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Group of 27 Congress members call for release of Mohammed Ibrahim, 16, held in Israeli detention for eight months.

A group of United States lawmakers have urged the Trump administration to secure the release of a 16-year-old Palestinian American who has been held in Israeli detention centres for eight months.

In a letter sent to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, 27 members of the US Congress called for the release of Mohammed Ibrahim amid reports that he faces abusive conditions in detention.

“As we have been told repeatedly, ‘the Department of State has no higher priority than the safety and security of US citizens abroad,’” the letter, signed by figures such as Senators Bernie Sanders and Chris Von Hollen, states. “We share that view and urge you to fulfil this responsibility by engaging the Israeli government directly to secure the swift release of this American boy.”

Mohammed’s detention, which has now lasted for more than eight months, has underscored the harsh conditions faced by Palestinians held in Israeli prisons with little legal recourse.

“His family has received updates from US embassy staff and former detainees who described his alarming weight loss, deteriorating health, and signs of torture as his court hearings continue to be routinely postponed,” the letter said.

Analysts and rights advocates also say the case is demonstrative of a general apathy towards the plight of Palestinian Americans by the US government, which is quick to offer support to Israeli Americans who find themselves in harm’s way but slow to respond to instances of violence or abuse against Palestinians with US citizenship.

“The contrast has been made clear: The US government simply does not care about Palestinians with US citizenship who are killed or unjustly detained by Israel,” Yousef Munayyer, head of the Palestine/Israel programme at the Arab Center Washington DC, told Al Jazeera.

During his time in prison, Mohammed’s 20-year-old cousin, Sayfollah Musallet, was beaten to death by Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank. US Ambassador Huckabee called for the Israeli government to “aggressively investigate” the murder, but no arrests have been made thus far, and Israeli settlers who carry out violent attacks against Palestinian communities rarely face consequences.

Musallet’s family have called for the Trump administration to launch its own independent investigation.

“Our government is not unaware of these cases. They are themselves complicit,” said Munayyer. “In many cases where Palestinian Americans have been killed, the government does nothing. This is not unique to the Trump administration.”

In testimony obtained by the rights group Defense for Children International – Palestine (DCIP), Mohammed said that he was beaten with rifle butts as he was being transported and has been held in a cold cell with inadequate food. DCIP states that he has lost a “considerable amount of weight” since his arrest in February.

Israeli authorities have alleged that Mohammed, 15 years old at the time of his initial detention, threw stones at Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank. He has not had a trial and denies the charge, and the letter from US lawmakers states that “no evidence has been publicly provided to support this allegation”.

Charges of stone throwing are widely used by Israeli authorities against Palestinian children in the occupied West Bank, where Israeli facilities are notorious for their mistreatment of detainees.

A DCIP investigation into the detention of Palestinian children in the occupied West Bank found that about 75 percent described being subjected to physical violence following their arrest and that 85.5 percent were not informed of the reason for their arrest.

“The abuse and imprisonment of an American teenager by any other foreign power should be met with outrage and decisive action by our government,” the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said in a statement about the case.

“The Trump administration must be America and American citizens first, and secure the release of Mohammed Ibrahim from Israel immediately. This 16-year-old from Florida belongs at home, safe with his family – not in Israeli military prisons notorious for human rights abuses.”

A few months ago, my younger daughter, Darby, and I were settling into our seats at the local AMC. As the previews rolled, she gasped. “I know that voice,” she said. “That’s Aidan. Mom, that’s Aidan.”

I looked up just in time to see a familiar shock of brown curls. It was indeed Aidan Delbis, former member of the Falcon Players at Crescenta Valley High School in La Crescenta, a kid I had seen perform alongside my daughter in countless student plays.

Only now he was seated at a kitchen table with Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone as the words “Bugonia” and then “directed by Yorgos Lanthimos” flashed across the screen.

“Did you not know?” I asked my daughter. CV is a fine public school with a good theater program, but it isn’t exactly an incubator for nepo babies and aspiring stars. That one of their own had stepped off last year’s graduation stage and into a major film production should have been very big news long before a trailer hit theaters.

“No,” she said, furiously messaging various friends. “But now they will.”

Now they will indeed. When he joined the cast of “Bugonia,” Delbis didn’t just become a part of Lanthimos’ highly anticipated remake of Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 black comedy “Save the Green Planet!” He also entered the mythology of which Hollywood dreams are made: A 17-year old sends in his first-ever open-call submission and lands a major role in a very big movie.

With a script by Will Tracy and obvious Oscar potential, “Bugonia” had its world premiere in August at this year’s Venice Film Festival before launching onto the festival circuit, including screenings in Toronto and New York, in preparation for its release this Friday. A slightly absurdist, darkly funny thriller with political undertones, it revolves around the kidnapping of a pharmaceutical company’s CEO, Michelle (Stone), by wild-eyed conspiracy theorist Teddy (Plemons) and his loyal cousin Don (Delbis).

From left, Emma Stone, Aidan Delbis and Jesse Plemons in the movie “Bugonia.”

(Atsushi Nishijima / Focus Features)

Teddy believes Michelle is an alien sent to destroy Earth. Don believes in Teddy. Though he falls in with Teddy’s plans, he often questions them, serving as a continual reminder that even within Teddy’s paranoid view of the universe, there is such a thing as going too far. Don is, in many ways, the heart of the film.

He is also, like the actor who plays him, autistic.

Delbis — who chooses to self-describe as autistic rather than neurodivergent — is not someone who has long nursed dreams of stardom. He took drama classes all through high school, but it wasn’t until his junior year, Delbis says, “that I started to get more into the process. I found the general process of acting, of understanding and investing in different personalities, to be fun and sometimes scary.”

Still, he says, “I wasn’t really sure that I wanted it to be my main career. But it so happened that this happened while I was in high school, and here we are.”

Here is the Four Seasons on a very rainy October afternoon where Delbis, now 19, has just finished his first solo photo shoot and is sitting, fortified by Goldfish crackers (his go-to-snack), for his first long one-on-one interview. He went to some of the film festivals and just returned from “Bugonia’s” London premiere, where he signed autographs on the red carpet and enjoyed flying first class. His parents, Katy and David Delbis, are seated nearby, as is his access and creative coach, Elaine Hall.

Delbis is a tall, good-natured young man who speaks with a distinctive cadence and in an unwaveringly calm tone. Aside from a habit of repeating himself as he searches for what he wants to say next, he seems more comfortable discussing his experience with filmmaking than many of the dozens of more experienced actors I have interviewed in this very hotel over the years.

“We should try to be more empathetic to people with different worldviews because you never really know what those people are going through,” Delbis says. “The movie feels very relevant to that theme.”

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

“It all started,” he says, “when my mom was friends with this agent, April, and one day she sent Mom an audition that seemed pretty promising, so I submitted for that. And they really liked it and called me back.”

It actually started a bit further back than that. With Plemons and Stone already cast, Lanthimos had decided that he wanted a nonprofessional actor to play Don.

“We went really wide in trying to find someone really special,” the Greek-born director of “The Favourite” and “Poor Things” says in a phone interview. “With these two experienced actors, I wanted to bring in a different dynamic. As we looked at people, I felt that the character would be more interesting if he was neurodivergent.”

Casting director Jennifer Venditti put out an open call, which April Smallwood of Spotlight Development saw and sent to Delbis’ mother, Katy.

“A happy-go-lucky young man, neurodivergent — it practically described Aidan,” Katy says in a later interview. La Crescenta may not be an industry hub, but, like many in L.A., the Delbis family has a Hollywood connection. Aidan’s older brother, Tristan (who is also neurodivergent), works at a movie theater; father David is about to retire after years at the Writers Guild Health Fund; and Katy, a self-described “creative,” has done some acting herself. But no one saw film-acting as a potential career for Aidan, who was set to take a gap year after high school. And, Katy says, she had no idea what sort of movie it was for. “It said for a ‘big film,’ but they always say that.”

She thought of it a bit like the time Delbis, a member of the high school track team, decided he also wanted to try out for basketball. “As I drove him to the school,” Katy said, “I told him that he might not get on since there were a lot of kids who had been playing basketball for years, which he had not. He said, ‘Mom, I just want to see what it’s like.’”

Now Delbis wanted to see what it would be like to audition for a “big film.”

Aidan Delbis in the movie “Bugonia.”

(Atsushi Nishijima / Focus Features)

He had recently performed the Vincent Price monologue from “Thriller” for the school talent show, which Katy filmed on her phone, so Smallwood submitted that. Venditti called Smallwood the next day and met with Delbis over Zoom. Thus began a monthslong process of meetings, rehearsals and auditions.

“We focused on him right away,” Venditti says. “He seemed to have it all. And he was very committed.”

“I was really unaware of how big a project it was,” Delbis said. “I had never seen a film by Yorgos.”

In March, Lanthimos, Stone and Plemons were in L.A. for the Oscars, so they all met with Delbis and came away impressed.

Lanthimos thought of casting a neurodivergent actor in a part because it would bring a natural clarity and unfiltered unpredictability to the role. He didn’t consider it any more challenging than working with any other actor. And when he met Delbis, Lanthimos says, “I just thought: That’s him.”

“Just from watching that first tape, you could see there was something so magnetic about him,” said Stone during a recent phone interview. (She is also a producer on the film.) “Don is the audience’s window, the one who can see through the charade.”

Still, there were many more steps to take.

“It’s a big leap for any nonprofessional,” Stone says. “It’s a big part in what is essentially a three-hander.”

From left, director Yorgos Lanthimos, Emma Stone, Aidan Delbis and Jesse Plemons at the Venice Film Festival, where “Bugonia” had its world premiere in August.

