All posts tagged: schoolboy

Welsh schoolboy, 9, stuck abroad and unable to fly home after border control block

Welsh schoolboy, 9, stuck abroad and unable to fly home after border control block

A schoolboy who has been born and raised in Wales is currently stuck overseas and prevented from boarding his flight home due to a recent Home Office rule change. David Toropu, from Cardiff, was told he was unable to fly back home to the UK upon check-in. The nine-year-old then became stuck in Romania, with his mother, Christina, staying behind with her son and desperately trying to resolve the apparent issue. During the first week of the Easter holidays, David, Christina, her husband and her stepson, had enjoyed a rugby tour to Venice. After a four-night stay, the family travelled to check in at Milan airport on Thursday (April 2) for their return flight to London Gatwick. They anticipated to sail through the process smoothly, like they had done on their way out, but were instead told David would not be able to board as UK border control had no record of his UK residency, reports Wales Online. Despite being born in Cardiff and spending his whole life in Wales, David holds a Romanian passport …

Schoolboy ‘groomed’ online by Russian after joining far-right group jailed for terror offences | UK News

Schoolboy ‘groomed’ online by Russian after joining far-right group jailed for terror offences | UK News

A 16-year-old boy who joined a banned far-right group and researched a synagogue has been jailed for three-and-a-half years for a series of terror offences. The teenager, who cannot be named because of his age, was found guilty last month of possession of terrorist documents, dissemination of terrorist documents and membership of a proscribed terrorist organisation. But the jury at Leeds Crown Court failed to reach a verdict on whether he was planning a terror attack. The Crown Prosecution Service said in court it would not seek a retrial on this charge. In February 2025, the then 15-year-old boy was arrested at his father’s home in a village in Northumberland, where police found several journal entries ​​​​​​about pupils at his school. He wrote “I swear to God I just hate my f***ing school”, and “I want to do horrible things to the people in my school. Some of them should be shot”, the court heard. Image: An Airsoft shotgun was mounted on his wall. Pic: Gardham/CPNE On the same page, the boy ranked mass murderers, …

Murderer who killed schoolboy will not move to open prison after raps ‘boasting’ about his crime | UK News

Murderer who killed schoolboy will not move to open prison after raps ‘boasting’ about his crime | UK News

A murderer accused of rapping about the death of the London schoolboy he killed will not be transferred to an open prison, after the Deputy Prime Minister intervened. Jake Fahri murdered 16-year-old Jimmy Mizen in a south London bakery in 2008, throwing a glass dish at him which shattered and severed blood vessels in his neck. Given a life sentence in 2009 with a minimum term of 14 years, Fahri was released on licence in June 2023, and embarked upon a new musical venture. Image: Jimmy Mizen, 16. Pic: PA Dubbing himself Ten, the masked drill artist was reportedly showcased on BBC 1Xtra, and had a track on Spotify and YouTube that seemed to reference Jimmy’s death. But after The Sun newspaper revealed his identity, the Ministry of Justice recalled him to prison in January 2025. Putting him back behind bars, a Probation Service spokesperson said that Jimmy’s parents “deserve better than to see their son’s murderer shamelessly boasting about his violent crime”. According to a Parole Board decision summary, Fahri initially denied he was …

Dylan Thomas was ‘serial plagiarist’ as a schoolboy, publisher claims

Dylan Thomas was ‘serial plagiarist’ as a schoolboy, publisher claims

Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter A young Dylan Thomas was a serial plagiarist who frequently wrote “audacious rip-offs” of others’ work, a lifelong admirer of the Welsh poet has claimed. Publisher and Italian translator Alessandro Gallenzi says he has identified at least a dozen examples of plagiarised poems, arguing that the scale of the alleged theft is greater than previously understood. Thomas, whose masterpieces include 1953’s “Under Milk Wood” and 1951’s “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night”, is known to have plagiarised other works for one or two of his early poems. However, Gallenzi argues in an essay for the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) that 10 poems published under Thomas’s name in his school magazine, along with two poems published in the Swansea newspaper The Herald of Wales, were rip-offs of work by other writers. Thomas began attending Swansea Grammar School in 1925, where …