reunites

EMMA Thompson has reunited with a Love Actually and Nanny McPhee co-star for a new show 22 years after the iconic Christmas film’s release.

The heavyweight actors play married private investigators in new Apple TV+ thriller Down Cemetery Road, which sees them drawn into the mysterious disappearance of five-year-old Dinah.

Joe, played by Adam Godley, is tasked with investigating the disappearance which follows a fatal explosion linked to the Ministry of Defence.

In an intriguing first episode, Joe is believed to have taken his own life shortly after accepting the case, and Zoe is seen in a morgue where she identifies her spouse’s lifeless body.

Adam, 61, spoke to UPI about his connection with Emma.

He said: “We have a bit of history.

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“I’ve known Emma slightly for a while, so that was something we could already invest in their relationship and it helped us.

“She’s a glorious human being and a mighty impressive actor and, so, any time I spend with Emma is a good time.”

While filming the aforementioned morgue scene, Adam revealed he laid almost naked underneath a sheet in a cold room with his feet poking out the end.

Highlighting his co-star’s kind nature, he said: “To give you a sense of who Emma is, Emma was standing at the foot of the slab and she noticed my feet were poking out from under the blanket and she assumed my feet would be quite cold, so she just tucked them underneath her jumper, pressed them against her belly to keep them warm.”

In Love Actually, Adam played Mr Trench – a small role in a memorable scene at the end of the film.

Mr Trench leads the Christmas choir which features smitten schoolboy Sam drumming in a bid to impress popular classmate Joanne.

Emma played stay-at-home mum Karen in the film whose heart is broken on Christmas Eve when she discovers her husband has bought his secretary expensive jewellery instead of her.

Three years later, they both starred in Nanny McPhee, with Emma in the lead role as the magical disciplinarian who transforms the lives of the kids in her charge.

Adam played the vicar who officiates a chaotic wedding at the film’s climax.

While in Israeli detention, Palestinian photojournalist Shadi Abu Sido was told his wife and children had been killed in Gaza. But when he was released under the ceasefire deal, he discovered they were alive.

Oct. 9 (UPI) — After 46 years of searching, 64-year-old María Soto was reunited with her twin daughters, María Laura and Valeska, who were given up for adoption without her consent in 1979 when they were 8 months old.

Because of their low weight, the girls had been admitted to a state institution. But when Soto went to retrieve them, she was told her daughters had been adopted by an Italian couple.

The case became public a few weeks ago, highlighting the work of the Hijos y Madres del Silencio Foundation (Children and Mothers of Silence), which searches for Chilean children who were illegally taken. The twins are numbers 319 and 320 of children the Foundation has successfully reunited with their families.

They were able to reunite thanks to the efforts of one of Soto’s Italian grandsons, who knew his mother had been born in Chile. He sought help from Hijos y Madres del Silencio, which then contacted Soto.

Marisol Rodríguez, founder and president of the Children and Mothers of Silence Foundation, told UPI that between the 1950s and 1990s, an estimated 45,000-plus Chilean children were illegally adopted abroad.

The foundation has worked for more than 11 years to reunite families. Its team cross-checks information in databases, reviews court records and requests DNA tests from those searching for relatives.

The idea grew out of her Rodriguez’s experience. In 1972, her mother was told that her newborn daughter had died, but she was never given the body and there was no record of her pregnancy. It turned out the baby had been adopted in Germany, and the mother and daughter did not reunite until 2014.

“We thought there were just a few other cases. We never realized the scale of what had happened,” Rodríguez said. She explained that over time, more cases began to surface of children searching for their mothers and mothers searching for their children.

Initial information suggested that about 20,000 children had been taken, but Alejandro Aguilar, the judge handling irregular adoption cases in Chile’s courts, said that in 1983 alone, 23,000 children were sent abroad, according to Rodríguez.

“There could have been more than 40,000 children who were sent abroad, plus others who were adopted illegally within the country and remained in Chile,” she said.

Today, more than 306 people are searching for their biological origins, and 504 families are looking for children with the help of the foundation.

According to collected records, the child-trafficking network that operated in Chile charged as much as $30,000 for each child placed in an illegal adoption. Most of the children were sent to Europe — to countries that included Italy, Sweden, Germany, Denmark and France — but cases have also been identified in the United States.

“It is estimated there are about 8,000 cases in that country, but now many people are afraid of being deported and don’t want to file a report. That’s why the number of people searching for their families is much smaller. Others don’t want to file a legal complaint because they don’t want to admit it was an illegal adoption,” Rodríguez said.

Although there are reports of illegal adoptions as early as the 1950s, the peak occurred during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

“In Chile, there was a state policy, but it was not directly tied to political repression as it was in Argentina, where women had their children taken while they were detained,” she said.

She added that documents show many children were sent to public childcare centers because their mothers were poor. But as those institutions struggled financially, the children were sold to families abroad.

Rodriguez said state agents “took part in these crimes and acted systematically in crimes against humanity.”

“We are talking about the forced disappearance of children. The state must apologize to the mothers and the children — and it must do so quickly, because the mothers are dying,” she said. “I have mothers who are 88 years old, and some have already passed away. They did not give away or sell their children.”

Chilean courts are investigating possible crimes of irregular adoption, child abduction and other offenses in more than 1,500 complaints.

“In just five months, Judge Aguilar has already detained 15 people and is seeking the extradition of one individual in Israel,” she said.