(Alessandra Tarantino / Invision / AP)

For an autistic actor, it’s an even bigger leap. As talented as Delbis might be, he also had to be able to handle the pressures, boredom and chaos of a film set. Venditti reached out to Hall. The founder of the Miracle Project and mother to a now-adult neurodivergent son, Hall is an acting coach who has worked for more than 20 years to increase the presence and understanding of neurodivergent and disabled people. She is often asked to gauge the ability of actors to take on a certain role — their ease with the material, their physical stamina, their level of independence and their emotional accessibility.

Delbis, she says, ticked all the boxes. He loves horror films, he was on the track team and he was, at the time, about to travel without his parents on a school trip to Sweden.

He is, as he says himself, “a low-key guy,” so Hall gave him some exercises to help him portray more extreme emotions and prepare him for when other cast members might do the same. (One subsequent rehearsal involved a scene in which one of the actors screamed repeatedly.)

Often, Hall says, perfecting these exercises can take weeks; Delbis, working with his mother, did it in a weekend. She also helped him prepare for his meeting with and then chemistry read with Plemons.

Delbis says he was “a bit nervous, though I don’t know why.” He did not recognize Plemons’ name or his face. “I had watched ‘Breaking Bad,’ but I didn’t realize Jesse played Todd. Halfway through [the read], I told him he looked like Todd and he said, ‘That’s because I played him.’ I’ve seen him in other things since then,” Delbis adds. “He’s a very solid actor.”

More important, he says, “Jesse seemed to me to be a very cool guy.”

That feeling is mutual. “When we brought Aidan in, I was excited and a little nervous,” Plemons says during a phone call from London. They started with one of the more extreme scenes from the film. “I was finding my feet too. When it became apparent that he was going to be fine with the darker scenes, I said, ‘This is him; this is Don.’”

While all this was happening, Delbis was finishing his senior year, which included a starring role in a production of “Almost Maine.” “It was not overly hard,” he says, but sometimes it was a lot. “I did one read and then I had to go to rehearsal for the play.”

Venditti remembers that day very well. “Here we were being so careful, treating him like he was fragile and not wanting to overload him,” she says laughing, “and he’s just calmly multitasking.”

When Delbis got the role in May, he and his family signed a nondisclosure agreement, which is why none of his friends knew his news after graduation, and Delbis and his family flew to the U.K. to begin filming. It was a tough secret for his parents to keep. But “any time it looked like I might slip,” Katy says, “Aidan shut me down.” He celebrated his 18th birthday near the set outside of Windsor, where production ran for three months before moving for two weeks in Atlanta.

Hall was hired to be Delbis’ on-set access and creative coach, a job she believes she has invented, meant to make the experience for neurodivergent and disabled actors easier. She suggested that Lanthimos and Tracy simplify Delbis’ script pages, stripping down the description of action “so he wouldn’t get stuck thinking he had to do exactly what was on the page,” she says, which they were happy to do.

“We didn’t want to put any limits on him,” Lanthimos says.

Delbis chose most of his costumes (except a beekeeping suit, motivated by the plot, which he says “was very hot”), which mirrored his own wardrobe preferences down to the horror film t-shirts and mismatched socks. Even the food Teddy and Don eat during the film reflects Delbis’ taste: mac ’n’ cheese, taquitos, spaghetti.

Hall ensured Delbis had extra time before filming, during which she could help him prepare with rehearsal and centering exercises. She visited the set before he arrived so she could tell him exactly what to expect and worked with the production team to ensure that he had his own space between takes. “They built us a little house, with horror posters on the wall and stuffed animals that looked like his cats,” she says. As there were no Goldfish available in the U.K., the production had them flown in.

“Having Elaine there was amazing,” Venditti says. “The idea of having someone to act as eyes and ears of what people are actually experiencing on set, I think it’s groundbreaking. I don’t know why we haven’t done it before.”

Delbis spent a fair amount of time with Plemons, who Hall said occasionally stepped in to help if she had to be away from set.

“We did a decent amount of goofing around,” Delbis says. “The bond that developed between us occurred quite naturally. I consider Jesse a friend.”

For his part, Plemons enjoyed being around someone who spoke his mind.

“I so appreciated Aidan’s inability to tell a lie,” Plemons says. “On a set, you spend so much time waiting around, and he would say, ‘What are we doing? What is taking so long?’ Which was exactly what I was thinking. He’s a very smart, sensitive, self-assured guy, and if you’re unclear in what you’re saying, he will let you know.”

“Aidan is just so funny,” says his “Bugonia” co-star Emma Stone. “We spent a lot of time together in a basement and Aidan had so many jokes about that.”

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Stone says that while she and Delbis had a friendly rapport, she hung back a little when they weren’t shooting. “I didn’t want to form the same kind of bond Aidan had with Jesse because [in the film] it’s them against me and I didn’t want to do too much to mess with that.”

But, the two-time Oscar winner says, “Aidan is just so funny. He was on a jag during the kidnapping scene. We spent a lot of time together in a basement and Aidan had so many jokes about that.”

“I went through all of ‘Bugonia’ thinking I had never seen Emma in anything,” Delbis says. “Then I realized my parents had shown me a clip of a woman getting very involved in a birthday card — ‘Pocketful of Sunshine’ — and that was from ‘Easy A.’”

When he was filming, Delbis was all business. Several of the takes which he ad-libbed made it into the film and Delbis is proud of that.

“Despite being in more extreme situations than I’ve been in, there’s something of Don’s emotion and struggles that did feel very familiar to me,” he says. “Feelings of great distress and helplessness and conflictedness and confusion. I have felt that in classes in high school.”

“Aidan has great instincts,” Lanthimos says. “In a scene toward the end [of the film], he was so moving, it was the first time I have ever teared up on set.

There were difficult days — one moment with Plemons, Delbis says, took many takes. “It was hot AF and involved me getting more worked up that I am used to getting,” he remembers. But he appreciated Lanthimos’ willingness to let him try things. “In one scene, Jesse throws a chair and I thought that seemed pretty cool. So at the end of the day, they let me throw a chair. I hope that makes it into the outtakes reel.”

He was also very pleased when the crew threw him a s’mores party at the end of filming. “There was a fire pit on set that looked perfect for s’mores,” he says. “And I told them that, so it was my idea to have a s’mores party.”

Delbis is happy with how the film turned out, including his performance. “I think I looked pretty baller in that suit,” he says of one scene. Though he doesn’t have an opinion on the authenticity debate — whether autistic actors should always be the ones to play autistic characters — he thinks it’s “cool that writers and directors are starting to be more conscientious and give more realistic and respectful depictions of neurodivergent people and characters.”

He is more concerned that audiences understand what he thinks is the most important message of the movie.

“We should try to be more empathetic to people with different worldviews because you never really know what those people are going through,” he says. “The movie feels very relevant to that theme. God knows, people aren’t always willing to be tolerant.”

A judge on Tuesday blocked the Trump administration from requiring recipients of federal teen pregnancy prevention grants to comply with the president’s orders aimed at curtailing “radical indoctrination” and “gender ideology.”

The ruling is a victory for three Planned Parenthood affiliates — in California, Iowa and New York — that sued to try to block enforcement of a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services policy document issued in July that they contend contradicts the requirements of the grants as established by Congress.

U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell, who was appointed to the bench by former President Obama, blasted the administration’s policy change in her written ruling, saying it was “motivated solely by political concerns, devoid of any considered process or analysis, and ignorant of the statutory emphasis on evidence-based programming.”

The policy requiring changes to the pregnancy prevention program was part of the fallout from a series of executive orders Trump signed starting in his first day back in the White House aimed at rolling back recognition of LGBTQ+ people and diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.

In the policy, the administration objected to teaching that promotes same-sex marriage and that “normalizes, or promotes sexual activity for minors.”

The Planned Parenthood affiliates argued that the new directives were at odds with the requirements of the program — and that they were so vague it wasn’t clear what needed to be done to follow them.

Howell agreed.

The decision applies not only to the handful of Planned Parenthood groups among the dozens of recipients of the funding, but also to nonprofit groups, city and county health departments, Native American tribes and universities that received grants.

The Health and Human Services Department, which oversees the program, declined to comment on Tuesday’s ruling. It previously said the guidance for the program “ensures that taxpayer dollars no longer support content that undermines parental rights, promotes radical gender ideology, or exposes children to sexually explicit material under the banner of public health.”

Mulvihill writes for the Associated Press.

A TEENAGE girl, 17, was reportedly raped by a stranger in broad daylight as cops launch a manhunt.

The alleged attack unfolded in the village of Hassocks, in West Sussex, between 6pm and 7.30pm on Thursday.

The victim claimed to be approached in Keymer Road, near the junctions with Parklands Road and Grand Avenue.

Detective Inspector Debbie Birch, leading the investigation, said: “We are supporting the victim as we actively carry out detailed enquiries, which include CCTV and house to house enquiries.”

DI Birch added: “We have increased our police presence in the village while we investigate, and we are carrying out additional high visibility patrols for reassurance.

“Anyone who has any concerns is urged to stop and talk to officers.

“If you were in the area and noticed anything suspicious or have information that may assist us, we ask you to contact police or on 101, and quote Operation Insight.

“We will provide updates about the investigation when possible.”

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A TEENAGER has been shot and killed in a tragic accident while squirrel hunting.

Carson Ryan, 17, was on a hunting trip when he was shot by a fellow hunter in Iowa on Saturday.

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The Washington teen was “mistaken for a squirrel by a member of his hunting party”, according to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.

“[He was] struck in the back of the head”, a spokesperson said.

“Carson was transported to UI Health Care Medical Center, where he later died from his injuries,” the spokesperson added.

An investigation into the incident is ongoing.

Carson was in his final year at Washington High School and a player on the varsity football team.

In a tribute Facebook post, the Washington Boy’s Track and Field team said their “hearts are broken”.

“[We] ask you to keep Carson’s mom, family, classmates and teammates in your hearts as we navigate the devastating loss of Carson,” the post read.

A vigil was held for Carson on Saturday evening, hosted by the secondary school to honour their former pupil.

