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Messages - Lost Soul

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151
Sad, we all need to be there for our loved ones and anybody we know that doesn't have support.

152
Fun, Games And Silliness / Re: Word Association
« on: December 26, 2020, 02:06:36 PM »
cards

153
genealogy

154
Fun, Games And Silliness / Re: Keep A Word, Drop A Word, Add A Word
« on: December 26, 2020, 02:04:53 PM »
military man

155
Fun, Games And Silliness / Re: Movies and Actors
« on: December 26, 2020, 02:03:37 PM »
Shadow of the Vampire

156
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9082111/Jealous-husband-43-son-20-jailed-attack-love-rival.html

Father and son who launched savage hammer attack on estranged wife's new lover and left him seriously injured are jailed for four years each

    Craig Shortman, 43, and Dillon Gillott, 20, ambushed Neil Twist, 43, in Salford
    Savaged him while he was with Shortman's estranged wife and Gillott's mother
    Julie Gillott tried to intervene but could only watch as they battered Mr Twist
    Shortman and Gillott jnr, both of Little Hulton, Salford, admitted inflicting grievous bodily harm and were each jailed for four years

By Danyal Hussain For Mailonline

Published: 10:59, 23 December 2020 | Updated: 11:00, 23 December 2020

A jealous husband and his son have been jailed for four years after a savage 'Rambo' knife and hammer attack on his estranged wife's new lover.  Craig Shortman, 43, and Dillon Gillott, 20, caused Neil Twist's head to 'explode' with blood after the pair ambushed him as he walked down the street with Julie Gillott in Salford.  During the beating, Mr Twist, also 43, was stabbed by Shortman in the thigh and buttocks with a military-style hunting knife while Gillott struck the victim over the side of the head with the hammer.  Mrs Gillott, 43, tried to intervene but was unable to and blood poured from Mr Twist's head.   A member of the public had to patch up the wound with a tee-towel while they waited for an ambulance.  The victim was treated at hospital for a hematoma and had wounds on his face, leg and buttocks.  At Manchester Crown Court, Shortman and Gillott jnr, both of Little Hulton, Salford, admitted inflicting grievous bodily harm and were each jailed for four years.  Prosecutor Robert Elias said: 'Jealousy is often called the green-eyed monster. In this case the defendants are father and son, and the victim Neil Twist had started a relationship with Mr Shortman's ex-wife and Mr Gillott's mother several months before this attack.  Mr Shortman had not yet divorced from his now ex-wife and it is clear he was jealous of the new man in her life.  At around 4pm on 21 October 2019 the defendants got in their car armed with a knife and a lump hammer and came across the victim in Salford.  They saw him walking down the street with his partner and attacked him using these weapons. Mr Shortman had a knife described as military-style and Mr Gillott had a lump hammer, hitting the side of the victim's temple repeatedly in the same place.  At the same time Mr Shortman stabbed the victim in his left thigh and buttocks. His partner tried to intervene as the final hammer blow caused blood to explode from the victim's head. She phoned for an ambulance.  'A member of the public came along with a tee-towel to stop the blood and an air ambulance had to be called, but the victim was taken to Manchester Royal Infirmary by a normal ambulance.  The victim had a hematoma, blood had collected on the right side of his face and he had a 3cm laceration on his face, as well as wounds on his left buttock and thigh. The wounds were unpleasant, but the victim was lucky they were not substantially worse.  The defendants were both arrested at their home address the next day. As police came to the door Mr Gillott tried to escape through the window but was rugby tackled by the police. Mr Gillott replied 'no comment' at interview but Mr Shortman said his wife had made false accusations about him. He was trying to blame her but she was completely blameless.' '

In mitigation Mr Shortman's lawyer David Bentley said: 'He understands custody is not the way forward for him and has started to better himself.'

For Gillott, David Bentley said: 'Love can cause people to act in misguided ways.  There is an unfortunate background of domestic violence between the victim and the defendant's mother although no allegations have been made to the police. This explains why he took part in the attack on the victim.  He is starting to grow up. He is remorseful for this offence.'

Sentencing Judge Suzanne Goddard QC told the pair: 'You are father and son and it is a great tragedy that you appear in the dock together in relation to these serious allegations.  This wound was a serious injury and you were both lucky the victim did not sustain fatal injuries having been attacked with that sort of weapon. This was a particularly nasty incident in a public place in the middle of the afternoon.  There is little that can be said for either of you that would reduce the length of your sentences.'

157
General Discussion / The Skeletons at the Lake
« on: December 10, 2020, 04:43:29 PM »
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/12/14/the-skeletons-at-the-lake?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits

The Skeletons at the Lake

Genetic analysis of human remains found in the Himalayas has raised baffling questions about who these people were and why they were there.

By Douglas Preston
December 7, 2020

In the winter of 1942, on the shores of a lake high in the Himalayas, a forest ranger came across hundreds of bones and skulls, some with flesh still on them. When the snow and ice melted that summer, many more were visible through the clear water, lying on the bottom. The lake, a glacial tarn called Roopkund, was more than sixteen thousand feet above sea level, an arduous five-day trek from human habitation, in a mountain cirque surrounded by snowfields and battered by storms. In the midst of the Second World War, British officials in India initially worried that the dead might be the remains of Japanese soldiers attempting a secret invasion. The apparent age of the bones quickly dispelled that idea. But what had happened to all these people?

Why were they in the mountains, and when and how had they died?

In 1956, the Anthropological Survey of India, in Calcutta, sponsored several expeditions to Roopkund to investigate. A snowstorm forced the first expedition to turn back, but two months later another expedition made it and returned to Calcutta with remains for study. Carbon dating, still an unreliable innovation, indicated that the bones were between five hundred and eight hundred years old.  Indian scientists were intensely interested in the Roopkund mystery. The lake, some thought, was a place where holy men committed ritual suicide. Or maybe the dead were a detachment of soldiers from a thirteenth-century army sent by the Sultan of Delhi in an ill-fated attempt to invade Tibet, or a group of Tibet-bound traders who had lost their way. Perhaps this was hallowed ground, an open-air cemetery, or a place where victims of an epidemic were dumped to prevent contagion.  People in the villages below Roopkund had their own explanation, passed down in folk songs and stories. The villages are on the route of a pilgrimage to honor Nanda Devi, a manifestation of Parvati, a supreme goddess in Hinduism. The pilgrimage winds up through the foothills of the Trisul massif, where locals believe that the goddess lives with her husband, Shiva. It may be the longest and most dangerous pilgrimage in India, and a particularly perilous section the Jyumra Gali, or Path of Death runs along a ridge high above Roopkund. As the villagers tell it, long ago Nanda Devi left her home to visit a distant kingdom, where she was treated discourteously by the king and queen. Nanda Devi cursed the kingdom, unleashing drought and disaster, and infesting the milk and rice with maggots. In order to appease the goddess, the royal couple embarked on a pilgrimage. The king, who liked his entertainments, took along a bevy of dancing courtesans and musicians, in violation of the ascetic traditions of the pilgrimage. Nanda Devi was furious at the display of earthly pleasures, and she shoved the dancing girls down into the underworld. The pits into which they are said to have sunk are still visible high on a mountainside. Then, according to the legend, she sent down a blizzard of hail and a whirlwind, which swept all the pilgrims on the Path of Death into the lake. Their skeletons are a warning to those who would disrespect the goddess.  This story is retold in “Mountain Goddess,” a 1991 book by the American anthropologist William Sax. Now a professor at Heidelberg University, he stumbled upon a reference to the lake and the bodies as an undergraduate, in the nineteen-seventies, and was fascinated. He and a friend travelled to the hamlet of Wan, the settlement closest to Roopkund, where a local man agreed to guide them up the pilgrim trail to the lake. The trail climbs through deep forests, emerging above the tree line, at eleven and a half thousand feet, into meadows carpeted with wildflowers. To the north is a vast wall of Himalayan peaks, some of the highest in the world. From there, the route follows steep ridgelines and leads past an ancient stone shrine, festooned with bronze bells and tridents and containing a statue of the elephant deity Ganesha. Then, at fifteen thousand feet, it goes over a pass and up a series of switchbacks through scree to Roopkund. The lake, about a hundred and thirty feet across and ten feet deep, is an emerald jewel nestled in a bowl of rock and ice. (In Hindi, roop kund means “beautifully shaped lake.”) Almost as soon as Sax and his companions arrived, they were engulfed by a blizzard and stumbled around the bone-strewn cirque in whiteout conditions, calling for one another and nearly adding their own bodies to the charnel ground.  Exhausted and feverish, Sax barely made it back to Wan with his companions, and spent ten days recovering in his guide’s stone hut. Yet his passion for the place was undimmed. He went on to write a doctoral thesis about the local traditions surrounding Nanda Devi. In the late eighties, he went on the pilgrimage himself, the only Westerner to have done so at that time, after which he published “Mountain Goddess.” The book describes how the Himalayas, “associated for thousands of years in India’s literatures with famous pilgrimage places and powerful, ascetic renouncers,” became the setting for followers to show devotion to the goddess by “giving suffering” to their bodies.  In 2005, Sax was featured in a National Geographic documentary about the lake. The Indian media company that made the film assembled a team of archeologists, anthropologists, geneticists, and technicians from research laboratories in India and the U.K. to collect and study the bones. In the decades since Sax first visited, the lake had become a popular destination in the trekking community and the site was being ruined. Bones had been stolen; others had been rearranged in fanciful patterns or piled in cairns. Almost none of the skeletons were intact, and it was impossible to tell which bones belonged together or where they had originally lain. Nature had added to the confusion, churning and fracturing the bones with rock slides and avalanches. But a recent landslide had exposed a cache of fresh bones and artifacts. Under a slab of rock, the team found the remains of a woman, bent double. The body was intact and still had skin and flesh. The scientists removed tissue samples for testing, shot video, and collected bones and artifacts. The team estimated that the area contained the remains of between three hundred and seven hundred people.  The scientific analysis swiftly discounted most of the prevailing theories. These were not the remains of a lost army: the bones were from men, women, and children. Aside from a single iron spearhead, no weapons were found, and there was no trace of horses. The bones showed no evidence of battle, ritual suicide, murder, or epidemic disease. Nor was Roopkund a cemetery: most of the individuals were healthy and between eighteen and thirty-five years old. Meanwhile, the team’s geographic analysis laid to rest the idea of traders lost in the mountains, establishing that no trade route between India and Tibet had ever existed in the area. Although the Tibetan border is only thirty-five miles north of Roopkund, the mountains form an impassable barrier. Besides, no trade goods or beasts of burden were found with the bodies. Artifacts retrieved included dozens of leather slippers, pieces of parasols made of bamboo and birch bark, and bangles made of seashells and glass. Devotees of Nanda Devi carry parasols and wear bangles on the pilgrimage. The dead, it appeared, were most likely pilgrims.  DNA analysis showed that all the victims appeared to have a genetic makeup typical of South Asian origin. Bone and tissue samples were sent to Oxford University for carbon dating. The new dates, far more accurate than the 1956 ones, formed a tight cluster in the ninth century. Tom Higham, who performed the analysis, concluded that the victims had perished in a single event and had “died instantaneously within hours of one another.”

