Latest news with #Franke
Belfast Telegraph
4 days ago
- Lifestyle
- Belfast Telegraph
Hole-in-one Portrush property boasting ocean views
Located in a highly desirable area, it's close to Portrush and a series of amenities. Number 7 Ballymacrae Road was constructed in 2018 and extends to approximately 5,700 sq ft of living space. The home's bonus features include Heatmiser-controlled OFCH with heat recovery system, triple glazed timber framed windows and a fully serviced Beam vacuum system. Hikvision CCTV surrounds the property. The entrance hall has understairs storage and an open tread staircase leads to the first floor. On this floor you'll find a bedroom with recessed lighting and an en suite shower room. There's also a dressing room with recessed lighting. There is a utility area and rear hallway, with built-in boot room and coat hooks, plus a gym. The kitchen boasts a Franke stainless steel sink unit set in granite worktop, plus space for a Rangemaster with mirrored splashback and space for American-style fridge freezer. Integrated appliances include a dishwasher and Neff eye-level oven. Additionally, there are saucepan drawers, wine rack with storage and glass display cabinets. A lounge area has a built-in media unit with shelving, TV shelf and recessed lighting. Floor-to-ceiling windows offer views across the Atlantic Ocean, Donegal headlands and surrounding countryside. The sun room has a bespoke wood pitched glass roof and integrated ceiling speakers. French doors lead to the rear garden. The utility room has a range of high and low level built-in units and is plumbed for an automatic washing machine, with space for a tumble dryer. There's additional storage and drawers. The lounge has a recessed log burner with stone surround fireplace and stone and slate hearth. The second floor has a hot press and the principal bedroom with a dressing room which contains a range of built-in furniture (four double wardrobes and two chests of drawers) and an en suite (freestanding Burlington bath, fully tiled walk-in shower with rainfall shower system). There is another bedroom — with a dressing table, two double mirrored wardrobes — with an en suite shower room, plus three further bedrooms. The family bathroom has a fully tiled walk-in shower area with rainfall shower head system, bath in tiled surround, Velux window and countryside views. Externally, there is an integral garage with boiler room and additional storage room. The site is surrounded by a selection of hedging, trees and shrubbery, plus a screened area with sunken recessed lighting. The property is conveniently located near Royal Portrush and Rathmore golf clubs, beaches, town centre and a selection of well-known restaurants.
The Sun
17-06-2025
- Climate
- The Sun
Three hikers struck dead by lightning in Austrian Alps
VIENNA: Three experienced Austrian hikers were killed when lightning struck during a sudden thunderstorm in the Tyrolean Alps over the weekend, police told AFP on Tuesday. Authorities said such incidents are 'extremely rare' in the country of almost 9.2 million, which is famed for its mountain ranges. Lightning struck when a couple, both aged 60, and a 62-year-old relative were descending from the Mittagspitze mountain near the village of Flirsch in Tyrol province. 'Due to a sudden change in weather conditions, the group immediately began their descent at around 12:30 pm (1030 GMT), but they did not return,' police said in a statement. 'The trio was struck' at an altitude of about 2,270 metres (7,440 feet), where their bodies were later found near a trail by rescuers, a local police spokeswoman told AFP. After relatives reported them missing, a rescue operation including a helicopter was launched. According to Gregor Franke, head of operations at Tyrol's Mountain Rescue Service, such accidents are 'an exception'. To avoid getting stuck in thunderstorms, which tend to occur more often in the afternoon and evening, it is vital to 'depart earlier and come down earlier', Franke told Austrian press agency APA.
New York Times
16-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Kids, Inc.