Assistant football coach Nic Williams said: “Carson was a fierce competitor in everything he did”.

“He loved fishing. He loved being with his friends. But more importantly, Carson was a person of incredible faith,” he said.

The heart breaking accident has added fuel to the fire of the ongoing debate surrounding gun laws and young people in the US.

Carson’s shock death comes as the New York Police Department revealed that a 13-year-old boy had been declared brain dead after being shot in the head on his way to school.

Just last week a mass shooting at a church in Michigan also claimed four lives and left eight survivors injured.

The gunman, Thomas Jacob Sanford, 40, ploughed his car into the church before unleashing gunfire on worshippers inside.

The singer D4vd called off a series of upcoming tour dates, including a concert this weekend at Los Angeles’ Greek Theatre, as police investigate his connection to the death of a teenage Inland Empire girl whose decomposed body was discovered this month in a car registered to the musician.

A representative for the Greek said the show, which was scheduled for Saturday night, had been canceled. Other tour dates in San Francisco and in Europe had either been removed from or were listed as canceled on Ticketmaster’s website by Friday afternoon.

An event at L.A.’s Grammy Museum scheduled for Wednesday — in which D4vd planned to perform and to take part in a conversation about his work — has also been called off. A representative for D4vd didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Last week, D4vd, 20, announced that he would release a deluxe edition of his 2025 album, “Withered,” on Friday, but the project hadn’t appeared on streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music by Friday morning.

Police are investigating the singer’s ties to Celeste Rivas, who was reported missing in April 2024 and whose whereabouts were a mystery until this week, when authorities identified her remains after they found a body in the trunk of a Tesla in a Hollywood tow lot on Sept. 8.

A TEENAGER who was mauled by a shark recalled the terrifying moment she “raised her arm out of the water and saw she had no hand”.

Lulu Gribbin, 15, was enjoying a beach day in Florida last summer when she lost her arm and leg in the brutal attack.

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She and her family had heard speculation that a shark was in the sea by the beach they were at in Walton County, northwest Florida.

But it wasn’t until the teen saw “a shadow” in the water that panic set in.

She told ABC News: “I never saw a tail or a fin. I never saw its eyes.”

After spotting a “glimpse” of the shark’s body, she initially started swimming as fast as she could.

But after recalling advice she had heard in a movie, she stopped – thinking her frantic movements would encourage the shark to chase her.

It was then that her life would drastically change forever.

She said: “I told everyone to just calm down…and the next thing I know is that I raised my hand out of the water and there just was no hand there.”

Lulu was rushed to the shore where her twin sister, Ellie, sat by her side, keeping her calm and ensuring she remained conscious until paramedics arrived.

Meanwhile, doctors on the beach wrapped a tourniquet around Lulu’s injuries.

Her mom, Ann Blair Gribbin, said she rushed to the beach when her daughter didn’t pick up her phone.

Comparing her child’s injuries to something out of a movie, she said she found her “lifeless” with her “eyes closed, and her mouth white and pale”.

She said: “All I could say was, ‘Just keep breathing. Please keep breathing. God, please let her keep breathing.

“We didn’t know anything, no idea if she was alive.”

The teen was then airlifted to a Pensacola hospital where she underwent multiple surgeries leading to her leg and arm being amputated.

Doctors said she had also lost around two-thirds of the blood in her body.

Following the horror incident, her mom paid tribute to the doctors who saved Lulu’s life.

She also described her daughter as a “miracle” admitting the family’s life will “be forever changed”.

Ann said: “At this point, we will have multiple surgeries in the days to come and our lives will be forever changed.

“She is truly a miracle.  We have a long road ahead and our journey is just beginning!”

MULTIPLE ATTACKS

Lulu wasn’t the only victim that day.

According to the teen, there was another shark attack just 90 minutes before just a few miles down the coast.

She said: “If I wouldn’t known about this, I wouldn’t have been in the water”.

Lulu’s friend McCray was also bitten on her foot, and officials suspect the same beast attacked three other people.

This spate of maulings were the first in the county for three years, with the last fatality recorded in Walton County in 2005.

Cops in the area, however, stressed that sharks are always present in the Gulf.

Officers previously said: “Swimmers and beachgoers should be cautious when swimming and stay aware of their surroundings”.

Her brutal attack comes as a little boy was mercilessly savaged off the Florida coast by a blacktip shark earlier this month.

The blacktip shark rushed Richard Burrows, his sister Rose, and his dad, David, as they snorkeled at Horseshoe Reef, about four miles off Key Largo, at around 3 pm on September 1.

Richard was bitten above his right knee and on his arm, leaving him gushing blood in the water as his dad and sister scrambled to help.

David quickly applied a tourniquet to Richard’s leg to stop the bleeding, which doctors later said helped to save his life.

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Kyiv, Ukraine – Evhen Ihnatov was a young teenager when Russian forces occupied his hometown.

In the eight months of 2022 when the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson was overtaken, his mother was killed and his brother was forcibly held in Russia.

“We buried her in the countryside. Grandma was beside herself,” Ihnatov told Al Jazeera of the tragedy that befell the family when his mother, Tamara, died. He was aged just 13.

On October 6, 2022, Tamara, 54, had boarded a minibus that was ultimately blown to pieces on a bridge by a misdirected Ukrainian missile.

His brother left for a Russian camp on the day she died.

Now 16 and living in Mykolaiv, studying in a college to become a car mechanic and working part time in a pizzeria, Ihnatov has spoken to Al Jazeera about life in occupied Ukraine.

After graduation, he said he might sign a contract with the army.

But that ambition felt impossible when he was living under Russian control, a period he survived with angst, the denial of all things Russian and a sense of dark humour.

Kherson is the administrative capital of the eponymous southern region the size of Belgium, which mostly lies on the left bank of the Dnipro River, which bisects Ukraine.

Russians occupied the region and Kherson city, which sits on the Dnipro’s right bank, in early March 2022 and rolled out in November that year.

According to Ihnatov, other witnesses and rights groups, Ukrainians were mistreated, assaulted, abducted and tortured from day one. Russia regularly denies intentionally harming civilians.

“They beat people, a real lot,” Ihnatov said. “Those who really stood up are no more.”

A former Ukrainian serviceman he knew was assaulted so violently that he spent a week in an intensive care unit, Ihnatov said.

In the first weeks of occupation, Kherson city was rocked by protest rallies as Ukrainians tried to resist the new rulers. Moscow-appointed authorities soon packed hundreds of people into prisons or basements in large buildings.

“Detained for minor or imaginary transgressions, they were kept for months and used for forced labour or sexual violence,” Nikolay Mitrokhin, a historian with Germany’s Bremen University, told Al Jazeera.

Survivors have said they were forced to dig trenches, clean streets, trim trees and bushes, and haul garbage.

At least 17 women and men were raped by Russian soldiers, Andriy Kostin, Ukraine’s prosecutor general at the time, said in May 2023.

Rallies stopped because of the crackdown, but most of the locals remained pro-Ukrainian, Ihnatov believes. He said the fewer pro-Russian locals were mostly elderly and nostalgic about their Soviet-era youth, attracted to the idea of Russia because of Moscow’s promises of higher pensions.

But to him, the Russian soldiers did not look like “liberators”.

He said many drank heavily and sported prison tattoos. In July 2022, the Wagner mercenary group began recruiting tens of thousands of inmates from Russian prisons with promises of presidential pardons and high pay.

“They look at you like you’re meat, like you’re chicken,” Ihnatov said.

He said ethnic Russian soldiers or ethnic Ukrainians from the separatist region of Donbas in the east whom he saw several times a day on patrols or just moving around were often hostile towards Ukrainian teenagers. Ethnic Chechens were more relaxed and gave them sweets or food, he said.

Fearful of Russian forces, the Ihnatovs – Evhen’s seven siblings and their single, disabled mother who occasionally worked as a seamstress – moved to their grandmother’s house outside Kherson. While still occupied, the village was not as heavily patrolled as the city.

There was a cow, some ducks and a kitchen garden, but they were cash-strapped and moved back to the city right in time for the new school year that began on September 1, 2022.

But Russian-appointed authorities were facing an education disaster.

Many teachers had quit to protest against the Moscow-imposed curriculum, and enrolment fell as some parents preferred to take a risk and keep their children in Ukrainian schools online.

A Russian curriculum was introduced in all of Kherson’s 174 public schools, and by August, Russia-appointed officials and masked soldiers began knocking on doors, threatening parents and offering them monthly subsidies of $35 per child who would go to a Russia-run school.

Ihnatov’s eldest sister, Tetiana, enrolled her school-aged siblings.

Students at Ihnatov’s school were herded into the schoolyard to listen to the Russian anthem. But he and his friends “just turned around and went to have a smoke”, he said.

The school was not far from his apartment. He remembered seeing about 50 children staring at Russian flags and coats of arms on the school building.

His class had 22 students. They were surprised by an oversimplified approach of new teachers who treated the students like they knew nothing.

“They explained everything, every little thing,” he said.

Communication between students changed. Their conversations became cautious, and they did not discuss sensitive issues, worried others would overhear them.

“Everything was happening outside the school,” he said.

The new curriculum was taught in Russian and emphasised Russia’s “greatness” while Ukrainian was reduced to two “foreign language” lessons a week.

“Everything was about references to Russia,” Ihnatov said.

However, to his clique, Russia’s efforts appeared half-hearted.

Teachers were more interested in fake reporting and just gave away A’s, he said.

“They didn’t force us to study, couldn’t make us,” he said.

“I’d crank up the music in my earphones, didn’t care about what they were saying, because anyway I’d get an A. We got good grades for nothing. They wanted to show that everyone studies well,” he said.

Only his history teacher would confront his group of friends while “the rest were scared,” he said.

Their rebelliousness could have cost them more than reprimands had Russians stayed in Kherson longer, according to observers.