Meanwhile, a team of bioarcheologists and paleopathologists noted the presence of two distinct groups: there were “rugged, tall” people with long heads and also some “medium height, lightly built, round headed” people, who displayed a curious shallow groove across the vault of the skull. The scientists concluded that the dead represented two populations: a group of tall Brahmans from the plains of India and a company of shorter, local porters, whose skulls were marked by years of carrying heavy loads with a tumpline looped over their heads.  The investigation also revealed that three or possibly four skulls had compression fractures on the crown that had probably occurred at the time of death. “It is not a weapon injury,” the researchers noted, but came “from a blow from a blunt and round heavy object.”

This stretch of the Himalayas is notorious for hailstorms, which destroy crops and damage property. The team concluded that, around the year 800 A.D., a group of pilgrims were caught in a storm on the exposed ridge above Roopkund and were pummelled to death by giant hailstones. Over the years, landslides and avalanches had rolled the bodies down the steep slope into the lake and the surrounding area. Not only did the mystery of Roopkund appear to be solved; it also seemed that the local tales of Nanda Devi’s wrath had originated in an actual event.  Last year, however, Nature Communications published the baffling results of a new study conducted by sixteen research institutions across three continents. Genetic analysis and new carbon dating revealed that a significant proportion of the Roopkund remains belonged to people from somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean, most likely near Crete, and that they had perished at the lake only a couple of centuries ago.  India is an ideal country for studying human genetics, ancient and modern. There are fewer cultural barriers to handling human biological materials than in many parts of the world, and Indian scientists have eagerly pursued research into the peopling of the subcontinent. Geneticists have sampled the DNA of hundreds of living populations, making India one of the most genetically mapped countries in the world. In 2008, David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard, made the first of many trips to the country, and visited a leading life-science research institution, the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, in Hyderabad. While there, he discussed someday collaborating on a more detailed study of the Roopkund bones with the center’s director, Lalji Singh, and Kumarasamy Thangaraj, a geneticist who had headed up the previous DNA analysis. By the time work began, in 2015, the team, led by the Reich lab and the laboratory in Hyderabad, also included researchers at Pennsylvania State University, the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard, the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, and the Anthropological Survey of India, where many of the Roopkund bones reside.  Not long before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the U.S., I visited Reich at Harvard Medical School. His office is a minimalist space with a whiteboard, a table, and a wall of glass looking across Avenue Louis Pasteur to the red brick façade of the Boston Latin School. Reich is a lean, fit man in his mid-forties who speaks with rapid, quiet precision. His self-deprecating manner conceals a supremely self-confident iconoclast who is not averse to toppling received wisdom, and his work has attracted criticism from some anthropologists, archeologists, and social scientists. The Reich lab, the foremost unit in the country for research into ancient DNA, is responsible for more than half the world’s published data in the field. Having so far sequenced the DNA of more than ten thousand long-dead individuals from all over the globe, the lab is almost halfway through a five-year project to create an atlas of human migration and diversity, allowing us to peer deep into our past. The work has produced startling insights into who we are as a species, where we have come from, and what we have done to one another. Hidden in the human genome is evidence of inequality, the displacement of peoples, invasion, mass rape, and large-scale killing. Under the scrutiny of science, the dead are becoming eloquent.  Last year, Reich led a team of more than a hundred researchers who published a study in Science that examined the genomes of some two hundred and seventy ancient skeletons from the Iberian Peninsula. It’s long been known that, from around 2500 to 2000 B.C., major new artistic and cultural styles flourished in Western and Central Europe. Archeologists have tended to explain this development as the result of cultural diffusion: people adopted innovations in pottery, metalworking, and weaponry from their geographic neighbors, along with new burial customs and religious beliefs. But the DNA of Iberian skeletons dating from this period of transformation told a different story, revealing what Reich describes as the “genetic scar” of a foreign invasion.

In Iberia during this time, the local type of Y chromosome was replaced by an entirely different type. Given that the Y chromosome, found only in males, is passed down from father to son, this means that the local male line in Iberia was essentially extinguished. It is likely that the newcomers perpetrated a large-scale killing of local men, boys, and possibly male infants. Any local males remaining must have been subjugated in a way that prevented them from fathering children, or were so strongly disfavored in mate selection over time that their genetic contribution was nullified. The full genetic sequencing, however, indicated that about sixty per cent of the lineage of the local population was passed on, which shows that women were not killed but almost certainly subjected to widespread sexual coercion, and perhaps even mass rape.

We can get a sense of this reign of terror by thinking about what took place when the descendants of those ancient Iberians sailed to the New World, events for which we have ample historical records. The Spanish conquest of the Americas produced human suffering on a grotesque scale war, mass murder, rape, slavery, genocide, starvation, and pandemic disease. Genetically, as Reich noted, the outcome was very similar: in Central and South America, large amounts of European DNA mixed into the local population, almost all of it coming from European males. The same Y-chromosome turnover is also found in Americans of African descent. On average, a Black person in America has an ancestry that is around eighty per cent African and twenty per cent European. But about eighty per cent of that European ancestry is inherited from white males genetic testimony to the widespread rape and sexual coercion of female slaves by slaveowners.

In the Iberian study, the predominant Y chromosome seems to have originated with a group called the Yamnaya, who arose about five thousand years ago, in the steppes north of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. By adopting the wheel and the horse, they became powerful and fearsome nomads, expanding westward into Europe as well as east- and southward into India. They spoke proto-Indo-European languages, from which most of the languages of Europe and many South Asian languages now spring. Archeologists have long known about the spread of the Yamnaya, but almost nothing in the archeological record showed the brutality of their takeover. “This is an example of the power of ancient DNA to reveal cultural events,” Reich told me.

It also shows how DNA evidence can upset established archeological theories and bring rejected ones back into contention. The idea that Indo-European languages emanated from the Yamnaya homeland was established in 1956, by the Lithuanian-American archeologist Marija Gimbutas. Her view, known as the Kurgan hypothesis named for the distinctive burial mounds that spread west across Europe is now the most widely accepted theory about Indo-European linguistic origins. But, where many archeologists envisaged a gradual process of cultural diffusion, Gimbutas saw “continuous waves of expansion or raids.” As her career progressed, her ideas became more controversial. In Europe previously, Gimbutas hypothesized, men and women held relatively equal places in a peaceful, female-centered, goddess-worshipping society as evidenced by the famous fertility figurines of the time. She believed that the nomads from the Caspian steppes imposed a male-dominated warrior culture of violence, sexual inequality, and social stratification, in which women were subservient to men and a small number of élite males accumulated most of the wealth and power.  The DNA from the Iberian skeletons can’t tell us what kind of culture the Yamnaya replaced, but it does much to corroborate Gimbutas’s sense that the descendants of the Yamnaya caused much greater disruption than other archeologists believed. Even today, the Y chromosomes of almost all men of Western European ancestry have a high percentage of Yamnaya-derived genes, suggesting that violent conquest may have been widespread.  The team members of the Roopkund study planned a variety of tests for the bones. DNA sequencing would show the ancestry of the victims and whether they were related to one another, and carbon dating would estimate when they died. The researchers would test for disease, and analyze the chemistry of the bones to determine the victims’ diet and where they might have grown up. Under sterile conditions, the scientists in Hyderabad drilled into long bones and teeth, producing a powder. Vials of this were sent to Harvard and to other labs in India, the United States, and Germany.  An ancient human bone is packed with DNA, but, in many cases, ninety-nine per cent or more of that is not human. It is the DNA of billions of microbes that colonized the body during the decomposition after death. To tease the tiny fraction of human DNA from this mass of microbial debris requires a chemical ballet of enormous delicacy, and the risk of contamination is high. Stray DNA molecules from people who handled the remains can ruin an entire sample.