According to Chile’s judiciary, the investigation has so far concluded that in the 1980s, in the city of San Fernando, a network of lawyers, Catholic priests, members of social organizations, health officials and a judge arranged the adoption of children “whose mothers were poor to foreign couples in exchange for payments that could reach up to $50,000.”

Stacey Solomon was joined by her ex-boyfriend Dean Cox on the latest episode of her BBC series Stacey & Joe, as they celebrated her son Zach’s 17th birthday

Stacey Solomon showed a lovely example of a happy blended family on the latest instalment of her reality TV show as her ex, and father of her eldest son, made a cameo on screen.

The 35-year-old mum-of-five used first-born son Zach’s 17th birthday to recall on the moment she found out she was expecting him at the age is he now and how her loved ones reacted to her teen pregnancy.

The BBC One series, Stacey & Joe, which also stars the Loose Women star’s husband Joe Swash, follows the happy couple and their busy lives. Stacey shares her three youngest children, daughters Rose, three, and Belle, two, and son Rex, six, with the former EastEnders actor.

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Stacey, who discovered she was expecting her first child at the age of 17, also shares Zach with ex boyfriend Dean Cox, and 12-year-old Leighton with former fiancé Aaron Barnham.

On Tuesday night’s episode of Stacey & Joe, the pair invited Dean into their home to mark Zach turning 17. As the blended family enjoyed fish and chips they looked back on when Stacey discovered she was pregnant at the same age Zach had just reached.

When asked how old he was at the time, Dean responded: “I was just 18.” Speaking about learning she was set to become a teenage mum when she was 17, Stacey recalled: “My step-mum was the first person who knew I was pregnant, because she guessed it.

“We were at a cafe, me, her and my dad, and I was like, ‘oh, my God, your onions stink, Dad’. And he didn’t even have any onions. Someone, like, at the other end of the cafe had onions, and I remember her pulling me to the side and being like, ‘When was the last time you had a period?’ I was like, ‘I don’t know.'”.

“She immediately made me tell my dad straight away. And then my dad made me ring my mum, and then everyone else that was in the house, Jemma, Matthew, everyone, my brothers and sisters, were all there to hear the fallout.”

Tuesday night’s instalment of Stacey & Joe was actually filmed back in March, coinciding with Zach’s real birthday. The doting mum took to Instagram at the time to celebrate her son’s 17th birthday with an emotional tribute to her first-born.

Stacey has previously spoken about the ‘rocky road’ she and husband Joe faced when blending their families. In addition to Stacey’s two older children from previous relationships, Joe shares his eldest child Harry, 16, with ex-partner Emma Sophocleous.

“The blended family situation has been a rocky road,” Stacey admitted on the Parenting Hell podcast in 2022. “That has never been easy. We have always had to work really hard to make sure everyone feels secure.”

She went on to reveal how wedding a few months earlier, where her and Joe’s four eldest son’s made speeches, made her feel more reassured about her blended family and confessed the kind words from their children left her in floods of tears.

“It was so funny we didn’t say to the boys you need to do a speech,” she recalled, before adding: “Joe was an emotional mess the whole day. People coming up to me saying ‘Joe is a mess down there’.”

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Sept. 23 (UPI) — Human rights activist Alaa Abdel Fattah was reunited with his family late Monday, after more than five years’ imprisonment, according to his family and supporting organizations.

Fattah, who holds both British and Egyptian citizenship, has spent a collective of more than 10 years behind Egyptian bars and was widely considered the Middle Eastern country’s most prominent political prisoner.

Fattah, along with five others, received pardons from President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi on Monday, according to state media.

Mona Seif, one of Fattah’s two sisters, took to X to broadcast updates on the situation, starting with hearing the news, then preparing to leave work and finally posting pictures of her brother embracing family members.

“An exceptionally kind day,” she said. “Alaa is free.”

Reporters Without Borders, which has campaigned for his release, said in a statement that Fattah was reunited with his mother, Laila Soueif, and other sister Sanaa Seif late Monday.

“We are deeply relieved to see Alaa Abdel Fattah finally walk free,” Fiona O’Brien, RSF UK director, said in a statement.

“What he and his family have been through is unimaginable: he should never have gone to prison, and his family should never have had to mount a years-long international campaign to free him. His pardon and release must mark a definitive end to their ordeal and, after so many lost years, he must be allowed to travel to the United Kingdom to be reunited with his son Khaled.”

Fattah, who rose to international recognition during the 2011 Egyptian revolution, has been repeatedly arrested in Egypt over the years.

In 2013, three months after el-Sisi’s coup, he was arrested, charged with the organization of a protest and then sentenced to five years behind bars.

He was released in 2019, but was then arrested shortly afterward.

He was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison in 2021 on the charges of “spreading false news,” according to the U.S. State Department. Reporters Without Borders said he was charged with an arbitrary offense of spreading false news for sharing a Facebook post about torture in Egyptian prisons.

The Free Alaa website states his sentence was to have ended last September of last year but he was still detained by the authorities.

His detainment was deemed arbitrary and in breach of International law by the the United Nations Working Group.

“Alaa Abdel Fattah is a prisoner of conscience who was targeted for his peaceful activism,” Erika Guevara Rosas, Amnesty International’s senior director for research, advocacy, policy and campaigns, said in a statement.

“His pardon will not erase the ordeal he has endured in detention over the past six years. The Egyptian authorities should follow up on today’s decision by releasing all those solely detained for exercising their human rights and allowing them to reunite with their loved ones.”