“What they did only worked because the occupation was short term. Had the occupation gone on, the screws would have gotten tighter,” Victoria Novikova, a senior researcher with The Reckoning Project, a global team of journalists and lawyers documenting, publicising and building cases of Russia’s alleged war crimes in Ukraine, told Al Jazeera.

After school, Ihnatov took odd jobs in grocery shops or the city market and hung out with his friends.

Ukraine ‘never existed’

The new teachers paid special attention to history classes. Instructors from Russia or annexed Crimea were promised as much as $130 a day for teaching in Kherson, the RBK-Ukraine news website reported.

New textbooks “proved” that Ukraine was an “artificial state” whose statehood “never existed” before the 1991 Soviet collapse.

The erasure of Ukrainian identity went hand in hand with the alleged plunder of cultural riches.

Russians robbed the giant Kherson regional library of first editions of Ukrainian classics and other valuable folios and works of art after the building was repeatedly shelled and staffers were denied entry, its director said.

“My eyes don’t want to see it. My heart doesn’t want to accept it,” Nadiya Korotun told Al Jazeera.

Meanwhile, thousands of children in occupied areas were reportedly taken to summer camps in Crimea or Russia – and never came back as part of what Kyiv calls a campaign of abduction and brainwashing.

Kyiv has accused Moscow of forcibly taking 20,000 Ukrainian children away and placing them in foster families or orphanages.

In 2023, The Hague-based International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin for the “unlawful deportation and transfer of children”.

Some of the abducted kids “broke”, a presidential adviser on children’s rights said.

“They are really maximally broken. Russians do absolutely everything to achieve that,” Daria Herasymchuk told Al Jazeera. “There were cases of Stockholm syndrome when [the abducted children] became Russian patriots.”

Ihnatov’s elder brother Vlad, 16 at the time, was among those who went to a camp – and was forcibly kept in Russia for a year until his sister travelled there to get him back.

In an unfortunate twist of fate, he had left for the camp hours before his mother was killed.

He was transported to a summer camp on Russia’s Black Sea coast and then transferred to the city of Yevpatoria in annexed Crimea, where he continued school – and was not allowed to return home.

His sister Tetiana travelled there to spend a week in a “basement” while Russian security officers “checked her”, Ihnatov said.

They returned to Ukraine via Belarus and Poland and “don’t talk much” about the experience, he said.

A month after his mother’s death, Moscow decided to withdraw its forces from Kherson city and the region’s right-bank area.

Ukrainian forces were greeted like long-lost family.

“The liberation was about nothing but joy, freedom and joy,” Ihnatov said.

But Russians holed up on the left bank and began shelling the city and flying drones to hunt down civilians.

“In a week or two, the cruellest shelling began. And then – fear,” Ihnatov said.

His sister decided to relocate the family to the Kyiv-controlled city of Mykolaiv, where they live in a rented three-bedroom apartment.

On the night Los Angeles police claim he carried out an act of gangland vengeance, Oscar Eagle could barely walk.

In March 1998, Eagle was only 17 and using crutches to get around after he was wounded in a drive-by shooting. The bullet is still in his leg to this day, marked by a coin-shaped indentation on his calf.

At the same time that police allege Eagle opened fire on an 18th Street gang member in an act of retribution, he says he was at an East L.A. hospital because a friend’s cousin was giving birth, according to court records.

Oscar Eagle in his childhood neighborhood of Pico-Union in 1996.

(Courtesy of Megan Baca)

Eagle knew he was innocent. Witnesses placed him at the hospital and he said medical records could prove he wasn’t mobile enough to carry out the crime.

But a combination of dubious legal representation and an arrest made by members of a notoriously corrupt unit in the Los Angeles Police Department saw Eagle sentenced to 25-years-to-life in prison.

In July, a judge granted a joint motion from the California Innocence Project and the L.A. County district attorney’s office to vacate Eagle’s conviction, citing ineffective assistance of counsel and questions about the behavior of LAPD detectives on the case.

For reform advocates, Eagle’s case epitomizes the problem with prosecuting teens as adults, but it also marks a positive sign for the L.A. County district attorney’s office’s conviction review unit under Nathan Hochman, who personally appeared at the hearing where Eagle was set free.

“This is what I’ve been dreaming of every day,” a tearful Eagle, 45, said during an interview in late July.

Pelican Bay State Prison in Crescent City, California is surrounded by razor wire, tall fences and towers manned by guards with rifles.

(Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)

Formed in 2015 and expanded under former Dist. Atty. George Gascón, Hochman has shown a continued commitment to the conviction review unit. After facing criticism for recording just four exonerations from 2015 to 2020, the unit has been involved in 12 in just the last four years, according to a district attorney’s office spokesperson.

“I think that a D.A. sends a strong message when you appear in court, that it’s both a case of serious concern to the D.A.’s office, and it’s one where you want to see justice done,” Hochman said.

Seeing L.A. County’s top prosecutor personally endorse his release is a stark turnaround for Eagle, who spent most of his life believing police would do anything to keep him behind bars.

After entering California’s adult prison system as a teenager, Eagle said he watched a friend die in a riot at Pelican Bay. He spent years in isolation after he says he was erroneously connected to the Mexican Mafia. Both of his parents died while Eagle was locked up, and he can’t even mention their names without tearing up to this day.

Eagle said he grew up in a section of Pico-Union where all his neighbors were affiliated with a local gang set, the Burlington Locos. A young tagger who went by “Clown,” he too wound up part of the crew.

In the late 1990s, Eagle became a target of detectives with an infamous LAPD unit known as C.R.A.S.H., short for Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums.

At the time, the LAPD’s Rampart division was home to C.R.A.S.H. officers who falsified reports and framed civilians, later triggering a scandal that ended with the U.S. Department of Justice placing the LAPD under a consent decree.

Officers watch from inside the front entrance of the LAPD’s Rampart Station in the Westlake district in 2010 as protesters demonstrate outside against police brutality.

(Reed Saxon / Associated Press)

Eagle says that in 1996 he was wrongfully arrested for gun possession as a juvenile by Rafael Perez, the central figure of the Rampart scandal. Perez later admitted the report that led to Eagle’s first arrest was falsified, according to court records.

But it was Eagle’s next run-in with police that proved far more consequential.

In March 1998, 18th Street Gang member Benjamin Urias was shot twice on Burlington Avenue in what police believed to be retribution for a prior attack on a Burlington Locos member, court records show. Urias, who was hospitalized for two days and released, told police the shooter walked with a limp.

Investigators from a C.R.A.S.H. unit based in Rampart locked onto Eagle, due to his gang connections and the fact that he was said to be walking with a limp after he was injured in a shooting, according to his attorney, Megan Baca, of the California Innocence Project.

Charges against Eagle were initially dismissed after Urias failed to show up for a preliminary hearing. But a month later, LAPD homicide detectives Thomas Murrell and Kenneth Wiseman prodded the shooting victim to pick Eagle out of a photo lineup, according to the motion to vacate his conviction.

Urias initially told police he did not recognize anyone in the lineup, records show.

“OK, circle that guy … Number 4 is the one you were pointing to,” Murrell said to Urias, according to a recording of the interview described in court records.

An LAPD spokesperson declined to comment. The audio recording that called the validity of the identification into question was never raised at Eagle’s trial, according to Baca.

Despite concerns about the behavior of the detectives, Hochman said he was not immediately ordering a review of other cases involving Murrell and Wiseman. Neither Rampart detective was part of a C.R.A.S.H. unit.

Murrell denied any wrongdoing and told The Times he remembered Eagle’s name because the then-teenager was a suspect in multiple gang homicides at the time.

He did not offer specifics, but dismissed Eagle’s medical alibi, contending the teen “wasn’t on crutches” when police arrested him.

“If he made an ID, we didn’t cheat, I can tell you that … I’ve never done that,” said Murrell. “We did everything by the book.”

Attempts to contact Wiseman were unsuccessful.

Eagle said things were only made worse by his former attorney, Patrick Lake, who didn’t make an opening statement at trial or raise any of Eagle’s alibi evidence. When Eagle questioned his lawyer, Lake joked that he was “saving the best for last.”

Oscar Eagle with his defense attorney, Megan Baca of the Innocence Project.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

As Eagle’s family grew frustrated in the gallery, he said his mother passed him a note that simply read “fire him.” Eagle tried to get rid of Lake, but a judge denied his request. Eagle was convicted of murder. And since he was tried as an adult, he faced 25-years-to-life.

Lake did not respond to a request for comment. Baca said she had one conversation with Lake, in which he claimed he didn’t remember Eagle or his case.

At the time, prosecutors in California could directly file charges against teens in adult court, sending hundreds of children every year to adult prisons such as Pelican Bay, where Eagle wound up. That practice has been abolished by a change in state law, but Baca said she’s encountered too many cases where teens had their lives stolen because they were wrongfully convicted and tried as adults.

“It’s egregious, but I think that it happens all the time,” Baca said. “So many of my clients were juveniles and they got adult life.”

Eagle said his stay in prison was long and painful. He spent six years in segregated housing, essentially isolation, after Baca said her client was wrongly labeled as a Mexican Mafia associate. He denied any affiliation with the powerful prison-based syndicate. Eagle said prison officials took a leap in logic to link him to the gang based on a “kite,” or prison note, sent by another inmate.

As he grew older behind bars, Eagle started to read voraciously. His father sent recommended books. Eagle says he gravitated toward the Bible.

Oscar Eagle at an L.A. County juvenile detention camp in 1997.

(Courtesy of Megan Baca)

Even though he knew he hadn’t committed the crime that put him in prison, Eagle said he still realized there were things about his life that needed to change.

“I was 30 years old. My perspective started to change. And I started to see this past life that I was living was nonsense,” he said. “I started to have a conscience.”