David Reich’s lab has a “clean room” for extracting and processing DNA from human tissue. Personnel pass through a dressing area, where they don a full-body clean suit with booties and hood, double pairs of nitrile gloves (the inner one sealed to the suit with tape around the wrists), a hairnet, a face mask, and a plastic shield. The clean room is maintained at positive pressure, which keeps the airflow directed outward, to curtail the entry of airborne DNA. After anything is touched in the room, the outer pair of gloves must be stripped off and a fresh pair put on, in order to prevent the transfer of DNA from surface to surface. Intense ultraviolet light shines whenever the room is empty, to destroy stray DNA. The light is shut off when the lab is occupied, because it burns human skin and eyes.

When I visited, a technician was working on a nubbin of bone from an ancient Roman who lived in Belgium. The whine of a sandblaster filled the air as she removed excess bone from a tiny treasure chest of DNA—a spiral cavity in the inner ear called the cochlea. The bone in which the cochlea is embedded is the densest in the body, and provides the best source of preserved DNA in ancient remains. DNA this old breaks up into short strands. Getting enough to sequence requires complex processes, one of which involves placing samples in a machine that produces a polymerase chain reaction, copying the fragments up to a billion times. The lab doesn’t sequence the entire DNA molecule, much of which is repetitious and uninformative, but maps about a million key locations.

Reich had asked a graduate student in his lab, Éadaoin Harney, to take charge of the Roopkund project. Her role was to analyze the Roopkund DNA, wrangle the worldwide team, assemble the results, and write the resulting paper as its lead author. (She has since taken a job as a postdoctoral researcher at the genomics firm 23andMe.) By the middle of 2017, it was apparent that the Roopkund bones belonged to three distinct groups of people. Roopkund A had ancestry typical of South Asians. They were unrelated to one another and genetically diverse, apparently coming from various areas and groups in India. Roopkund C was a lone individual whose genome was typical of Southeast Asia. It was the Roopkund B group, a mixture of men and women unrelated to one another, that confounded everyone. Their genomes did not look Indian or even Asian. “Of all places in the world, India is one of the places most heavily sampled in terms of human diversity,” Reich told me. “We have sampled three hundred different groups in India, and there’s nothing there even close to Roopkund B.”

Harney and Reich began exploring the ancestry of the Roopkund B group, comparing the genomes with hundreds of present-day populations across Europe, Asia, and Africa. The closest match was with people from the Greek island of Crete. “It would be a mistake to say these people were specifically from Crete,” Reich said. “A very careful analysis showed they don’t match perfectly. They are clearly a population of the Aegean area.” The Roopkund B group made up more than a third of the samples tested—fourteen individuals out of thirty-eight. Since the bones at the lake were not collected systematically, the finding hinted that the Mediterranean group in total might have been quite large. One-third of three hundred, the lower estimate of the Roopkund dead, is a hundred people.

As bizarre as the result seemed, it nonetheless matched an analysis of bone collagen that the Max Planck Institute and the Harvard lab had done on the same individuals, to determine their diet. Dietary information is stored in our bones, and plants, depending on how they fix carbon during photosynthesis, create one of two chemical signatures C3 or C4. A person who eats a diet of C3 plants, such as wheat, barley, and rice, will have isotope ratios of carbon in their bones different from those of a person eating a diet high in millets, which are C4. Sure enough, the analysis of Roopkund bone collagen revealed that, in the last ten or so years of their lives, the Roopkund A people ate a varied C3 and C4 diet, typical for much of India; Roopkund B ate a mostly C3 diet, typical of the Mediterranean.

During the study, the Reich lab had divided up its bone-powder samples, sending one portion to the carbon-14-dating laboratory at Penn State. (Doing this rather than having the Penn State samples sent straight from Hyderabad was a way of insuring that the labs were working on the same individuals.) When the carbon-dating results came back, there was another surprise: there appeared to have been multiple mass-death events at Roopkund. The Roopkund A individuals probably died in three or possibly four incidents between 700 and 950 A.D. The Roopkund B group—from the Mediterranean—likely perished in a single event a thousand years later. Because carbon-14 dating is difficult to interpret for the period between 1650 and 1950, the deaths could have occurred anytime during that span, but with a slightly higher probability in the eighteenth century. The lone person of Southeast Asian ancestry in Roopkund C died around the same time.

The eighteenth-century date was so unexpected that Reich and Harney at first thought it might be a typo, or that the samples had been contaminated. Harney wrote up the findings, in a paper co-authored by twenty-seven other scientists. She told me, “We hoped that after the paper was published someone would come forward with information that would help us determine what might have happened at Roopkund some historian or a person with knowledge of a group of European travellers who vanished in the Himalayas around that time.”

When William Sax learned of the results, he was incredulous. He had spent years in the mountain villages below the lake, among the devotees of Nanda Devi. The women consider themselves to be keepers of the goddess’s memory, and Sax had recorded and translated many of their songs and stories of the pilgrimage. He feels certain that if a large party of travellers, especially foreign travellers, had died at Roopkund in recent centuries, there would have been some record in folklore. After all, despite the new study’s surprises, the Roopkund A group was not inconsistent with the earlier findings.

“I never heard a word, not a hint of a story, no folktale or anything,” Sax told me. “And there’s absolutely no reason to be up there if they weren’t on the pilgrimage.” The idea of a group of eighteenth-century Greeks on a Hindu pilgrimage seemed far-fetched. A simpler explanation would be that the Roopkund B bones somehow got mixed up while sitting in storage. “It is quite possible that these bones were contaminated,” he said, and the researchers were simply taking their provenance on trust: “They didn’t actually collect them themselves.” Having been fascinated with the region’s way of life for four decades, he also found the scientists’ perspective lacking. “This isn’t just a story about bones,” he said. “It’s also a story about human beings and religious devotion.”

Many anthropologists and archeologists are uneasy about the incursion of genomics into their domain and suspicious of its brash certainties. “We’re not schooled in the nuances,” Reich admitted to me. “Anthropologists and geneticists are two groups speaking different languages and getting to know each other.” Research into human origins and the differences between populations is always vulnerable to misuse. The grim history of eugenics still casts a shadow over genetics—a field with limitless appeal for white supremacists and others looking to support racist views even though, for half a century, geneticists have rejected the idea of large hereditary disparities among human populations for the great majority of traits. Genetic science was vital in discrediting racist biological theories and establishing that racial categories are ever-shifting social constructs that do not align with genetic variation. Still, some anthropologists, social scientists, and even geneticists are deeply uncomfortable with any research that explores the hereditary differences among populations. Reich is insistent that race is an artificial category rather than a biological one, but maintains that “substantial differences across populations” exist. He thinks that it’s not unreasonable to investigate those differences scientifically, although he doesn’t undertake such research himself. “Whether we like it or not, people are measuring average differences among groups,” he said. “We need to be able to talk about these differences clearly, whatever they may be. Denying the possibility of substantial differences is not for us to do, given the scientific reality we live in.”

In 2018, Reich published a book, “Who We Are and How We Got Here,” about how genetic science is revolutionizing our understanding of our species. After he presented material from the book as an Op-Ed in the Times, sixty-seven anthropologists, social scientists, and others signed an open letter on BuzzFeed, titled “How Not to Talk About Race and Genetics.” The scholars complained that Reich’s “skillfulness with ancient and contemporary DNA should not be confused with a mastery of the cultural, political, and biological meanings of human groups,” and that Reich “critically misunderstands and misrepresents concerns” regarding the use of such loaded terms as “race” and “population.”

Reich’s lab now has an ethics-and-outreach officer, Jakob Sedig, whose job is to work with some of the cultural groups being studied, to understand and respond to their sensitivities. “We are mapping genetic groups to archeological cultures,” Sedig, who has a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Colorado, explained. “How we’re defining these groups genetically is not how they see themselves culturally. We don’t want to discredit other people’s beliefs, but we don’t want to censor our research based on those beliefs. There’s no one answer. You need a dialogue from the beginning.”