The scenes leave a pit in your stomach. In Netflix's 'Bad Influence: The Dark Side of Kidfluencing,' two early teenagers are pressured to kiss by adults — a parent and a videographer — on camera. Hulu's 'The Devil in the Family: The Ruby Franke Story' shows the dramatic footage of Franke's 12-year-old son showing up at a neighbor's door with duct tape markings around his ankle, asking them to call police. The pair of documentaries, released this year, shine a light on the perils of child-centered online content. 'Bad Influence' examines claims of abuse and exploitation made by 11 former members of the teen YouTube collective 'The Squad' against Tiffany Smith — who ran the YouTube channel, which drew two million subscribers — and her former boyfriend Hunter Hill. Both denied the allegations, and the suit was settled for a reported $1.85 million last year. Ruby Franke, a mother of six, pleaded guilty to four counts of aggravated child abuse in 2023 after denying her children adequate food and water and isolating them as she built a family YouTube channel that amassed nearly 2.5 million subscribers before it was taken down. She will serve up to 30 years in prison. Concerns about the treatment of child entertainers have abounded since the days of Judy Garland and through last year's 'Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV,' in which former Nickelodeon actors described performing under harmful and sexually inappropriate conditions. Less examined is the working world of child influencers, who are now speaking out about the harsh, unsafe or emotionally taxing constraints of being broadcast by their parents. Viewers may be tempted to ask, 'Aren't there laws against this?' 'We have pretty documented evidence of the troubling pipeline for Hollywood and child actors, but we don't have nearly similar numbers for child influencers, primarily because the phenomenon of influencing is so young,' said Chris McCarty, the founder and executive director of Quit Clicking Kids, an organization dedicated to stopping the monetization of minors. 'A lot of the kids are too young to even really fully understand what's going on, let alone, like, actually speak out about their experiences.' Child entertainer laws — which in some cases make provisions for minors' education, set limits on working hours and stipulate that earnings be placed in a trust — regulate theatrical industries. The world of content creators, where an account with a sizable following can generate millions of dollars a year for creators, is largely unregulated. McCarty worked with the California legislature to draft an amendment to the Coogan Law, legislation passed in 1939 that requires employers to set aside 15 percent of a child actor's earnings in a trust. In September 2024, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California signed Senate Bill 764, mandating that creators who feature children in 30 percent or more of their content set aside a proportioned percentage of their earnings into a trust for the child to access when they turn 18. The law went into effect this year and made California the third state (along with Illinois and Minnesota) to adopt financial protections for children featured in social media content. Some notable family vloggers uprooted from California for Tennessee in the immediate aftermath. The LaBrant family, whose YouTube (12.8 million subscribers) and TikTok content (the mother, Savannah, has 30.3 million followers) mainly revolves around their five young children, explained their move to Nashville in a post, saying 'We truly feel like this is where God is calling our family.' Brittany Xavier, a prominent TikTok creator with over 3 million followers whose content mostly showcases her three children, attributed her move to Nashville to finding mold in her family's California rental house. They did not respond to requests for comment, nor did they cite the new law as the reason for their departures, but commenters on their videos and on Reddit have speculated about whether the new legislation contributed to their moves. The amendment to the Coogan Law could be a starting point to more regulation. 'The law can also be expanded to make sure that kids have boundaries on their working hours and protections in terms of being guaranteed education,' said Mary Jean Amon, an assistant professor at Indiana University who specializes in research on parental sharing and beliefs about autonomy and consent. That might prove difficult given the lack of boundaries between work and home for child influencers. In 'The Devil in the Family,' the Franke children protested rarely having any time off from making content — outtakes from their vlogs showed one of the family's sons, Chad, who is now 20, being told to answer with more enthusiasm when he was tired and didn't want to be on camera. 'It felt more like a set than a house,' Shari Franke, 22, says in one scene in the documentary. 'For kid influencers, those cameras are ubiquitous since most of the adults around them will have one in hand at virtually all times,' Amon said. 'Rather than playing characters, child influencers are observed as themselves, while also being heavily rewarded for pandering to the desires of strangers, and sometimes they're punished for failing to do so.' Those follower-strangers represent a danger far more difficult to address. Deja Smith, a stay-at-home mother from the Houston area, creates lifestyle videos for Instagram and TikTok, where she has a following of about 140,000. She shared details and images of her newborn daughter for most of the first year of her life until strangers started recognizing her child in public and leaving upsetting comments on social media. After reading more about the ways users can manipulate children's images through artificial intelligence and search for personal information like an address through photos, she wiped images of her daughter from the internet altogether. 'I honestly feel uncomfortable watching other family vloggers' accounts that are centered around their kid,' Smith said. 'I'm not interested, and I block because I don't want to be a part of that or supporting that kind of content.'
CBC
09-04-2025
- Climate
- CBC
How well did London clear snow this winter? 2 councillors want a review
Icy sidewalks, unplowed roads and difficulty getting to school are just some of the complaints piling up from London residents who faced challenges getting around in the ice and snow this past winter. Now, two councillors are calling for a review of the city's snow and ice removal — and what needs to improve. London's Ward 7 councillor Corrine Rahman and Ward 11 councillor Skylar Franke are putting forward a motion to the infrastructure and corporate services committee with a vote at Wednesday's meeting. "I think our staff do a great job. I think that the contractors that help us out do a great job, but there's always room for improvement," Rahman said. The review would look at how the city used contracted services during the 2024-2025 winter season, alternative options for snow and ice removal on roads and sidewalks, clearance around schools, and suggestions for new machinery to help with windrows, which form when snow is left at the end of a driveway after a plow has cleared the road. "In Old South and Wortley Village where there's a lot of people who walk around to get to work, to the bus and to school, I was hearing a lot of complaints about icy sidewalks," said Franke, adding that while most complaints were from pedestrians, she also heard from drivers about a need for faster snow clearance on the road. She also heard from families near Woodland Heights Public School on Springbank Drive who had challenges walking, she said. "The main entrance is off Springbank, but most people come from the neighbourhood behind the school and those pathways are not maintained in the winter." Meanwhile, Rahman said windrows are a key issue among many residents in her ward. "A lot of people sent me a video that was being shared on social media about how to get the snow not to build up at the end of your driveways when the plows go by," she said, adding that a review could highlight suggestions that other communities have already adopted to fix maintenance issues. The review is also a way for residents to learn how much money is needed for potential changes, Rahman said. "It's always good to know the cost of those kinds of services so people can really think about it from the perspective of council and what kinds of considerations we have to make for service improvements," she said. City teams clear close to 4,000 kms of roadway and more than 1,700 kms of sidewalk in the winter, said Joel Gillard, the city's division manager of road operations, in an email. He said they prioritize high traffic routes before clearing local streets and cul de sacs. "This winter has been very busy for our crews responding to all of the snow, and we recognize the winter weather has continued later in the season than what Londoners have previously experienced the past few years," Gillard said. Franke said the goal is to get committee approval Wednesday so the conversation can go to council sometime this spring. "We're hoping to get this done so that next winter, we can really address people's concerns and try to make the city easier to walk around in the winter," she said.