In 2023, after repeated failures to get his case overturned on appeal, some of Eagle’s friends got the attention of Baca and the California Innocence Project, which worked to bring the case before the conviction review unit. At the same time, Eagle said, he started exchanging letters with an ex-girlfriend from high school, a woman named Monica.

In July, the two squeezed next to each other on Baca’s couch at the lawyer’s Long Beach home, hands interlocked. They’ve since gotten married and are looking to move to Arizona, away from the city and county that nearly took everything away from Eagle.

There’s still a lot for Eagle to get used too — he’s never driven a car, the concept of Uber is still bizarre to him — but Monica says there’s one silver lining to the prison term Eagle never should have served. She wouldn’t have married the guy who was sent away all those years ago.

“He’s a whole new person from when he went in,” she said.

Carlo Acutis, a digital pioneer, used his computer skills to spread Catholic teaching globally.

A London-born Italian teenager, known as “God’s influencer”, who was an early adopter of the internet to spread Catholic teachings, has been made the church’s first millennial saint at a ceremony led by Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican.

Leo canonised Carlo Acutis, who died in 2006 aged 15, in a ceremony attended by thousands on Sunday in St Peter’s Square. At the Mass, the pontiff also canonised Pier Giorgio Frassati, who died in 1924 but was widely recognised for his charitable work.

During a speech at the event, Leo credited Acutis and Frassati for making “masterpieces” out of their lives, warning congregants that the “greatest risk in life is to waste it outside of God’s plan”.

Often seen photographed in his casual outfits, with scruffy hair, T-shirts and sunglasses, Acutis cuts a different figure from the church’s saints of the past who were often depicted in solemn paintings. This has built a global following for Acutis, with the church intending him to be a more relatable saint for digitally-focused young people today.

Leo said Acutis and Frassati’s lives are an “invitation to all of us, especially young people, not to squander our lives, but to direct them upwards and make them masterpieces”.

Acutis was born in London in 1991 but moved early on in his life to the northern Italian city of Milan with his family, where he lived until he died of leukaemia in 2006.

As a teenager, Acutis taught himself coding and programming, using the skills he had acquired to document recognised church miracles to spread Catholic teaching globally. His pioneering digital efforts took place at a time when literacy around those subjects was not widespread.

He was also believed to have regularly attended church services, been kind to the homeless and children who suffered bullying, which endeared him to Catholic youth globally.

Shortly after he died, Antonia Salzano, Acutis’s mother, began advocating globally for her son to be recognised as a saint, which requires that he carry out miracles during his life.

Pope Francis, whose death in April this year led to a delay in the saint-making ceremony for Acutis, said the teenager carried out two miracles during his life. According to the Catholic News Agency, Acutis healed a boy who had a birth defect affecting his pancreas and a girl who sustained an injury in Costa Rica.

In a 2019 letter to Catholics, Pope Francis acknowledged Acutis’s efforts, saying, “It is true that the digital world can expose you to the risk of self-absorption, isolation and empty pleasure.” He added, “But don’t forget that there are young people even there who show creativity and even genius. That was the case with the Venerable Carlo Acutis.”

Acutis’s body, encased in wax, lies in a glass tomb in Assisi, a medieval town in central Italy, which is a pilgrimage site visited by hundreds of thousands of people annually. Our Lady of Dolours Church in London, where he was baptised, has also attracted growing numbers of visitors. A part of his heart has been removed from his body as a relic and has been displayed at churches globally.

A TEENAGER who stabbed a 16-year-old boy to death in a street attack can now be pictured for the first time.

L’Avian Peniston was just 14 when he killed 16-year-old Kennie Carter by stabbing him in the chest in Stretford, Greater Manchester, just over three years ago.

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The teen was found guilty in July last year for the “act of revenge” that killed Kennie.

Manchester Crown Court handed Peniston the equivalent of a life sentence, required to serve a minimum of 17 years in prison.

The boy could not be named due reporting restrictions at the time of the murder case as he was still 16.

However, as he has now turned 18, Peniston can be named for the first time.

This is despite applications to lift reporting restrictions following his conviction, which was rejected by the judge.

Young Kennie was walking home while on the phone to his older brother when Peniston – who was with a group of boys – pounced on him.

The boys had travelled three miles ‘looking for revenge’ after an argument with Kennie’s friends the day before.

Four teens reportedly travelled by tram to the block of flats they knew Kennie and his friends typically hang out.

They stole three bikes, where a witness heard them shout: “This is revenge.”

Kennie was inside the block of flats and headed home after hearing the boys were nearby, but passed by them on the road.

One of the boys in the group was heard shouting to Kennie: “You’re the one who had backed that pole innit.”

“Nah nah it weren’t me bro,” Kennie was heard to reply.

Peniston then killed the 16-year-old boy with a single stab wound to the chest, before running away from the scene with the group.

They did not give Kennie medical assistance or call an ambulance, and later abandoned the stolen bikes.

Kennie was found lying face down at 7pm after calling his brother to say: “Oh, they’ve stabbed me in the heart bro.”

Paramedics raced Kennie to Manchester Royal Infirmary but he was pronounced dead at 8.27pm on January 22, 2022.

During the sentencing last year, the judge Mr Justice Goose, said: “This was yet another killing of a young person with a knife against the backdrop of gang violence.

“Young males carrying knives in public in readiness to threaten and kill others is becoming all too common in our cities.

“The tragedy is that not only does it destroy the lives of the victims and their families, but also those who commit the offence.”

Kennie’s mum Joan said she had seen the boy “laugh and smirk” throughout a court hearing.

She said: “This shows me he had absolutely no remorse and broke my heart even more.

“No penalty or what the court can award will ever be enough in my eyes.

A heartbreaking statement was also read out on Joan’s behalf by her sister in court: “My son was chased down in the street and killed on his way home.

“At the time of his death he was just 16.

“For the last seven weeks we have had to listen to evidence of what happened to our son in graphic detail.

“How can we put into words how his death and the last two and a half years has affected us?”

“It is not just Kennie that died on 22 January 2022.

“Our whole family has been destroyed by this mindless violence.”

She added: “They have taken away our Kennie from his loving family and our lives are destroyed forever.”

Three other teens were also jailed after being found guilty of manslaughter.

Latif Ferguson, who already turned 18 but was 15 at the time, was sentenced to five years’ detention in a young offenders’ institution.

Two 16-year-olds were sentenced to four years’ detention following a lengthy trial at Manchester Crown Court.

Six other teenagers, then aged between 15 and 19, were found not guilty of charges related to Kennie’s death

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Hey, hey, they’re the Runarounds, the latest Pinocchio band to straddle the line between fiction and fact. Meet Charlie (William Lipton), guitar! He’s a romantic! Neil (Axel Ellis), also guitar! Not just a pothead! (He reads Ferlinghetti.) Topher (Jeremy Yun), lead guitar! The quiet one! Wyatt (Jesse Golliher), bass! The even quieter one! And Bez (Zendé Murdock), drums, replacing Pete (Maximo Salas), henceforth the “manager,” who surely has been named for Pete Best, or I will eat my Beatles fan club card.

They have been assembled for your fist-pumping adulation from a reported 5,000-plus hopefuls responding to an open call for musicians and dropped into the center of a teenage musical soap opera, also called “The Runarounds,” premiering Monday on Prime Video.

This rockin’ concoction comes to you courtesy of Jonas Pate, creator of the Netflix teenage treasure-hunt series “Outer Banks,” and like that show, it is a wish-fulfilling fantasy set in Pate’s native North Carolina, specifically the seaside city of Wilmington, which offers a lot of lovely scenery and adorable domestic architecture. And like that show, it is all about being young and wanting to be free, like the bluebirds. Unlike that show, everybody here keeps their shirts on, in the actual sense (though not at all in the metaphorical).

The eight-episode season begins just as high school is ending, which in dramatic terms means parties and a scene in which someone makes a graduation speech. (That will be Sophia, played by Lilah Pate, daughter of Jonas.) Charlie, who has just turned 18, is avoiding telling his parents that he’s not going to go to college, even though he’s been accepted to one. (To just one is the perhaps unintended implication.) His entire future, in his head at least, depends on “getting signed” by the summer’s end — which, in music business terms, is 20th century thinking, but like a lot of music being made today, this is an old-fashioned show. That, and getting Sophia, the beautiful, overachieving sad girl he’s been crushing on for four years, to notice him.

Charlie, Toph, Neil and Pete have been playing unspecified gigs under an unfortunate name I’ll not repeat, and they feel pretty good about the band, although strangely it takes until the pilot for them to realize that Pete is a terrible drummer. After some group soul-searching and flyer-posting, they pick up Bez, who drums so well one wonders why he isn’t in three other bands already — or why there seems to be no other groups around, or any sort of music scene. He brings along his friend Wyatt, who picks up a bass, and a new band is born. Wyatt’s interiority, shy smile and young Jeff Tweedy vibe makes him immediately the most intriguing Runaround.

Charlie (William Lipton), Wyatt (Jesse Golliher) and Bez (Zendé Murdock) in a scene from “The Runarounds,” which is set in Wilmington, N.C.

(Jackson Lee Davis / Prime Video)

Along with Sophia, who writes poems that might be lyrics, the female element is filled out by Amanda (Kelley Pereira), Topher’s controlling, capable girlfriend, who will prove a secret weapon for the band, and Bender (Marley Aliah), who goes about with cameras, likes Neil and wholly embodies a somewhat scary, casually cool, not-at-all pixieish dream girl. They don’t get to be in the band, but as actors, they do a lot to support their nonprofessional castmates. (Lipton, the only professional actor in the band — including in 328 episodes of “General Hospital” — comes across as less authentic than the untrained others, though that may be in part because he’s saddled with the heaviest storylines and has to say things like, “I want to write love songs that change the world.”)