Reich acknowledges that geneticists need to be careful about how they discuss their work. He said that the majority of archeologists and anthropologists welcome the insights that genetic research provides, although “there are a small number of Luddites who want to break our machines.” In our conversations, Reich emphasized that the findings of geneticists were almost always unexpected and tended to explode stereotypes. “Again and again, I’ve found my own biases and expectations to be wrong,” he said. “It should make us realize that the stories we tell ourselves about our past are often very different from the reality, and we should have humility about that.” When I asked him for examples, he mentioned the origin of “white people” light-skinned people from Europe and parts of western Asia. He assumed (as did most scientists) that whites represented a stable lineage that had spread across western Eurasia tens of thousands of years ago and established a relatively homogeneous population. But his research showed that as recently as eight thousand years ago there were at least four distinct groups of Europeans, as genetically different from one another as the British are from the Chinese today, some with brown skin color. As he put it in an e-mail, “ ‘White people’ simply didn’t exist 8,000 years ago.”

Around 500 B.C., the Greek traveller Scylax of Caryanda is said to have journeyed through parts of the Indian subcontinent and sailed down the Indus River. In his writings, known only from secondary sources, Scylax called the river Indos, from which the English name for the subcontinent derives. Alexander the Great invaded India in 326 B.C., having previously swept through what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan. His armies traversed the Indus plains and reached as far as the Beas River before turning back. There was lasting Hellenic influence in the region for centuries, although the eventual decline of Greek civilization largely brought direct contact with Greece to an end.

Perhaps, the Roopkund researchers thought, there might be a tribe or a group in India descended from Greeks. Alexander left behind commanders and soldiers in some of the territories he conquered, many of whom stayed. Members of the Kalash tribe, in northern Pakistan, claim to be descendants of Alexander’s soldiers. (This was the inspiration for Rudyard Kipling’s story “The Man Who Would Be King.”) The Kalash are a distinct people with their own language and an ancient, animistic religion. Genetic research suggests that the Kalash have a Western European origin, and one disputed study found Greek heritage. On investigation, Reich’s team found that the modern genetic profile of the Kalash did not resemble that of Roopkund B. Two centuries before Christ, parts of northern India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan formed the Indo-Greek Kingdom, the easternmost state of the Hellenic world. But, again, Roopkund B didn’t resemble any populations living there now.

Could Roopkund B have come from an unsampled population in India descended from Greeks or a related group?

In this scenario, an enclave of migrants to India never admixed with South Asians, and retained their genetic heritage. But the genetics of Roopkund B, showing no sign of isolation or inbreeding, ruled this out, too. And then there was the stubborn fact that the Roopkund B people ate a diet more consistent with the Mediterranean than with India. The evidence pointed to one conclusion: they were Mediterranean travellers who somehow got to Roopkund, where they died in a single, terrible event. And yet the historians I consulted, specialists in South Asian and Greek history and authorities in the history of Himalayan mountaineering, said that, in recent centuries, there was no evidence of a large group of unrelated people from the eastern Mediterranean men and women travelling in the Himalayas before 1950.

Since the study was published, one of the most determined investigators of the mystery has been a recently retired archeologist named Stuart Fiedel, whose main research focus is the migration of Paleo-Americans into the New World from Asia. “I hate unsolved mysteries,” Fiedel told me. “It makes zero sense that a party of male and female Greek islanders would be participating in a Hindu pilgrimage around 1700 or 1800. That’s because, one, there is no documented presence of any substantial Greek communities in northern India at those times, and, two, there is no record of Europeans converting to Hinduism or Buddhism in those periods.”

He sent Harney and Reich a string of e-mails proposing alternatives to the Mediterranean theory. Fiedel contends that the mitochondrial DNA lineages and the Y-chromosomal DNA lineages of the Roopkund B group are rare or absent in the population of the Greek islands, but are relatively common in Armenians and other peoples of the Caucasus. His preferred hypothesis is that the Roopkund B people were Armenian traders. Armenians travelled widely in Tibet, India, and Nepal during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, trading in pearls, amber, and deer musk, a precious ingredient in perfume. Several large Indian cities have Armenian communities that go back centuries. “They might have been hanging with some major Hindu party trying to sell them stuff,” Fiedel said. Noting that nothing of value was found on the bodies, he speculated that the travellers were killed by Thuggees, a cult of robbers and murderers whose fearsome reputation in British India gave us the word “thug.” Thuggees were said to attach themselves to travellers or groups of pilgrims, gaining their trust and then robbing and murdering them on a remote stretch of road. “The Thuggees would make off with kids,” Fiedel said. “Everybody in the Roopkund B population is mature. There isn’t any gold on the skeletons, no rings, necklaces, or anklets on the victims. Who removed those things? And they were dumped in water. The Thuggees would dump people in water.”

Reich and Harney reject Fiedel’s genetic interpretation. Reich wrote back to him saying that the full DNA from Roopkund B was “extremely different from Armenians both modern and ancient.” What’s more, scholars increasingly view British reports about Thuggees as inaccurate or embellished, reflecting the colonialist fear and incomprehension of the country they occupied. Some historians question whether the Thuggees even existed.

Reich and Fiedel did agree, however, that Sax’s suspicion that the bones could have simply been mixed up was unsustainable. A jumble of bones from a poorly curated storage area would not have the consistency of age, type, diet, and genetics displayed by the Roopkund B remains. The data would be all over the map. Besides, even if these bones were proved to have been mislabelled, that would merely create another mystery: how did a bunch of eighteenth-century Greek bones get into a storage vault in India?

For the time being, Roopkund holds its secrets, but it remains possible that an answer will eventually be found. Veena Mushrif-Tripathy, a bioarcheologist on the previous study and a co-author of the new one, pointed out that Roopkund is so remote and inhospitable—in 2003, when she and her colleagues went to collect bones, altitude sickness forced her to turn back there has never been a systematic archeological investigation of the site. All the bones studied so far have been picked up haphazardly, a flawed way of sampling that often skews results. A careful excavation, she believes, might solve the mystery, especially if it is able to plumb the lake itself. The water is frozen most of the year, so the skeletons and artifacts visible on the lake bed have been kept safe from looters and souvenir hunters. “Inside the lake, you can get more preserved bones with soft tissues,” she said. “And if they are Greek people we should get some artifacts or tools or something which we can trace back to Greece.”

And what of Nanda Devi? The new study established that multiple groups had died at the lake centuries apart. Did everyone die in hailstorms? Mushrif-Tripathy thinks that a hailstorm was probably involved in one mass death but that most people had likely just died of exposure. According to Ayushi Nayak, who performed the isotopic bone analyses at the Max Planck Institute, Hindu pilgrims sometimes go barefoot and thinly clothed to sacred sites in the Himalayas as a spiritual challenge. Completing the pilgrimage in this way is a sign that the goddess favors you and wants you to survive. In other words, most of the Roopkund dead probably perished as Sax almost did, when he was an undergraduate staggering around in a sudden blizzard and looking for their companions.

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Woman who killed girl, 7, by slashing her throat on Mother's Day may never be freed

Eltiona Skana today showed no emotion as a judge told her she may never be freed from hospital after her paranoid schizophrenia was judged to be 'the driver' behind the horror which saw her cut little Emily Jones' throat in park

By Joseph Wilkes Reporter, Seamus McDonnell & Danya Bazaraa

5:50, 8 DEC 2020Updated18:30, 8 DEC 2020

A woman who killed a seven-year-old girl by slitting her throat in a park on Mother's Day has been handed a life sentence with a minimum term of 8 years.  Eltiona Skana, 30, may never be freed as a judge handed her a hybrid sentence after hearing from a psychiatrist that her paranoid schizophrenia was "the driver for this act."  Emily Jones tragically died after the horrific attack in Queen's Park, Bolton, on March 22 this year.  Skana was previously found not guilty of murder after a trial but earlier had admitted to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.  Today at Manchester Minshull Street Crown Court Judge Mr Justice Wall handed her a hybrid sentence, meaning she will only be sent to prison if her treatment allows it and if she is never fit to be released to prison she will remain in hospital indefinitely.  He told her: “What this means is that you will be detained in hospital until no longer necessary. If or when it’s no longer necessary you will be released to prison.”

Consultant psychiatrist Dr Helen Whitworth told Judge Mr Justice Wall that Skana "needs to be monitored full time, probably for the rest of her life."

She said Skana may have a "lack of insight" into her own condition which could account for her "clear history" of losing contact with mental health services and not taking medication.  When asked if she thought the schizophrenia was the cause of Skana’s actions on March 22 she says it was likely.  She said: "My view is that this illness was the driver for this act and in my opinion it follows that only effective control of her mental illness will be the way to achieve full control and management of risk."

If these symptoms are not managed the defendant represents a "clear danger to the public", the doctor added, with a a hospital being the most appropriate place for Skana to be treated and that in prison officers might not spot the "subtle signs of relapse" that come with her mental condition.  Dr Whitworth was asked about the possibility of a hybrid order including both a hospital and prison sentence, under questioning from prosecution barrister Michael Brady.  She said the average length of stay for patients at Rampton Hospital where Eltiona Skana is currently being treated is around seven years, but people with severe conditions like the defendant are likely to be under treatment for much longer.  She added: "In my opinion the safest way to manage Miss Skana’s case would be for her to be under the care of a mental health team."