Yahoo
02-04-2025
- Yahoo
Utah's new child influencer law cracks the veneer of social media fame
In a February Hulu documentary featuring Shari Franke, eldest child of the infamous mommy blogger Ruby Franke, Shari's brother Chad and her father, Kevin, viewers are privy to behind-the-scenes video from the now-defunct family vlog. In one clip, Ruby smiles while recording herself before breaking off to scream at her family off-screen. The documentary, titled 'Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke,' features several moments like this, moments that illustrate what detractors see as a wider phenomenon in which the family blogging industry is exposed for its many pitfalls and deceptions, particularly as it pertains to the protection and treatment of children. Indeed, Utah, where the Franke family resided and recorded daily family life for years, has become the fourth state to legislate protections for influencer kids with the passing of HB 322 into law in March, following high-profile activism from Franke family members, who were YouTube family vlogging royalty before matriarch Ruby was arrested on charges of child abuse. Ruby Franke and her estranged husband, Kevin Franke, were the head of the YouTube family channel '8 Passengers.' At its height, the channel commanded more than 2 million subscribers. In her content, Ruby Franke often touted strict parenting, like the time she infamously refused to bring her 6-year-old daughter lunch after the child had forgotten it or when her teenage son was made to sleep on a beanbag for months as a punishment. In 2023, Franke and her business partner, Jodi Hildebrandt, were arrested on charges of child abuse after Franke's 12-year-old son escaped from Hildebrandt's house. The child appeared emaciated and had wounds on his wrists and ankles. Franke's 9-year-old daughter was found in a closet of Hildebrandt's house, in a similar state. Hildebrandt and Franke each pleaded guilty to four counts of felony child abuse, for which they were sentenced to up to 30 years in prison. The fallout of Ruby Franke's arrest was intense. For detractors of family vloggers and mom influencers, Franke's arrest was proof positive that their suspicions were correct and something ominous was lurking under the perfect veneer of social media fame. Anti-vlogging advocates had the feeling that the bottom was finally falling out of a deeply rotten industry. Buffeted by the moment, Shari Franke, the eldest child of Ruby Franke, spoke in front of the Utah Legislature, saying, 'There is no ethical or moral family vlogger.' In the wake of the Franke family tragedy, calls for protections for kids of influencers have intensified. Though people often assume that child influencers are covered under legal protections for child actors, they're not. In 46 of 50 states, it's legal for parents to feature their kids in monetized or sponsored content without paying the children for their labor. It's particularly impactful for Utah, of all states, to have passed legislation for the privacy and profits of influencer kids, as experts often point to Utah as a hot spot for mom influencers, family vloggers and kid influencers. There's an entire book to be written about why Mormon people are so drawn to influencing — and why they're often so successful at it, including the fact that recordkeeping and scrapbooking are mainstay traditions of the Mormon faith, skills that lend themselves to content creation — but the bottom line is that Utah is one of the most popular states for family vloggers and mom influencers. And though people who were raised as kid influencers aren't a monolith, it's important to listen to them when they speak about their experiences, like when Shari Franke told Rolling Stone, 'Making money off your kids [with] no oversight as to how much the kids are getting paid — there's no way to do that well for me.' I'm a journalist who covers family vloggers and mom influencers, and my take on their work is far from black-and-white. I don't believe that showing your kid online is immoral in itself. We shouldn't conflate the horrors of Ruby Franke's story with the lives of every kid featured in their influencer parents' content. And not every mom influencer and family vlogger are evil — far from it. But if there's an industry that turns on the labor of kids, it makes sense to compensate them for their labor, at the very least. This article was originally published on