As in “Outer Banks,” and two out of every three teen shows ever, most are at odds with their parents, catnip to young viewers who are even occasionally at odds with their own parents, over even minor things because — parents! Charlie’s are played by Brooklyn Decker, whose character teaches film, and Hayes MacArthur, whose character has spent 12 years working on a novel — that is, only working on a novel, which is to say not working; somehow they are not divorced. (And money is becoming an issue, and there is a Big Secret that will shake the family.) “What kind of work is done in a bathrobe, father?” says Charlie’s mouthy little sister, Tatum (Willa Dunn).

Neil’s father, who has health problems, assumes his son will join him in his painting business; Topher’s are conservative stuck-up pills who, like Amanda, have him slated for a career in finance. Bez’s father is also a musician but thinks his son is wasting his time with the Runarounds. Wyatt’s mother is some sort of addict, who hates him. Sophia’s father is self-medicating after the death of her mother some years before, leaving her to pick up the pieces. (“I’m doing everything right on paper but I don’t feel alive,” she says.) Wouldn’t you rather be with your friends, playing in a band?

Wyatt will find a job and a refuge, and the band a rehearsal space in a music store run by nonparental adult Catesby (Mark Wystrach), who spent 18 years in Nashville experiencing success and failure and knew Charlie’s mother once upon a time — so that’ll be a thing. (The store apparently does no business at all.) For inspiration he sends the kids way out in the country to a secret show by his old friend Dexter Romweber (a real person, now deceased, played by Brad Carter), who will shake their nerves and rattle their brains and leave them with words of encouraging and discouraging wisdom before disappearing into the night and a fictionalized fate.

Every so often, we get a performance — at a graduation party, a county fair, a wedding, a roadhouse, a prestigious opening slot, where the crowds react as if they’re extras in a TV show. (The kids can play, and the songs aren’t bad.) As they struggle toward their goal, they’ll meet disaster and resistance. They’ll fuss, they’ll feud. They’ll make mistakes, they’ll make sacrifices, they’ll make trouble, though no trouble that can’t be fixed with an apology or checkbook or someone to bail them out. (I am pretty sure in the long history of underage kids sneaking into clubs, none has ever been arrested and put in jail, but maybe things are different in Wilmington.) They’ll get high and stay out all night, talking heart to heart, which does seem authentically teenage. (The “Wizard of Oz” costumes less so.)

There are niche references for the pop-musically informed: Catesby telling Wyatt to put a couple of P13 pickups into a ’68 Silvertone guitar; moving from the two to the five chord; name-dropping storied rock clubs (the 40 Watt, the 9:30). “This isn’t some f— Squier I got for Christmas,” Neil wails when his Gretsch White Falcon disappears. When Charlie rides his bike off a roof into a swimming pool in the midst of Pete’s party, that is almost certainly in homage to the “I am a golden god” scene from “Almost Famous”; later, they’ll nick an idea from the Beatles.

As with other manufactured bands before them, the line between what’s real and what’s retail is blurred. You can buy Runarounds-branded merch (T-shirts and hoodies, a beach towel, a sweatband, lighters). You can stream their “album,” co-produced by the Talking Heads’ Jerry Harrison, and released by actual major label Arista, from all the usual musical platforms. They’ve got dates scheduled from mid-September to late October in the South, mid-Atlantic and Northeast in legit rock halls, though whether they will identify themselves by their character names, I don’t know. (That wasn’t a problem for the Monkees, who just used their own.) I doubt they’ll be sleeping on floors or tripled up at a Motel 6, unless things are worse than I know at Amazon. If they split the driving, I hope they’re more responsible with that than the characters they play.

It’s a fluffy show, sometimes catching something real, frequently improbable, never completely ridiculous. But the audience at which it’s aimed may be happy enough with an aspirational fairy tale that reflects their own feelings about their own feelings, for which the music itself is a megaphone and a metaphor.

“All good pop songs are a little corny,” says Charlie.

“Maybe,” replies Sophia, which is the right answer.

Nearly 40 years into Deftones’ career, the Sacramento-bred band are anything but a legacy act. As proved by the visceral allegiance from countless fans half their age thrashing at their feet as they perform on stage, the band continues to be as explosive as they were when they conquered the Warped Tour in the late ‘90s.

The band’s late-era surge in popularity with generations of fans who missed their first (and second) go-round inspires and surprises them.

“It does freak me out when I sit back and, in retrospect, think about it,” Chino Moreno says of Deftones’ longevity. Sitting backstage in a Victoria, Canada, arena during a break from the band’s pre-tour rehearsal, kicking off in Vancouver on Friday, Moreno, 52, is relaxed as he discusses their place in the hard rock landscape.

Since roughly 2022, the singer has noticed that the crowds at some of the band’s meet and greets were younger. In some cases, fans in their teens and early 20s were introducing their parents to the band’s catalog, including their turn-of-the-century classic, “White Pony.”

That stature has only grown as elements of Deftones’ amorphously aggressive sound, which has elements of post-hardcore, trip hop and, most relevant to their revival, shoegaze, have attracted a much younger audience. They’ve broken out from being a cult and critical favorite from the nü-metal scene to being widely appreciated as one of the most important and influential bands of that era.

“I’m not a big social media person,” Moreno says of the medium that’s enabled a new generation to discover Deftones. “There are positive sides to it, like amongst all the noise, you can share music. It is neat that everybody’s much more connected to be able to share it like that.”

Yet, he’s aware that based on the online resurgence, Deftones don’t have to release a new album. Even so, seeing this influx of a younger fan base invigorated the band. It has driven the band to push themselves not just on stage, but in the studio.

Chino Moreno of Deftones performs at the Kia Forum on March 5, 2025.

(Clementine Ruiz)

“Having this whole new generation of eyes on us and more attention now than we’ve had in decades. So why not embrace it?” he says. “I love that I met a lot of parents and children, fathers and daughters, and they’re at the show together as a bonding experience, and to talk about some type of art you both connected over … it’s really cool.”

The band also knew that if they were going to write and record, it had to be for the right reasons.

Recording “can’t be where the label needs [the album], or we need money,” Moreno explains. “We’ve made records under those circumstances before, and it sucks the fun out of the experience. We’re bratty in that way where we only want to do something if it’s something we want to do. The minute someone tells us we have to do it, then we fight it.”

With the band’s members now scattered across the U.S., Deftones couldn’t wait to get back into the studio together, just like they did as teens when they had a space that felt more like a clubhouse. As Moreno puts it, it excited them to be able to “experiment and hang out together. Locking ourselves in a room for six hours a day, five days a week, was fun. It was like going back into the clubhouse again.”

With “Private Music,” Deftones once again joined forces with Nick Raskulinecz, who produced “Diamond Eyes” and 2012’s “Koi No Yokan” (“Dude, we have to finish the trifecta!” Moreno says he told Raskulinecz whenever they’d see each other.) Throughout the last year and a half, the band and Raskulinecz worked together through a variety of sessions before deciding on the 11 songs that constitute the album. Without a definitive timetable to release their 10th studio album, it allowed for a much more relaxed and enjoyable atmosphere than before. That said, the time between 2020’s “Ohms” and “Private Music” was the longest span between Deftones albums.

“We’re in a mind frame where it’s like we don’t have to make a record,” he says. “It gave us a kick in the butt. If people are talking about us holding us to a certain standard and pushing ourselves. So the fact that we’re gonna do it, we might as well make it great.”

A band this far into its career is generally in their victory-lap era. Write, record, release an album, go on tour, play mostly the hits, sprinkle in a new song, repeat. Not Deftones. Throughout this album, which is another significant achievement, the band mixes the moody and melodic to create a genre-bending album full of fire and fury. Look no further than the equally bombastic “My Mind Is a Mountain” and “Locked Club,” the menacing “Ecdysis,” the soaring Moreno-powered “I Think About You All the Time,” and the push-and-pull of the methodical “cxz.” Throughout the sessions, which included three additional songs left in various states, Deftones wrote and recorded batches of songs in different locations, which Moreno says allowed for a respective track to have its own sonic personality as a product of its environment.

“‘I Think About You All the Time’ was written in Malibu at 8 in the morning and was pretty fast,” he says. “We put it aside then, after dinner that night, we made some coffee and went out and finished it. Whereas with ‘Ecdysis,’ it was the last song we wrote, and it was while we were in the studio. We were looking at our collection of songs that we already had and just going, like, ‘OK, where does it fit within this batch of songs?’ We wanted something jagged and also a little weird that was more experimental but with an aggressive approach.”

As their tours have gotten bigger, external factors have given the band a new appreciation for their ongoing success. During the band’s 2024 Coachella appearance, guitarist Stephen Carpenter felt his performance wasn’t up to his standard, telling Zane Lowe of Apple Radio that he was “completely out of it for both shows. I barely had enough energy to stand up. All I could think about during those shows was, ‘Please, just don’t fall over on stage.’” Later, he’d find out that he has Type II diabetes.

A few years before Carpenter learned of his health issues, Moreno got sober. Those changes enabled the bandmates, friends since they were teens, to become even closer, despite any misconceived notion that they’ve been at odds. Though Carpenter doesn’t travel internationally with Deftones due to his condition, when the band was on the road in the States earlier this year, he and Moreno were busmates. They pushed each other to remain on their respective lifestyle-changing tracks.

“I think we’re both very proud of each other,” Moreno says of their changes. “He is so on it. He’s an obsessive person about a lot of things, and now he’s obsessed about his blood sugar and about his health. It’s parallel to my sobriety. So we get on the bus after a show, and we’re all into our diet. With my sobriety, I think he sees me being a better version of myself.”

Deftones perform at Kia Forum.

(Clementine Ruiz)

“Private Music” stands not just as a wonderfully cohesive riff-heavy body of work with a relentless energy that is the next shapeshifting step in the Deftones catalog, but is also a well-balanced album. It’s a logical sonic step for the Deftones universe. The band has also been building its annual Dia de Los Deftones festival. The lineup for the sixth edition, taking place in November in San Diego, includes Virginia Beach, Va., hip-hop heroes Clipse, beloved metal band Deafheaven, Rico Nasty, 2hollis and more. Comparing curating the festival to compiling a mixtape, Deftones is the common thread that ties these diverse artists together, which Moreno calls “a fun experiment.”