Skana showed no reaction as she was sentenced.  The 30-year-old could be seen in the dock in Manchester during the sentencing hearing.  Throughout the trial she had appeared via a video link but she appeared in person in court for sentence.  Emily's father Mark Jones was also in court to see the sentence passed.  Chilling video shared by Greater Manchester Police upon sentencing shows the arrest of Skana moments after the attack.  In it a woman can be heard saying "I think she's killed someone" as police arrest Skana.

Simon Csoka QC, for the defence, told Mr Justice Wall that it is his case Skana would be in hospital under care for longer than she would be in prison.  He says: "On the specific facts of this case, the public interest aligned with a Section 37/51 order [hospital order].  Under such a regime, the amount of time she is detained is likely to be at least as long if not longer than a hybrid order or even a life sentence.”

Emily's devastated dad told the court the family's future had been "taken away" after he described running for his daughter and begging her 'don't leave me'.

In court today, a heartbreaking victim impact statement was read from Emily’s dad, Mark Jones, who described his daughter as a "kind child" who was "bright and funny".

"Emily was a vulnerable child full of innocence and wonder, she was just starting off on her path of life and her future was cut short," he said.

"Our future has also been taken away, how can we enjoy life when the best part of it has been taken away?"

Over the course of a seven-day hearing at Manchester Minshull Street Crown Court, a jury was told Emily was killed by Skana as she was riding her scooter through the park.  The child had been riding to meet her mother when the defendant sprang from a bench, grabbed her and then sliced her across the neck with a craft knife she had bought that morning.  Mr Justice Wall explained in court today that he has reservations about Skana’s intentions before she attacked Emily.  He said it is "without question" that she was likely suffering from a psychotic episode when the incident happened, based on the evidence from psychiatric experts heard in court.  But he also said he is concerned that Skana appears to have lied to a mental health nurse on March 11 when she said she had been taking her medication.  Police found a month’s worth of unused pills in her home after the incident.  Dr Whitworth had previously been asked to make a report for the sentencing.  She said it was "extremely common" for people suffering from paranoid schizophrenia to think they do not need their medication.  Emily's father previously described the moment he knew he was losing his little girl.  He said: “I ran for Emily. I was absolutely terrified. I just knew it was so bad. You don’t survive these things.  I just thought, 'Oh my God, I’m going to lose her, I’m going to lose her.' I was shouting, 'Just stay with me Emily, stay with me. Don’t leave me.'”

On Friday, prosecution barrister Mr Brady told the jury the Crown Prosecution Service would no longer pursue a murder charge and asked them to find Skana not guilty of that offence.  Speaking to the jury, he said the prosecution had decided that was 'no longer any realistic prospect of conviction' for murder.  "This is not a decision that has been taken lightly by the Crown," he said.

"It's a decision taken with care and mindful of the sensitivity of this case."

He explained that the decision to drop the charge had come following evidence from Dr Saifullah Syed Afghan a consultant forensic psychiatrist who is treating Skana at Rampton Hospital.  He told the court he had no 'alternative' explanation for her actions, aside from previous explanations of psychosis brought on by her diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia.  The jury then found Skana not guilty of murder. 

'We cannot move on, because at this time, we cannot see a future'

Emily's parents Sarah and Mark wrote a moving impact statement in tribute to their daughter. saying: "How can you put into words how you feel about the senseless death of your only child? It is just too difficult to comprehend.   Emily was the beat in our hearts, the spring in our step and the reason we got up every morning.  Emily was our beautiful, spirited little girl, a bundle of energy with an infectious personality.  She was bright and funny, a kind child with not a mean bone in her body.  Emily loved life and had not a care in the world.  One smile from Emily and she had her daddy wrapped around her little finger.  Emily was a loveable child, full of innocence and wonder.  She was just starting out on her path of life and her future has cruelly been cut so short.  Our future has also been taken away, how can you enjoy life when the biggest part of it isn't there anymore?  We will never see Emily grow and become the wonderful young lady we knew she would become, we will never see her hold her own child in her arms, as we held her.  Emily brought out something special in everyone who was lucky enough to be in her life.  The loss of Emily has had a profound and significant impact, not just on her family, but the whole community.  Emily was someone’s school friend, a play mate and of course a grand daughter and a niece, and she meant something very special and unique to each and every one of them.  The last 9 months have been spent in limbo.  We cannot move on, because at this time, we cannot see a future. We can only focus on today, it is literally one day at a time."

'A dangerous offender'

A Greater Manchester Police spokesperson said today: "Skana has been sentenced under the Mental Health Act 2003 and has been deemed a dangerous offender so will need to be medically assessed before being considered for release.  On Sunday 22 March 2020, 7-year-old Emily Jones was riding her scooter through Queen's Park with her father, Mark when she began scooting towards her mother, Sarah who was jogging through the park.  On her journey, Emily was scooting past a bench that Skana was sitting on and completely unprovoked; Skana got up and grabbed Emily before attacking her with a knife and throwing her to the ground.  Emily's father immediately ran to her aid whilst Skana fled on foot towards the exit of the park, followed by a member of the public who bravely managed to detain her until police arrived at the scene.  Emily was rushed to hospital but had tragically sustained an un-survivable neck injury and sadly passed away despite the best efforts of medical professionals and her family.  Skana has remained in secure facilities ever since this incident."

Senior Investigating Officer Duncan Thorpe, of GMP's Major Incident Team, said: "This was an absolutely devastating incident that has left Emily's parents and family completely heartbroken and I know it sent shockwaves across the country as everyone mourned the loss of this innocent little girl.  Emily was taken from her family and friends in the worst possible way. No sentence can ever undo what happened on that awful day in March, but Emily's spirit will live on in her family and I know that she will never be forgotten."

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Fun, Games And Silliness / Re: Movies and Actors
« on: November 27, 2020, 12:47:38 PM »
Anthony Hopkins

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I'm A Celeb fans fear Hollie Arnold will be first star axed in brutal elimination

EXCLUSIVE: I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here! viewers have voted Hollie Arnold as the first star to be eliminated from Gwrych Castle in a brand new Mirror Online survey

By Brogan-Leigh Hurst Showbiz Reporter

02:06, 27 NOV 2020Updated03:14, 27 NOV 2020

I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here! fans fear Paralympian Hollie Arnold will be the first star to get axed from the show.  The new series has only been on screens for just over one week, but it's set to cause chaos as Friday night will see the first elimination of the show's 20th season.  A survey held by Mirror Online revealed that 32% of fans think that Hollie won't be on the reality show for much longer.  She received a total of 3,359 votes as the first star to be booted off the gruelling competition.  Former Strictly star AJ Pritchard is shortly behind her in second place.  The ballroom dancer received 1,276 responses and 12% of the vote for him to be kicked out of Gwrych Castle after Hollie.  The results show new campmate Ruthie Henshall, former EastEnders star Jessica Plummer and ex-soap star Shane Richie in joint third place.  However with a total of 1,027 responses, Ruthie is more likely to be the third star to get axed by the public vote, according to our data.  Victoria Derbyshire, Beverley Callard and Giovanna Fletcher have landed themselves in a safe place as 5% of viewers voted for them as fourth.  But the journalist is less safe than the rest of her co-stars as she received 562 votes, which puts her at a higher risk of being booted off sooner than Beverley, with 502 votes, and Giovanna, with 499.  Russell Watson, Sir Mo Farah, Vernon Kay and Jordan North are the most likeable stars suggesting one of them could be crowned the winner.  It appears 3% of viewers voted for the boys to be the fifth star to leave the show.  Jordan is the most safe out of Russell and Mo as he only has 325 votes, whereas Russell has 350 and Mo has 346.  Vernon Kay is the least likely star to be eliminated as he comes out safe at the bottom of the results.  Only 2% of fans voted for the TV presenter to go out, which suggests they like his bubbly character.

