Articles labeled: united kingdom

A man preparing dinner for his daughter’s birthday BBQ says he was “shocked” when he found a breaded chicken head mixed in amongst the bag of frozen chicken he had purchased. Because, you know, gnawing on the bird’s rib cage is just fine, but finding a HEAD?! Oh, the horrors!

Salesman Peter, 39, was about to grill the defrosted wings at the bash for nine-year-old Georgia when he glimpsed a beak.

The dad, of Bacup, Lancs, said yesterday: “The kids were horrified.”

He took the head back to his local Asda in Rawtenstall.

Store chiefs gave him £50 of beer and wine to compensate and promised to investigate.

Be sure to click through to the story to see how “horrified” his daughter is as she’s *holding* the chicken head in her hands.

A manager at Lloyds TSB bank in the U.K. had a “brilliant” marketing idea — send debit cards to kids as young as 11 years old. The real kicker is that they sent the cards without notifying parents or asking for their permission.

Politicians and debt groups are up in arms, with Vince Cable, the Lib Dem’s Treasury spokesman, quoted as regarding the move as “deeply dispiriting”.

It isn’t so much that children should not in any circumstances be allowed a Visa card. The crux of the issue is that Lloyds TSB has been sending out cards without informing the parents or guardians of the children.

Lloyds TSB’s excuse is that it can’t be sure of the addresses of the parents or guardians - last week it told me that they won’t necessarily have an account with them and so it won’t always have their contact details.

Officials in the United Kingdom are investigating a couple’s claim that a nurse at the hospital where their 14-month-old son was being treated glued one of his eyes shut. The boy had gone to the hospital for a cut on his head, which the nurse was attempting to seal shut.

Mum Wendy Duff said that, before applying the glue, the nurse had told her: ‘I do tend to get this stuff everywhere.’

For four days Archie’s eye was shut tight before he had to be put under general anaesthetic and his eyelids prised open by doctors.

An investigation has now been launched into the incident at St Mary’s Treatment Centre, Milton, Portsmouth.

Mum Wendy, of Guildford Road, Fratton, said: ‘It was horrible. I was crying, and he was crying, and the nurse was telling me to sing to calm him down – but I wasn’t calm either.’

A leading UK charity is claiming that children in post-conflict areas are being abused by UN peacekeepers and aid workers.

After research in Ivory Coast, southern Sudan and Haiti, the charity proposed an international watchdog be set up.

Save the Children said it had sacked three workers for breaching its codes, and called on others to do the same.

The three men were all dismissed in the past year for having had sex with girls aged 17 - which the charity said was a sackable offence even though not illegal.

The UN has said it welcomes the charity’s report, which it will study closely.

Save the Children says the most shocking aspect of child sex abuse is that most of it goes unreported and unpunished, with children too scared to speak out.

Brandon Davis, a 2-year-old in Birmingham, West Midlands, UK, has died after possibly overdosing on methadone. His two brothers, Lewis and Kyle, are also believed to have ingested the drug that is sometimes used to treat heroin addiction. They remain hospitalized.

Two men were arrested over the death by West Midlands Police and later freed on bail pending further inquiries. A post-mortem examination on Brandon’s body proved inconclusive and more tests will be carried out, police said.

West Midlands Ambulance Service took the children to hospital from the family flat in Walkers Heath, Birmingham, at around 10am last Tuesday, when it is believed they swallowed the heroin substitute.

The three-year-old boy is in a stable condition, and the baby boy, taken to hospital as a precaution, also remained there. Both surviving boys are believed to have been placed in protective care by Birmingham City Council.

Residents living near the family’s home on Bentmead Grove, a block of low-rise run-down flats, said the estate was known for its drug problems.

A police spokesman said a 30-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of neglect and a 33-year-old detained on suspicion of possession of a controlled drug. Both were released on bail. Police refused to specify whether the arrested men were related to the children.

After hearing countless times that the parents don’t respect their kids’ teachers enough, Dr. Bill Maxwell, the new Wales, UK chief inspector of schools, tells the teachers that they shouldn’t take “respect for granted and must ensure good communication with families.” What a novel idea!

[Dr. Maxwell] warned that Wales was in danger of losing its tradition of respecting and valuing education unless more was done to engage parents and carers.

“Good schools are taking notice but some need to try harder,” Dr Maxwell said.

“Society is changing. There’s no question that the automatic respect once accorded to school teachers, for good or ill, is not automatic now. Schools have to proactively seek and earn respect.

“Schools should be very conscious of their reputation and image in the local community.

“Successful schools try to break down the barriers between the harder-to-get parents and the school. Many of these parents, possibly, had very negative experiences of school and may even have had the same teachers.”

There seems to be a rash of schoolchildren gone missing in Bradford, U.K. 33 kids have simply gone “unaccounted for” after not showing up for classes for over two months. Now government officials have revealed that these children may have been pulled out of school and forced into arranged marriages:

The national Forced Marriage Unit was set up three years ago to tackle the problem regarded as “an abuse of human rights and a form of domestic violence”.

Laws coming into force this summer will allow victims to obtain court injunctions against anyone trying to force them to marry.

A spokesman for the department of children, schools and families said there was no evidence the “missing” children had been forced into marriage but Bradford was an area where “a forced marriage problem has been reported”.

“We have asked the local authority to find out more details about these children,” she said.

Martin Reynish, a teacher in Wales, UK, told members of a disciplinary hearing that an attack by a student “permanently changed his attitude to his job”, and that is why he was unable to stop pupils from continuously setting off firecrackers in his classroom — the incident that may lead to his dismissal for professional incompetence.

The school where he worked, Bryn Celynnog Comprehensive, in Beddau, near Pontypridd, had become more like an inner city secondary than a small rural one, [Reynish] said.

The hearing, resumed after two months, is the first of its kind held by the General Teaching Council for Wales to look at the competence of a teacher. The GTCW usually considers issues of suitability or misconduct only.

When the hearing opened last November Mr Reynish’s teaching methods came under scrutiny as the panel heard allegations of bad behaviour by pupils and his inability to control them.

Pupils let off firecrackers, took mobile phone calls and used games consoles during his lessons, the panel heard.

Giving evidence yesterday, Mr Reynish said he felt “victimised and stressed” by a local education authority capability process to assess his ability as a teacher, which forced him to present lesson plans to be externally monitored.

Asked why he might have started to find his job harder, Mr Reynish said, “With the benefit of hindsight I can remember an incident when I was physically attacked by a Year 9 pupil (aged 12 or 13), who ultimately went on to be excluded.

Shannon Bloomfield, 12, of Bletchley, Bucks, UK, loved riding horses since she was a small child. She was eagerly awaiting her 13th birthday, as that’s the age to qualify in more prestigious three-day equestrian events. There was even talk that Shannon was good enough to make it into the 2012 Olympics. Then tragedy struck during training:

She had almost completed the course when her horse, Poppy, failed to negotiate the penultimate fence.

It fell awkwardly, trapping the young rider, as horrified spectators looked on. Shannon was pronounced dead at hospital.

Yesterday, her parents, Darren and Wendy, both accomplished riders, paid tribute to their “sports-mad” daughter.

Mr Bloomfield, of Bletchley, Bucks, who sometimes competed in events alongside his daughter, said: “From the day Shannon sat up, she sat on a horse and even then she wanted to jump.

“She loved all sports, and the pony club got her into tetrathlon, which is running, shooting, horse riding and swimming. For that she had to learn to swim in weeks.

“Whatever she did in life, she always gave it her all. Even on the day she left us all she had to win her class.”