Decades later, it’s Deftones’ music and adventurous sonic spirit that keep the crowds coming back, anticipating the group’s next move. It’s allowed them to gradually build on successes without being weighed down by the past. Now, it’s moved so quickly and exponentially that they’ve barely had time to catch their collective breath — with another stretch of arena dates and a pair of co-headlining stadium shows with System of a Down on the docket.

“I’m excited to be busy,” Moreno says. “I’m the type of person who has been lucky enough to have done this for pretty much all of my adult life. We didn’t get to go out and tour ‘Ohms’ after it was released, and this is such a different time. I really love this batch of songs, so I’m eager to go play them and stay busy for the next couple of years.”

I sank into Randy Carter’s comfy couch, excited to see the Hollywood veteran’s magnum opus.

Around the first floor of his Glendale home were framed photos and posters of films the 77-year-old had worked on during his career. “Apocalypse Now.” “The Godfather II.” “The Conversation.”

What we were about to watch was nowhere near the caliber of those classics — and Carter didn’t care.

Footage of a school bus driving through dusty farmland began to play. The title of the nine-minute sizzle reel Carter produced in 1991 soon flashed: “Boy Wonders.”

The plot: White teenage boys in the 1960s gave up a summer of surfing to heed the federal government’s call. Their assignment: Pick crops in the California desert, replacing Mexican farmworkers.

“That’s the stupidest, dumbest, most harebrained scheme I’ve heard in my life,” a farmer complained to a government official in one scene, a sentiment studio executives echoed as they rejected Carter’s project as too far-fetched.

But it wasn’t: “Boy Wonders” was based on Carter’s life.

Randy Carter’s collection of historical photos and other memorabilia of A-TEAM, a 1965 program that sought to recruit high school athletes to pick crops during the summer.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

In 1965, the U.S. Department of Labor launched A-TEAM — Athletes in Temporary Employment as Agricultural Manpower — with the goal of recruiting 20,000 high school athletes to harvest summer crops. The country was facing a dire farmworker shortage because the bracero program, which provided cheap legal labor from Mexico for decades, had ended the year before.

Sports legends such as Sandy Koufax, Rafer Johnson and Jim Brown urged teen jocks to join A-TEAM because “Farm Work Builds Men!” as one ad stated. But only about 3,000 made it to the fields. One of them was a 17-year-old Carter.

He and about 18 classmates from University of San Diego High spent six weeks picking cantaloupes in Blythe. The fine hairs on the fruits ripped through their gloves within hours. It was so hot that the bologna sandwiches the farmers fed their young workers for lunch toasted in the shade. They slept in rickety shacks, used communal bathrooms and showered in water that “was a very nice shade of brown,” Carter remembered with a laugh.

They were the rare crew that stuck it out. Teens quit or went on strike across the country to protest abysmal work conditions. A-TEAM was such a disaster that the federal government never tried it again, and the program was considered so ludicrous that it rarely made it into history books.

Then came MAGA.

Now, legislators in some red-leaning states are thinking about making it easier for teenagers to work in agricultural jobs, in anticipation of Trump’s deportation deluge.

“I used to joke that I’ve written a story for the ages, because we’ll never solve the problem of labor,” Carter said. “I could be dead, and my great-grandkids could easily shop it around.”

I wrote about Carter’s experience in 2018 for an NPR article that went viral. It still bubbles up on social media any time a politician suggests that farm laborers are easily replaceable — like last month, when Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said that “able-bodied adults on Medicaid” could pick crops, instead of immigrants.

From journalists to teachers, people are reaching out to Carter anew to hear his picaresque stories from 50 years ago — like the time he and his friends made a wrong turn in Blythe and drove into the barrio, where “everyone looked at us like we were specimens” but was nice about it.

“They are dying to see white kids tortured,” Carter cracked when I asked him why the saga fascinates the public. “They want to see these privileged teens work their asses off. Wouldn’t you?”

But he doesn’t see the A-TEAM as one giant joke — it’s one of the defining moments of his life.

An old photo belonging to Randy Carter shows, seated at bottom right, his boss at the time, Francis Ford Coppola. “Everyone in this photo won an Academy Award except me,” Carter said.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., Carter moved to San Diego his sophomore year of high school. He always took summer jobs at the insistence of his working-class Irish mother. When the feds made their pitch in the spring of 1965, “there wasn’t exactly a rush to the sign-up table,” Carter recalled. What’s more, coaches at his school, known at University High, forbade their athletes to join. But he and his pals thought it would be the domestic version of the Peace Corps.

“You’re a teenager and think, ‘What the hell are we going to do this summer?’” he said. “Then, ‘What the hell. If nothing else, we’ll go into town every night. We’ll meet some girls. We’ll get cowboys to buy us beer.’” “

Carter paused for dramatic effect. “No.”

The University High crew was trained by a Mexican foreman “who in retrospect must have hated us because we were taking the jobs of his family.” They worked six days a week for minimum wage — $1.40 an hour at the time — and earned a nickel for every crate filled with about 30 to 36 cantaloupes.

“Within two days, we thought, ‘This is insane,’” he said. “By the third day, we wanted to leave. But we stayed, because it became a thing of honor.”

Nearly everyone returned to San Diego after the six-week stint, although a couple of guys went to Fresno and “became legendary in our group because they could stand to do some more. For the rest of us, we did it, and we vowed never to do anything like that as long as we live. Somehow, the beach seemed a little nicer that summer.”

Carter’s wife, Janice, walked in. I asked how important A-TEAM was to her husband.

She rolled her eyes the way only a wife of 53 years could.

“He talks about it almost every week,” she said as Randy beamed. “It’s like an endless loop.”

University High’s A-TEAM squad went on to successful careers as doctors, lawyers, businessmen. They regularly meet for reunions and talk about those tough days in Blythe, which Carter describes “as the intersection of hell and Earth.”

As the issue of immigrant labor became more heated in American politics, the guys realized they had inadvertently absorbed an important lesson all those decades ago.

Before A-TEAM, Carter said, his idea of how crops were picked was that “somehow it got done, and they [Mexican farmworkers] somehow disappeared.”

“But when we now thought about Mexicans, we realized we only had to do it for six weeks,” he continued. “These guys do it every day, and they support a family. We became sympathetic, to a man. When people say bad things about Mexicans, we always say, ‘Don’t even go there, because you don’t know what you’re talking about.’”

Carter’s experience picking cantaloupes solidified his liberal leanings. So did the time he tried to cross the U.S.-Mexico border in 1969 during Operation Intercept, a Nixon administration initiative that required the Border Patrol to search nearly every car.

The stated purpose was to crack down on marijuana smuggling. Instead, Carter said, it created an hours-long wait and “businesses on both sides of the border were furious.”

In college, Carter cheered the efforts of United Farm Workers and kept tabs on the fight to ban el cortito, the short-handled hoes that wore down the bodies of California farmworkers for generations until a state bill banned them in 1975.

By then, he was working as a “junior, junior, junior” assistant to Francis Ford Coppola. Once he built enough of a resume in Hollywood — where he would become a longtime first assistant director on “Seinfeld,” among many credits — Carter wrote his “Boy Wonders” script, which he described as “‘Dead Poets Society’ meets ‘Cool Hand Luke.’”

It was optioned twice. Henry Winkler’s production company was interested for a bit. So was Rhino Records’ film division, which explains why the soundtrack features boomer classics from the Byrds, Bob Dylan and Motown. But no one thought audiences would buy Carter’s straightforward premise.

One executive suggested it would be more believable if the high schoolers ran over someone on prom night and became crop pickers to hide from the cops. Another suggested exploding toilets to funny up the action.

“The mantra in Hollywood is, ‘Do something you know about,’” he said. “But that was the curse of it not getting made — because no one else knew about it!”

Colorado River water irrigates a farm field in Blythe in 2021.

(Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times)

Carter continues to share his experience, because “as a weak-kneed progressive, I always fancied we could change the situation … and that some sense of fair play could bubble up. I’m still walking up that road, but it seems more distant.”

A few weeks ago, federal immigration agents raided the car wash he frequents.

“You don’t even have to rewrite stories from years ago,” he said. “You could just reprint them, because nothing changes.”

I asked what he thought about MAGA’s push to replace migrant farmworkers with American citizens.

“It’s like saying, ‘I’m going to go to Dodger Stadium, grab someone from the third row of the mezzanine section, and they can play the violin at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.’ OK, you can do that, but it’s not going to work,” he said. “I don’t get why they don’t try to solve the problem of fair conditions and inadequate pay — why is that never an option?”

What about a reboot of A-TEAM?

“It could work,” Carter replied. “I was with a group of guys that did it!”

Then he considered how it might play out today.

“If Taylor Swift said it was great, you’d get people. Would they last? If they had decent accommodations and pay, maybe. But it would never happen with Trump. His solution is, ‘You don’t pay decent wages, you get desperate people.’”

He laughed again.

“Here’s a crazy program from the 1960s that’s not off the map in 2025. We’re still debating the issue. Am I crazy, or is the world crazy?”

A 38-YEAR-OLD man has been charged with raping a 17-year-old boy after “approaching him on a bench” in a popular UK seaside town.

The teen, who was sitting on a bench in Dyke Road, Brighton, was approached by a man who asked for help finding a shop that was open.

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He assisted the man before being taken to an address in Regent Hill where the rape was reported to have taken place.

Cops received a report of the rape in the early hours of Sunday and immediately launched an investigation.

A 38-year-old Brazilian man, of no fixed address, was arrested near the property shortly later.

Officers have since charged Rafael Nascimento with rape, he appeared at Brighton Magistrates’ Court on Tuesday.