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Mum wakes up from three-month coma after car crash to discover she is pregnant

Gemma Holmes, from Wiltshire, lost all memory of three years of her life after a car crash, including the identity of the dad of her unborn child and she'd had no idea she was pregnant

By Lucy Moses

19:37, 5 NOV 2020 Updated19:48, 5 NOV 2020

A woman who was in a terrifying car crash woke up from a coma to discover she was pregnant.  Gemma Holmes, 33, was involved in a collision on her way to work when she was just four weeks pregnant, and put in an induced coma.  Doctors told her worried parents she had a small chance of pulling through and then broke the news that she was also expecting a baby.  Gemma suffered horrific injuries including a broken back and she lost all memory of the previous three years of her life including the identity of the dad of her unborn child.  When the former carer came around she was stunned when medics revealed to her that she was 11 weeks pregnant.  Gemma defied the odds and gave birth to her healthy baby boy, Rueben, now seven, on May 2, 2013.  She was told she wouldn't be able to walk again, but defied doctors and learned to take her first steps alongside her little boy.  Gemma from Trowbridge, Wiltshire, features on the latest episode of the Real Fix podcast which features real people telling extraordinary stories.  She told the weekly podcast: "I woke up to be told: 'You're in hospital, you've had a really bad accident, you've got brain damage, a punctured lung, you've broken too many bones and you'll never walk again.'  To wake up to be told 'you've just been through all of this, died and everything but you're still pregnant' it's like: 'Oh my god, how does that happen?'  I was like 'what?' because I woke up to a dream of giving birth to a little boy so it was like 'what?' I even question myself today: 'How did that happen?'  I died twice, but he's still alive inside of me I don't get it.  They said to me you've got a week to decide if you want to keep the baby because we can't do anything after 12 weeks.  I was like: 'No way, of course I'm going to keep him. Are you joking?'  It was just instant he's here for a good reason.  I was excited. I couldn't wait to meet him. He kicked me loads letting me know he was in there."

Gemma was in an on-off relationship with the father of her son when she crashed her moped into the back of a parked car while driving to work in September 2013.  She didn't know she was pregnant at the time and was rushed to Frenchay Hospital in Bristol, fighting for her life.  Doctors told her mum Julie Brown, 59, she was pregnant, and the family waited for her to wake up. They broke the news to her and she had to wait until she had given birth to Rueben, until she could have major surgery on her back.  But after being in a wheelchair for months after the accident, Gemma gave birth to her baby boy and she learnt to walk at the same time as he took his first steps.  Speaking to the podcast, which helps people share their real stories, Gemma said: "The doctors said I hadn't got much chance of making it, but I pulled through and I proved all those doctors wrong.  My mum's always brought up to think if you think negative, negative is going to happen. If you think positive, positive will happen.  Some days I am in so much pain I really don't want to get out of bed and I don't, but other days I'll go to the gym for a good workout.  But for me where I am today is just amazing."

Gemma is smitten with her son, Rueben. She added: "I just look at him and he's just so lush, it's like meant to be, wasn't it?  It was so amazing seeing him.  To me everything happens for a reason. I really believe in that so I just take each day as it comes because everyday is so different for me.  I just feel so lucky to have my little amazing boy."

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'Quiet' teen killer who murdered 'beautiful' ex told chilling lies to cover tracks

Thomas Griffiths was just 17 when he murdered his ex-girlfriend Ellie Gould in a brutal stabbing - he will likely be freed from prison before he's 30 and her parents want tougher sentences so no other family has to go through what they have

By Jane Lavender Assistant Editor

12:10, 30 OCT 2020

Ellie Gould was a "beautiful and loving" daughter, who was adored by her friends and determined to go far in life.  The 17-year-old schoolgirl had dreams of going to university when she had finished her A-levels and learning to drive when her life was snuffed out in a horrific and brutal killing.  On May 3 last year, the picturesque Wiltshire town of Calne was shocked to its core when news started to spread that the teenager had been murdered in her own home.  Ellie had been stabbed 13 times in a brutal and frenzied attack by the teenager who, until the day before, had been her boyfriend.  Thomas Griffiths, who was also 17, then desperately tried to cover his tracks as police realised he was the one responsible for the harrowing crime.  He was convicted of jailed of the killing and sentenced to 12-and-a-half years in prison, which means he could be free before he's 30.  For Ellie's devastated parents, Carole and Matt, Griffiths' sentence was a double blow and they have worked tireless since their daughter's death for a change in the law.  Carole said: "How can one person cause so much damage, complete devastation to us, Ellie’s family, such deep emotional scarring to all her friends, to our friends, to the wider community, cause so much damage to so many people, and the punishment for that is 12 and a half years. It’s wrong."

When the teen killer was sentenced, he was treated as a child reather than an adult.  Carole said: "Somebody a day off their 18th birthday cannot be treated the same way as a 10-year-old in terms of sentencing. I’m just flabbergasted that a high court judge and top barristers in this country think that was correct, it just does not make sense."

The courageous couple are calling for sentences for domestic homicide to be treated in the same way as other homicides.  They also was the 'smart sentences' loophole, which could let domestic murderers, like Thomas Griffiths, receive lighter sentences, be removed.  Ellie had made the decision to end her relationship with Griffiths so she could concentrate on her exams.  Her heartbroken mum described her beloved daughter, saying: "She was on the brink of adulthood, she was blossoming into this beautiful young lady, she was working hard at school studying hard for her A-levels, she’d just got herself a little job waitressing with the National Trust; she was learning to drive, and she was looking at universities."

Her dad, Matt, added: "She was very much like her mother. She was just well, a father would always say that a lovely child. She knew her own mind from a very young age, very determined.  She was great fun and obviously grew up into a beautiful, kind, loving young lady."

Ellie's friends echo her parents grief.  School pal Tilda Offen said: "Something just jumped out to me, like she was just so quirky. There was something about her where you just fell in love with her instantly."

Another friend, Ellie Welling, added: "She was just so real with everyone; she was just Ellie all the time. She was so funny, so bubbly, everyone loved her."

Ellie and Griffiths had been dating for three months before her brutal murder.  To her friends, he seemed ” like a ‘normal’ and ‘quiet’ boy and there was nothing to suggest that he would go on to kill.  Ellie Welling said: "Normal, honestly. He was just your normal boy. You would never have thought he could have even hurt a fly."

Another one of the tragic teen's friends, Harriet Adams, added: "I think we only saw the quiet side of him, because maybe he was intimidated by the big personalities in our group but she told us he was a lot more caring and open and louder and funnier and more outgoing when he was with her."

After murdering Ellie in her kitchen, Griffiths fled the scene but all the evidence pointed to him as a person of interest and police arrested him on suspicion of Ellie’s murder.  As Detective Superintendent Jim Taylor, who led the investigation, remembers a callous Griffiths attempted to lie himself out of the situation.  He explained: "When he was seen by officers, he was displaying marks, fresh marks down his face, which looked like scratch marks. They looked like classic defence wounds and based on that quite rightly he was arrested on suspicion of murder of Ellie Gould.  “His initial kind of response upon being arrested was ‘is my girlfriend ok, I haven’t seen her today?’ So he is immediately already trying to lay the foundations down of his lies and deceit.”

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Prince William enraged Prince Harry by asking Princess Diana's brother Earl Spencer to step in and stop him rushing into marriage to Meghan Markle, explosive new book claims

    Prince William was worried Prince Harry was going too fast with Meghan Markle
    William asked his uncle Charles Spencer to stop Harry rushing into marriage
    Harry was furious with his brother for dragging others into the row, book claims

By Robert Lacey For The Daily Mail

Published: 22:16, 4 October 2020 | Updated: 23:08, 4 October 2020

In the first part of our serialisation of his new book on Saturday, Robert Lacey a distinguished royal historian and adviser to TV's The Crown told how Harry and Meghan's behaviour left the Royal Family 'hopping' mad.  Today, he reveals how William feared Harry was rushing into marriage and that the Queen suggested the couple move to Africa for a year or two to enjoy time together.  For the last two years of his 20s, Prince Harry's life slipped sideways into what he described as 'total chaos'. In his own words: 'I just didn't know what was wrong with me.  I had probably been very close to a complete breakdown on numerous occasions.'

At his older brother's suggestion, Harry went into therapy. Even so, Cressida Bonas, his last serious girlfriend before Meghan Markle, came to feel he was a damaged and self-obsessed young man.  'No matter how educated, talented, rich or cool you believe you are,' she posted enigmatically on her Instagram page, 'how you treat people ultimately tells it all.'

She complained to friends that Harry had a neurosis about the media. He'd rant and complain about paparazzi lurking where clearly there were none, she said.  Meghan Markle, star of the U.S. TV legal drama series Suits, came into his life in early July 2016.  Already Harry could sense in Meghan the quirks and originalities that made her such a similar character to Diana.   She was a changer not a conformist, who fought her battles with the same non-royal indeed, those temptingly anti-royal qualities of his mother.  Sometime during that first summer and autumn together in 2016, Harry introduced his girlfriend to his father and his grandmother, who thoroughly approved. The problem was William.  Meghan and Kate actually got on rather well from the start. They might not be best-buddy material, but they found themselves, sister-outsiders in their extraordinary royal situation, and both of them cool professionals, treating each other with mutual respect.  Each was far too canny to make an enemy of a prospective sister-in-law - it only made sense to be friends. The fundamental conflict was between the two males who had known each other all their lives and had never hesitated to tell each other exactly what they thought and felt.  For his part, William was worried that his brother was going too fast in his courtship and he didn't shrink from saying so when Harry started talking about getting hitched.  'This all seems to be moving rather quickly,' William was said to have remarked to Harry doubtfully, on the testimony of more than one friend. 'Are you sure?'

