1.An Australian girl who was subjected to female genital mutilation was told to “close her eyes and imagine being a princess in a garden” while her legs were held open and she was cut.
News Ltd has been covering the harrowing trial of the girl’s mother, who is accused of taking both her daughters, who were both under the age of nine at the time, to be mutilated.
The Telegraph says the eldest girl told police: “She told me to think of that so I didn’t feel as much but I did feel it a little bit … it hurt.”
The girl made her remakes in a recorded interview with police and a social worker from her primary school.
The trial is the first time charges relating to the genital mutilation of a girl have been bought to court in NSW.
On trial are the girls’ mother, 38, along with a retired midwife, 71, and a high-ranking Sheik from the Shia Islamic sect Dawoodi Bohra.
The mother and the midwife have pleaded not guilty. The crime carries a maximum penalty of 21 years.
The religious leader, Sheik Shabbir Mohammedbhai Vaziri, 59, has pleaded not guilty to being an accessory after the fact to female genital mutilation.
The Telegraph says: “In the interview, the social worker asked the girl, known as C1, if she knew about the procedure of ‘khatna’ where a girls private parts are cut.
““Yes,” she said. “It is because it has happened to me.”
“C1 went on to describe how ‘khatna’ was performed on her when she was seven by an unknown woman in a Wollongong house while her mother, grandmother and her great aunt stood by.
“She told the social worker and a police officer that in her culture, “it has to happen to every girl, it has to be at seven, I think it has to be.”
C1 said she next met the woman when the same procedure was carried out on her six-year-old sister at their family home in Sydney during the school holidays in 2012.
Police say the Sheik told people to tell say they do not believe in the practice when questioned.
2.Hand sanitiser contains up to 95 per cent alcohol and if your kids take it and drink it, they will get dangerously drunk.
That is the message from a new report which shows that more than 16,000 American children were admitted to the emergency ward last year after becoming drunk on hand sanitizer.
CNN reports that sanitizer, which now comes in “fun” scents such as grape and strawberry, can seem tasty to kids. Statistics from the Georgia Poison Center says the number of cases of poisoning from sanitiser jumped from 3,266 cases in 2010 to 16,117 in 2014.
The report says the alcohol in hand sanitizer is so concentrated that just a few squirts can actually cause alcohol poisoning.
The report cites the example of six-year-old Nhaijah Russell, who swallowed “three or four squirts of seemingly innocuous liquid hand sanitizer at school. It tasted good, she said, like strawberry. It also contained enough alcohol to make her dangerously drunk. She arrived at the emergency room slurring her words and unable to walk.”
“A kid is not thinking this is bad for them,” the poison center’s director tells CNN.
“There are strawberry-, grape-, orange-flavoured hand sanitizers that are very appealing to kids.”
Nhaijah’s blood-alcohol level was .179, twice the legal limit for an adult.
“That was very scary,” her mother said.
“It could have been very lethal for my child.”
3.How many children do you need to be truly happy? Brace yourself, for it seems the answer is four.
The ABC reports on a new
five-year study by Perth’s Edith Cowan University which has found that families with four children are the happiest.
Bronwyn Harman, a lecturer in the School of Psychology and Social Science, asked parents from different family types about resilience, social support and self-esteem.
She found that parents with four or more children had the best ratings in each of these areas.
“With large families, we think they have social support within the family,” Dr Harman said.
“The kids are never bored, they have someone to play with and they get independence quite early on.”
The disadvantages of having a larger family, such as the expense and time pressures, were balanced out by the joy their children gave them.
“Parents accept that there is chaos in their lives but it does not negate the happiness they get from their families,” Dr Harman explained.
Harmon thought they’d be stressed out, but “they said that they had planned a large family, it was a joyful experience for them, the house was often full of laughter, and there were many reasons to celebrate,” she says.
The least happy in her still-unpublished study were single dads, who she says are often seen as lesser parents and struggle to play a role in their children’s lives.
4.A US couple who agreed to adopt infant triplets were left reeling when they discovered that they were expecting twins.
A newspaper in Tulsa reports that Andy and Sarah Justice “wanted nothing more than to have a baby”, but after struggling to conceive for years, they decided to look into other options.
With IVF costing between $30,000–60,000, the Justices decided to look at adoption.
They were paired with an expecting mother, and when Sarah went to the first ultrasound, she saw that it was triplets.
Born two months early and weighing only 3 pounds each, the babies — Joel, Hannah, and Elizabeth — stayed in the neonatal intensive care.
A week later, Sarah began to feel sick and scheduled a doctor’s appointment. He confirmed her suspicion. She was pregnant — with twins!
“We were very happy. Did we panic a little? Of course. But we were very happy,” she told TulsaWorld.
“We really felt this was something God wanted us to do. And sometimes, when you follow God’s will in one thing, it leads to the next thing.”
The Justice family grew from two to seven in less than a year after welcoming Abigail and Andrew.
According to the couple, the children go through 84 bottles and 300 diapers a week! While they have their hands full — and barely sleep — Andy and Sarah wouldn’t want it any other way. They consider their babies a blessing, adding that “God has a great sense of humour.”