Nascimento was remanded into custody and is due to appear in court again on September 9.

Senior investigating officer, Detective Chief Inspector Steve Cobbett, said, “A dedicated team has been working diligently, swiftly, and thoroughly to ensure all lines of enquiry are fully progressed.

“The victim will continue to be supported throughout this process, and following their bravery in making a report, officers quickly identified a person of interest, and they have since been charged and remanded.

“Officers have continued to carry out enquiries in the Regent Hill area, and as a result, a heightened police presence has been visible.

“This forms part of our ongoing work to support the investigation and to provide reassurance to the community.

“We remain committed to protecting the public from those who seek to harm others. We are here to listen, to support, and to take action.

“If have information to report in connection with ongoing enquiries, we ask you contact police”

“Officers are here to ensure that every piece of evidence is collected, and every piece of information is heard.”

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A POLICE worker stalked and blackmailed a teenage boy for seven years after meeting him through an online game.

Ryann Moroney, 28, convinced the lad when he was 15 that he was being blackmailed by several Snapchat accounts.

Moroney, who worked on the London Met’s cyber crime unit, asked the boy to send naked selfies to appease his fictitious blackmailers.

He was arrested when his victim went to the police, who found 83 indecent images of him on Moroney’s phone.

Moroney admitted stalking and making indecent images of the most serious kind at Inner London crown court.

Judge Nathaniel Rudolf KC told him he had taken “complete and utter advantage” of his victim in a “sophisticated campaign designed to maximise his fear”.

He jailed Moroney for four years, four months.

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A TEENAGER has died after a car she was travelling in crashed into a tree on a rural road in the early hours of yesterday morning.

The woman, 18, tragically passed away when the silver Renault Clio – which she was a passenger in – collided with a tree after veering off the road in Hartlepool at 4.18am on Thursday, Cleveland Police said.

A 26-year-old man, who was driving the vehicle, was arrested on suspicion of causing death by dangerous driving as well as other driving offences.

He remains in police custody at this time.

The tragic crash took place on a road known locally as Greatham Back Lane, which connects the A689 to Greatham village.

Police said the woman suffered fatal injuries in the collision and was pronounced dead at the scene.

Her family have been informed and are being supported by specially trained officers.

Cops are now looking to witnesses or anyone who may have CCTV or dashcam footage of the silver Clio in the village to come forward.

You can contact Cleveland Police on 101, quoting reference number 148268.

Alternatively, you can upload footage directly by following this link.

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A TEEN boy who tortured, killed and dismembered two kittens with a girl in a warped bid to reduce his urge to kill a human has been locked up.

The depraved pair used rope to tie up the defenceless animals before “mutilating” them.

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One of the kittens was found cut open on the ground in Ruislip, North West London, while the other was hanging from a tree.

Chillingly, the boy, 17, wrote how he “really wanted to murder someone” and killed cats to “reduce my urges”.

He also made a number of harrowing searches about sacrificing animals to Satan.

The boy has been detained for 12 months after pleading guilty to causing unnecessary suffering to the protected animals by “mutilating and killing” them.

His co-defendant will be sentenced for the same charge this afternoon.

The teens, who legally can’t be named, also admitted one count of possession of a knife.

Highbury Corner Magistrates’ Court was told the horror unfolded on May 3.

Footage released by police showed the girl, 16, and 17-year-old boy strolling through a residential street.

The boy could be seen clutching a bag that is believed to have been used to carry the kittens.

CCTV then captured the twisted pair running back down the same street after killing the baby cats.

Prosecutor Valerie Benjamin said the animals were discovered with their flesh and fur cut off and burnt.

As well as the tragic kittens, knives, blowtorches and scissors were found at the scene.

Police later discovered a note on the boy’s phone that read: “I really wanted to murder someone and I was searching how to get away with murder.

“I have come close.

“I have killed cats to reduce my urges.

“I have skinned strangled and stabbed cats.”

The boy had also carried out a number of chilling searches for “killing cats and dogs” and “how to kill a human”.

Ms Benjamin said: “There were concerns about his desire to go on to killing humans.

“He questioned how easy it would be get away with murder and how to kill homeless people.”

It also emerged the teens had chillingly put out adverts for the kittens and went to pick them up before killing them.

Sentencing, Judge Hina Rai also imposed a lifetime ban from caring for animals on the boy.

She said: “You have caused extreme suffering to those two kittens. You knew exactly what you were doing and it would result in their suffering.

“Without a doubt these are the most awful offences I have seen against animals in this court.”

For centuries, mythology looked to gods to explain a disquieting world. But in the new documentary “Folktales,” from “Jesus Camp” filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, which follows a trio of jumbled Scandinavian teens to a remote Norwegian school that builds character in the snowy wild, the answer to life may just lie in what “god” spells backward.

In other words, yes, let’s go to the dogs: sled dogs, specifically, whose personalities, purpose and compatibility are the secret sauce to a lesson plan that seeks to get kids out of their heads and into a stronger sense of self. The beautiful Alaskan and Siberian huskies that animate the dog-sledding instruction at Norway’s Pasvik Folk High School are what help lift this handsomely photographed film above the usual heart warmer.

Ewing and Grady are no stranger to this scenario, having observed at-risk Baltimore youth striving for stability (“The Boys of Baraka”) and unhappy Hasidic Jews attempting to remove themselves from all they’ve ever known (“One of Us”). The situation is less sociologically dire in “Folktales,” but it isn’t any less compelling as a subject or less worthy of empathetic attention, especially when the stage for potential transformation is as rapturous as the birthplace of Vikings.

Pasvik is 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle, which means self-reliance isn’t optional and knitting carries more practical weight than learning a math formula. As gap-year institutions dedicated to nurturing the transition to adulthood, folk schools have roots going back to the 19th century. Pasvik sees survival training as unlocking potential in teens too devoted to their phone screens. As convivial dog-sledding teacher Iselin puts it to the students, she wants to “wake up your Stone Age brains.”

For anxious, bubbly 19-year-old Hege, who lost her father and struggles with image issues, unplugging is tough at first. But she responds to its benefits, especially when entrusted with the care of Odin, a gorgeous, lovable canine with an expressive howl. Socially awkward Bjorn wants to stop harboring sad thoughts and second-guessing his nerdiness. Nothing like a majestic creature who rewards your undivided attention, then, to refocus one’s energies. When the students are tasked with spending two nights in the forest alone with just their assigned huskies and camping acumen, their struggles give way to a turning point, what another kindhearted instructor describes as the special inner peace that comes with just “a fire, a dog and a starry sky.”

You also gather that Ewing and Grady may have been seeking some inspiration themselves. Hence, some arty montages of the icy wilderness (including some woo-woo yarn-and-tree symbolism) and an ambiance closer to warm spotlight than objective inquiry.

That makes “Folktales” decidedly more powdery than densely packed — it’s all ruddy cheeks, slo-mo camaraderie and the healing power of steering a dog sled through breathtaking terrain. It looks exhilarating, and if the filmmakers are ultimately there to play, not probe, that’s fine, even if you may not know these kids at the end any better than you did at the beginning. It’s hard to say whether negative-minded high school dropout Romain will wind up on the other side of what troubles him. But we see how happy he is making friends and catching a glimpse of moose in the wild. It’s a simple message, but “Folktales” sells it: Nurture via nature.

One Day in Southport detailed one teenage survivor from the horrifying Southport stabbings in July 2024 which saw three young girls stabbed at a Taylor Swift themed dance party

Channel 4’s One Day in Southport aired tonight, leaving viewers shaken by its unflinching portrayal of the tragic events of July 29, 2024. The documentary revisits the devastating day a Taylor Swift-themed dance class at Hart Space in Southport was turned into a crime scene when 17-year-old Axel Rudakubana launched a brutal knife attack.

The film follows the story of one young survivor and her family, using raw testimony from victims, witnesses, and community members to discuss how violence, disinformation, and extremism collided.

Rudakubana fatally stabbed three young girls called Bebe King (6), Elsie Dot Stancombe (7), and Alice da Silva Aguiar (9), and injured ten others, most of them being children.

He was arrested at the scene, later pleaded guilty, and received a life sentence with a minimum of 52 years.

False claims that the attacker was a Muslim asylum seeker spread rapidly online, fuelling a wave of riots across the UK. One of the most violent incidents occurred in Middlesbrough on August 4, when a planned protest spiralled into destruction.

More than 1,000 people gathered as shopfronts were smashed, homes vandalised, and cars torched.

The documentary struck a chord with viewers, with many taking to social media to describe it as “devastating,” “urgent,” and “impossible to forget.”

One particularly heartbreaking scene saw the focus survivor of the attack break down in tears after she blamed herself for not being able to save the three little girls – one of whom was her little sister’s best friend. The teenage survivor, only identified by her eyes, told the story from her memory as she detailed how she was stabbed both in the arm and in the back.

“I felt like I was dying,” the survivor shared in the heartbreaking admission. She then broke down after confessing that she blames herself for not being able to save the girls – despite having been stabbed herself.

“I regret it every day that I wasn’t able to save her. That I wasn’t able to get her out,” she sobbed.

Taking to X, formerly known as Twitter, after watching the chilling stories of the victims unfold, viewers shared their heartbreak. “This poor girl has to live with this trauma for the rest of her life. It’s so sad that she blames herself even in the slightest. Absolutely devastating.”

“I am truly sick to my stomach watching this. How did this happen to such innocent little babies? Bawling my eyes out and thinking of their poor families,” another viewer shared. Another echoed: “God, this is such a hard watch, but so important too.”

Another Channel 4 viewer typed: “Those poor little girls must have been terrified. To think they had their whole lives ahead of them. Such a powerful documentary. Fair play to Channel 4.”

“So heartbroken watching this. Tears streaming down to the ground omg,” someone else shared. While another viewer voiced: “It just shows how unsafe the UK has become. Nobody is safe. Not even innocent little girls.”

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