William couldn't understand how Harry could contemplate marrying this still unknown and untested quantity less than two years after their first meeting.  It went against his every instinct and his own track record. If 'Waity William' had taken nearly a decade to test out and approve his life partner, surely his younger brother could ponder his options for just a year or so more?

But 'Waity William', of course, took so long to commit to Kate for the sake of the monarchy. He had been auditioning her for a job all those years.  So Harry could not help but wonder whether Wills was really concerned about his personal happiness or whether he was, once again and as per usual, thinking about the make-up and fortunes of 'the Firm' whose boss he would become one day?

The response from Harry was a brusque and offended pushback and after several more peppery reactions, William turned to his uncle Charles Spencer for help.  From time to time Diana's younger brother had played something of an honorary godfather to both boys in the years since the death of their mother, and their uncle agreed with William to see what he could do.  The result of the Spencer intervention was an even more bitter explosion. Once again Harry refused to slow down.  He didn't blame his uncle. He understood why Diana's brother should want to help. Yet he was furious with his elder brother for dragging other family members into the row.  The fraternal fissure became established. There would be patch-ups and reconciliations, especially when a public show of unity was required. But that anger and mistrust that distance has lasted to the present day.  Even in the fierceness of their disharmony, William and Harry could clearly see and agree on some of the things that they needed to do next extracting themselves from each other's pockets for a start, and setting up their homes more separately.  That meant the brothers should also split apart the offices they had shared at Kensington since 2012.  Harry put in a request to set up his own office and mini court, possibly at Frogmore but that was a step too far for both the Queen and Prince Charles who would have to finance the new arrangement.  Harry and Meghan were told that they would have to house their staffs in offices at Buckingham Palace under the supervision of the Queen's private secretary Sir Edward Young which was hardly the destiny either side wanted.  Still, BP was the royal headquarters, and the couple were willing to see how things might work out.  The saddest separation in many ways came from the two brothers' decision to split up the Royal Foundation, the thriving charitable enterprise that they had created ten years earlier to promote their various good causes.  Raising and paying out a good £7 million to £8 million per year for some 26 charities, the Royal Foundation seemed to embody both the legacy of Diana and the harmony of her sons in perpetuating her name.  When William, Kate, Harry and Meghan appeared on stage together for the first time to launch their Royal Foundation Forum, at the end of February 2018, they'd been hailed as the 'Fab Four'.  'I'm personally incredibly proud and excited,' said Harry, 'that my soon-to-be wife, who is equally passionate about seeing positive change in the world, will soon be joining us with this work.'

William then welcomed Meghan to the family in a more official fashion, adding how 'delighted' he was for her to be joining the team, while Kate backed her husband up with a round of applause.  What good actors they all were.  'Working together as a family,' came a question, 'do you ever have disagreements about things?'

Cue nervous laughter. The two women looked at the ground saying nothing, using their hair to hide their faces and their true emotions, presumably.    Harry held on to Meghan for some mutual support. It was William who said quite directly, 'Oh, yes' inspiring Harry then to add that the clashes came 'thick and fast'.

Had these disagreements been resolved? the questioner persisted. To which William replied facetiously: 'We don't know!'

It was announced that Meghan would become a fourth trustee, and she expressed the hope the foundation might extend its support to the women's empowerment movement that was developing in the U.S. from the recent Harvey Weinstein sexual harassment scandals.  'Right now,' said Meghan, 'with so many campaigns like #MeToo and #TimesUp, there's no better time to continue to shine a light on women feeling empowered and people supporting them.'

Everybody nodded approvingly. Yet no one neither on the stage, nor in the audience, nor even in the attentive and critical Press pack appeared to realise quite how revolutionary was this suggestion that the new recruit was making.  Because only the previous month a $13 million legal defence fund had been created, linked to MeToo and TimesUp, seeking legislation to discipline and punish companies that tolerated sexual harassment.  Legislation meant politics and in royal terms politics was simply taboo. It was a total no-no for the British Royal Family to endorse any cause, no matter how virtuous, that could be seen to take one political side against another.  So here was another profound reason for the rift that would divide William and Harry and come close to shattering the House of Windsor within two years. Meghan didn't just want to do good in the world she wanted to change the world.  On June 20, 2019, not long after Archie's birth, it was announced that the Royal Foundation's assets would be divided. William and Kate would take over the existing organisation, while Harry and Meghan would establish a charity of their own aiming at 'global outreach'.  The following day, which just happened to be William's 37th birthday, Harry and Meghan trademarked 'Sussex Royal The Foundation Of The Duke And Duchess Of Sussex'.  Sussex Royal was the work of Harry, Meghan and her team of American advisers headed by the powerful Hollywood talent and PR agency Sunshine Sachs the creation of the amiably named Ken Sunshine and PR guru Shawn Sachs.  Those advisers were on hand at the end of July 2019 when the contents of Meghan's 'Forces for Change' Vogue were previewed and were met by stern and rather worrying disapproval from the British Press.  'Meghan's 'woke' Vogue is shallow and divisive,' wrote Melanie Phillips, leading the way in The Times. 'Her virtue-signalling is all about boasting. It flaunts the signaller's credentials as a morally virtuous person. It screams, 'Me! Me! Me!'

The new Duchess, she went on, clearly did not understand that her new, royal status 'precludes political statements. She still hasn't grasped that the role of the monarchy is to unite the country.'

The Sun took up the same theme: 'OUR ROYALS SHOULD KEEP THEIR POLITICAL OPINIONS PRIVATE.'

It was a formidable chorus of disapproval and not just from commentators.  Editors had serious constitutional concerns about the monarchy trespassing into politics. Meghan evidently did not know or did not want to know what it meant to be a Windsor.  That feeling was coming to be shared among the Windsors themselves and Prince William was particularly disturbed.  Many of the papers had identified Meghan's proclaimed refusal to be 'boastful' by appearing on the front of her issue as a not-so-sly put-down to Kate, whose face had featured on the cover of her own Vogue a few years earlier.  But William's concern went much deeper. Money, power and survival. These were basic royal issues, and they were far too important to be threatened by trendy controversies in a glossy magazine.  William had heartily endorsed his sister-in-law's previous publishing initiative. The Royal Foundation had stepped in to support the Grenfell Tower fire cookbook, administering the collection and distribution of the funds.  The project had been 'driven by a desire', as the foundation put it, 'to make a difference together'.

'Together' was the operative word. William did not see his future role as monarch - nor his current role as heir as a matter of him working to maintain the nation's feelings in harmony while his activist brother and his wife jumped up and down beside him cultivating political and cultural divisions in pursuit of their trendy vision of doing good. Windsors do not do 'woke'.  William had been worried for some time that Harry was growing away from him, and this was confirmed when he tried to discuss the issues raised by Meghan's Vogue with his brother.  As with the brothers' arguments of 2016/17 over William's attempts to make Harry 'go slow', the details of the showdown over Meghan's 'Forces for change' are not known.  But there was another classic Harry explosion, followed by a further, even deeper rift. Suddenly Harry, Meghan and Archie were no longer joining William, Kate and the other members of the Royal Family for their annual summer holiday with Grandma at Balmoral.  The official excuse, conveyed straight-faced by the palace, was that at three months Archie was still too young for the air travel involved. But that didn't stop the Sussexes somehow managing to travel to Minorca for a week that August, and then taking Archie with them for a few days in the South of France with Elton John and his partner David Furnish.  'The Côte d'Azur with Elton, but no Balmoral with Granny?' asked one former attendant to Elizabeth II. 'They seem to be getting their Queens mixed up.'

Final Abbey snub printed in black and white

Twenty-three years earlier, William and Harry had stepped out together so bravely side by side down the main aisle of Westminster Abbey, in the wake of their mother's coffin.  On Monday, March 9, 2020, they were due back at the Abbey with their wives for a celebration of Commonwealth Day but this time Harry was furious.  For the first time, he'd been relegated to the position of 'junior' royal, along with Edward and Sophie Wessex.  Neither he nor Meghan had been invited to process down the aisle behind the Queen, who would be accompanied by Charles and Camilla, as well as William and Kate.  In 2018 and 2019, Harry and Meghan had walked down the aisle in the main procession.  But, in 2020, they were being shunted aside on their final appearance as working royals in Britain.  As now glaringly 'junior' members of the family, the Sussexes would simply have to shuffle their way to their seats and take their place on the sidelines.  The subservience of a 'spare' could not have been more strikingly illustrated.  Fortunately, however, Prince William had more sense than those responsible for the humiliating new protocol.  The weekend before, he'd decided that he and Kate would be quite happy to skip the procession and take their places without ceremony in the congregation alongside Harry and Uncle Edward.  It was a small but sensitive gesture of peace.  Within minutes of each other, the two princes and their wives slipped quietly into their seats, then sat waiting for the Queen and Prince Charles to process in senior splendour down the aisle.  The only problem was that 2,000 orders of service had already been distributed round the Abbey, explaining that William and Kate would enter and process with the main royal party and making no mention at all of Harry and Meghan.  So there was the snub in black and white set out for all to see.  Observers also noted that Harry's face was 'quite tense and unsmiling' and that when William sat down close to him, he barely greeted his brother.  Throughout the service, Meghan megawatted away with her best TV smile but, as the ceremony progressed, Harry appeared to grow gloomier.  According to one observer, 'his accelerated blinking even suggested he might have been fighting back tears.'

