girl, but quite literally tries to perceive each moment from her height, signals a bond that’s closer to one between mutuals.

It’s through Amélie’s gaze — or, more precisely, how these filmmakers interpret it visually — that we begin to understand her invigorating whimsy. Early on, it seems like her rapidly changing moods affect the weather; later, Amélie steps into the ocean and it parts as it did for Moses (if only in her restless imagination). A person her age is inherently self-centered, unaware that she is part of a bigger whole.

To illustrate Nishio-san’s account of how she lost her family during World War II, animators Han and Vallade zero in on the dish she is cooking: Chopped vegetables fall into a pot like missiles, a gust of pot steam represents a fiery aftermath, rice under water shows how Nishio-san had to dig her way out of being buried alive. The gruesome subject matter is translated into immediate household imagery that someone Amélie’s age could grasp.

When Nishio-san shares with Amélie that the Japanese word “ame” means rain (so close to her own name), the girl takes this as confirmation that her kinetic, unbridled and visceral impulses are natural. Her feelings of kinship with precipitation are transmuted into a delightfully conceived scene in which little versions of Amélie appear inside every falling raindrop. These fanciful instances benefit from Mari Fukuhara’s score, a drizzle of aural luminosity.

Amélie’s rowdy approach becomes more nuanced when she is confronted with a loved one’s death, as well as her own mortality in the aftermath of two accidents. Han and Vallade also make room for her realizations about life’s unfairness and the inevitability of sorrow — all communicated via flights of fancy that only animation can materialize.

In turn, it comes as a shock for Amélie to learn that she is not Japanese, even if that’s the country she considers home. Her future may be determined by Kashima-san (Yumi Fujimori), the landlady who owns the house Amélie’s family is renting and who brought Nishio-san on to help them. Kashima-san distrusts westerners — her wounds of wartime haven’t healed — and to see Nishio-san smitten with Amélie feels like a betrayal.

The larger implications of her presence escape the little one, but the fact that Amélie, even at her age, is able to empathize with Kashima-san’s despair speaks to the thematic richness and emotional maturity that Han and Vallade channel in their brisk, arresting feature. The gently transcendent, tear-inducing conclusion that “Little Amélie” reaches suggests that memory serves as our only remedy for loss. As long as we don’t forget, what we cherish won’t become ephemeral.