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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8805581/Couple-attacked-son-seeing-girlfriend-spared-jail-fell-pregnant.html

Couple who attacked their rebellious 17-year-old son after he went to see his girlfriend while he was grounded are spared jail as she revealed she is pregnant with his child

    Craig Carroll, 41, and wife Denise, 39, had a violent showdown with son Joshua
    Said he was being 'manipulated' by girlfriend Tania Finn and wanted break-up
    Mrs Carroll pushed son while husband punched him, knocking youngster out 

By Rory Tingle For Mailonline

Published: 09:02, 5 October 2020 | Updated: 09:55, 5 October 2020

A couple who attacked their 17-year-old son after he went to see his girlfriend when he was grounded have been spared jail after she became pregnant with his child.  Craig Carroll, 41, and his wife Denise, 39, had a violent showdown with their son Joshua after realising he had ignored them and gone to see Tania Finn.  They stormed round to her home in Middleton, Greater Manchester, and demanded Joshua leave.  When he refused Mrs Carroll pushed her son before her husband threw punches at him, causing the youngster to momentarily lose consciousness.  The attack happened while the couple's teenage daughter and children from Tania's family looked on.  Joshua, now 18, initially gave a statement to police about the attack but later retracted it and is now living back home with his parents.  The Carrolls believed Joshua was being 'manipulated' by his girlfriend and subjected her family to a campaign of intimidation to try and get them to break up.  Tania, who lives with her mother, Donna, moved away from the area because of the intimidation she suffered.She later broke up with Joshua but has since announced she is expecting his baby. It is not known when the child was conceived.  At Minshull Street Crown Court, Manchester the Carrolls, from Heywood, near Rochdale faced jail over the attack on April 15 last year but were freed after Joshua issued a plea not to have his 'family ripped apart.'

Prosecutor Hayley Bennett said: 'Joshua had been grounded and was not supposed to be out of the house but he went round to see his girlfriend.  Joshua said in his original interview he lost consciousness briefly for two minutes but was very very brief. He was punched several times to the face.  However he now talks about how since this incident he has come to reconcile with his family and after some time living with his grandmother he now lives back together with his parents.'

The prosecutor explained how Tania and her mother were forced to move home due to threats from the Carroll family, who also pelted their house with planks of wood.  Initial charges against the couple of attempted burglary with intent to inflict grievous bodily harm were dropped at an earlier hearing.  In mitigation for Mrs Carroll, defence lawyer Huw Edwards said: 'Matters have been resolved between her and Joshua and he is actually here today in support of them and sits at the back of court. As of May Joshua has been living back at the family home.  Matters have been resolved between the parties and there are no longer issues between the family and any members.  Tania is due to have a child today or very soon. It's a very difficult situation. Joshua is not living with her anymore and is living back with his parents but between them at least matters have been resolved.'

Judge Angela Nield said: 'What does concern me is that Tania is expecting a baby. It's better if both families can speak to each other because of the imminent arrival of a baby.'

Mrs Carroll, a part time cleaner, admitted affray was ordered to complete a 12 month community order, 20, rehabilitation requirement days and 150 hours unpaid work.  Her husband pleaded guilty to affray and assault occasioning actual bodily harm and was sentenced to six months jail suspended for 18 months.  He was also ordered to complete 150 hours unpaid work and 30 rehabilitation requirement day.  Sentencing, Judge Nield said: 'Your son had a measure of vulnerability and you both believed he was being exploited.  Rightly or wrongly that belief appears to have been strongly felt and to a measure confirmed through Joshua and his more recently expressed views.  However, understandable might have been the background to what happened, it was wholly unacceptable behaviour and certainly from your point of view Mr Carroll it's set against a background of boiling frustration which led to the behaviour in a manner that has brought you both before these courts.  'It is ironic that your anger Mr Carroll was directed towards the very individual you sought to protect.'

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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8793541/Foster-daughter-abused-sadistic-mother-dead-aged-35.html

Foster daughter who suffered 17 years of sickening torture and abuse at the hands of Jehovah's Witness dubbed 'Britain's most sadistic mother' is found dead aged 35 after devoting life to safeguarding children

    Victoria Spry was subjected to physical and mental torture for 17 years
    Eunice Spry forced her foster children to eat their own excrement and vomit
    The 35-year-old dedicated her life to helping protect other vulnerable children

By Antonia Paget For Mailonline

Published: 11:05, 1 October 2020 | Updated: 16:49, 1 October 2020

A foster daughter who was horrifically abused by 'Britain's most sadistic mother' has died aged 35 with police confirming the death is not suspicious after her body was found at a property in Cheltenham.  Victoria Spry was subjected to sickening physical and mental torture for nearly 20 years at the hands of Eunice Spry.  The Jehovah's Witness, now 76, forced young Victoria and two other children in her care to eat their own excrement and vomit.  She would also ram sticks down the children's throats, rub their faces with sandpaper and lock them naked in rooms for weeks at a time.  Victoria and her foster siblings were attacked with hot pokers, machetes and cricket bats, and had their heads held under water.  She eventually managed to escape and raise the alarm, leading to Spry being jailed for 14 years, reduced to 12 on appeal and released in 2014.  Despite her horrendous ordeal, Victoria later worked with social workers to help them spot the signs of abuse.  Victoria who wrote a book about her experiences called 'Tortured' has now passed away aged 35.  Her death is not being treated as suspicious and an inquest is expected to open later this week.  A spokesperson for Gloucestershire Police said: 'Police were called to Pennine Road in Cheltenham shortly after 11.30am on Tuesday 22 September following reports that the body of a woman had been found inside a property.  'The death is being treated as non-suspicious and the woman’s next of kin has been informed.  A file has been passed to the coroner.'

Victoria's foster brother, Christopher, said Victoria wanted to be remembered for her mission to help children.  Paying tribute to the BBC he said: 'The work she was doing with the Gloucestershire Safeguarding Board and social services was because she wanted ours to be the last "horror case" for Gloucestershire.  I think her legacy will be the work she was doing to help the next wave of social workers to spot cases like ours earlier on.'

Victoria, Spry's oldest victim, had sticks forced down her throat and was tied up naked and blindfolded.  She endured 17 years of torture before she escaped and went to police and Spry was brought to justice.  But in spite of her nightmare upbringing brave Victoria went on to work as a consultant with social services in Gloucestershire.  Speaking in 2015, she said she wanted to draw on her own experience and to do further child protection studies.  Victoria said: 'My past helped me enormously.  It is really nice to be going to the same office where I was let down as a little one, now as a young woman helping other children.'

She added: 'I was offered the opportunity to write the book nine years ago when Eunice was found guilty but I turned that away because it was the worst time possible.  I wanted to concentrate on surgery and educating myself.  As I started to get older, my brother and sister had written about it and they got a lot of understanding from people about it.  It was really quite a liberating experience, doing the book but there are lots of other reasons.'

She only escaped when she was allowed to accompany her younger brother to Jehovah's Witness meetings in Tewkesbury, aged 17.  She broke down and told everything to a young couple in the group who smuggled her out the house just before Christmas 2004.  It took three weeks to build up the courage to tell the police.  Jehovah's Witness Eunice Spry of Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, was convicted of 26 charges of child abuse against children in her foster care in April 2007.  She was sentenced to 14 years' imprisonment and ordered to pay £80,000 costs.  In sentencing, the judge told Spry that it was the 'worst case in his 40 years practising law'.

She was arrested when police raided her home in Tewkesbury in February 2005.  Following Spry's conviction, Gloucestershire County Council apologised for the 'shortcomings' in its care system.  Vital information which could have alerted social workers to the abuse was not shared by the various bodies involved.

For confidential support or advice call the Samaritans on 116 123 for free or visit www.samaritans.org.

The tragic memoirs of Victoria Spry

Victoria Spry, 35, published her account of her awful upbringing in her memoir Tortured.  The memoirs recounted her life at Eunice Spry's home in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, where she lived with other foster children in squalor.  The book, released in April 2015, detailed the horrendous torture she endured at the hands of her foster mother.  It revealed how she forced bleach and urine down Victoria's throat, knocked out her teeth and tied her up naked.  It took years for Victoria to tell her story.  She was initially offered the oppotunity to write a book when Spry was convicted in April 2007.  But Victoria felt 'it was the worst time possible' becuse she wanted to focus on getting her life back on track.  When she saw the benefit her older foster siblings had from writing about their own experiences, she decided to go ahead.  Brother Christopher Spry wrote a book titled 'Child C', after the name he was given by social services, and Alloma Gilbert also published Deliver Me From Evil.  Victoria's memoir 'Tortured: Abused and neglected by Britain’s most sadistic mum. This is my story of survival' was published in April 2015.

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