Star Of BBC's ‘Bargain Hunt' Pleads Guilty To Terror Financing-Related Offences
A regular expert on hit BBC show Bargain Hunt has pleaded guilty to offences related to terror financing in a first of its kind case.
Oghenochuko Ojiri just admitted eight counts under the Terrorism Act 2000 of failing to make a disclosure during the course of business, according to BBC News, which said he failed to report a series of high-value art sales to a man suspected of financing the proscribed group Hezbollah.
More from Deadline
BBC Content Chief Frontrunners Revealed As Race To Replace Charlotte Moore Heats Up
Marian Keyes' 'The Walsh Sisters' Series Lands Australian Streaming Deal With Stan
Tim Davie Says BBC Is "Bombarded By Regions" Across The UK Looking For Investment
The prosecution is a first of its kind. The legislation says that it is an offence if people don't notify police if they know or suspect someone has been involved with financing a proscribed terror group.
Ojiri's prosecution came after a lengthy investigation, according to reports. He has pled guilty in the past hour and will now be sentenced.
The police were reported to have said the alleged offences dated back to between October 2020 and December 2021.
Ojiri, who is also an art gallery founder, has appeared many times on the BBC's Bargain Hunt although he is a freelancer. He is still listed on the website as an expert, where he names his best ever Bargain Hunt find as a 'box of tiny Victorian china dolls.' He has not appeared on the show, which sees pairs of contestants challenged to buy antiques from shops and then sell them in an auction for profit, for two years.
Ojiri has also been on shows like Antiques Road Trip and Storage: Flog the Lot!.
A BBC spokeswoman said: 'It would not be appropriate to comment on ongoing legal proceedings.'
Best of Deadline
All The Songs In Netflix's 'Forever': From Tyler The Creator To SZA
'Poker Face' Season 2 Release Schedule: When Do New Episodes Arrive On Peacock?
Everything We Know About Celine Song's 'Materialists' So Far
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
42 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Love Island's Georgia Harrison: 'I re-read my MBE letter three times'
The sexual abuse campaigner and former reality star Georgia Harrison has told the BBC she is "honoured" to be receiving an MBE. Harrison, 30, will be awarded for her efforts to tackle violence against women and girls, which includes working with the government on the Online Safety Act in 2023. She says she feels "a responsibility to help" the many women who are victims of crimes such as intimate image abuse and deepfaking. Her ex-partner Stephen Bear was jailed for 21 months in 2023 after uploading sexual footage of himself and Harrison to OnlyFans filmed without her consent. Harrison, who is being awarded her MBE as part of the King's Birthday Honours, said she had to re-read the letter she received from King Charles "three times" as she "just couldn't believe it". "It's definitely not something I anticipated and it feels nice to have my work recognised because with campaigning sometimes you feel like a lot goes unnoticed," she told the BBC. The former reality star appeared on ITV shows such as The Only Way is Essex in 2017 and Love Island in 2018, where she entered the villa as a bombshell and gained nationwide fame. It was during 2019 that she entered MTV's The Challenge, where she met fellow reality star Bear. The pair dated on and off for a few months, with Harrison discovering in December 2020 that the now 35-year-old Bear had uploaded intimate CCTV footage of them to streaming service OnlyFans without her consent. She subsequently reported the crime and Bear was sentenced after being found guilty of voyeurism and discussing private, sexual photographs and films. Harrison was then awarded compensation in a damages claim and said she would donate some of the £207,900 to charity. She says she often feels a "responsibility to help" as she worries about the increase of social media influencers fuelling misogyny and sexism. Harrison, who is currently expecting her first child, said: "I'd be scared to have a teenager right now, being completely honest, I really would be terrified". "We've seen with the rise of Andrew Tate and some men thinking the thing to do with women is to mistreat them and think they can do what they want with them," she said. She added she feels the need to let women know, "they deserve to be treated fairly, they deserve consent and the right to their own bodies". A recent poll of teachers in the UK found three in five believe social media use has had a negative effect on behaviour in schools - with Tate being named as a reason by a number of teachers in the poll. Harrison says she has been into some schools recently to watch consent workshops with primary school age children, describing them as "brilliant". She hopes that these type of lessons will have an impact for the next generation. "I'd like to think by the time my child gets to the age where consent becomes an issue, things are going to be a lot better, because we are doing something to educate around consent and that's something that's never really been done before in this generation," she added. Harrison says "on a positive note" women have told her case and "the strength you found" has encouraged them to take their perpetrators to court for causes of rape, domestic abuse and intimate image abuse. Since Bear's conviction in 2022, she has campaigned to increase the support for women and girls who have faced similar crimes to her by working on the Online Safety Act and as part of the Women and Equalities Committee. She says she has been working with the committee on improving timescales for women who want to report crimes against them - as currently they only have six months after a crime has taken place to tell the police about it. "It took me about four months to even realise a crime had been committed to me when it happened so its scary to think, had I been notified a few months later, I may not have had the right to justice. "It should be a lot easier for women out there," she added. Harrison says she has also been receiving more and more messages from victims of deepfakes, which are videos, pictures or audio clips made with AI to look or sound real. There have been recent concerns about schoolchildren using apps to distribute AI-generated deepfake content, despite the practice being illegal. The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) - a UK-based charity partly funded by tech firms - said in February there had been 245 reports of AI-generated child sexual abuse in 2024 compared with 51 in 2023, a 380% increase. "I think [deepfake] technology is getting a lot more impressive and easier to access," Harrison said. Earlier this year, the government announced laws to tackle the threat of child sexual abuse images being generated by AI, which include making it illegal to possess, create, or distribute AI tools designed to create such material. Georgia Harrison launches sexual consent campaign Harrison says revenge porn experience like 'grief' Stephen Bear ordered to pay £27k over sex tape
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Claudia Winkleman ‘incredibly grateful' for MBE in King's Birthday Honours
TV presenter Claudia Winkleman has said she is 'incredibly grateful' to have been made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the King's Birthday Honours. The Traitors presenter was honoured on Friday alongside her Strictly Come Dancing co-host, Tess Daly, for services to broadcasting. Winkleman, 53, said: 'I am incredibly grateful to receive this honour. 'It's a real privilege to work with extraordinarily talented people and I have only got this because of them. So this is for the BBC, the traitors and the faithful, for pianos and for the cha cha. 'I will buy a hat and am taking my mum. I am ridiculously lucky and will celebrate with Tess by doing a paso doble.' Born and raised in London, she studied history of art at Cambridge University and after graduating began her career as a TV and radio presenter, fronting a range of BBC TV shows including Comic Relief and The Great British Sewing Bee. She also presented on BBC Radio 2 until 2024, hosting different programmes on the station including the comedy quiz series Hot Gossip, the Claudia Winkleman Arts Show and Claudia On Sunday. In 2004, she joined BBC One's Strictly Come Dancing, presenting its weekday companion show It Takes Two until she passed it to broadcaster Zoe Ball, with her taking on the Sunday night results show alongside Daly. The presenter joined Daly for the main show every Saturday from 2014, after Sir Bruce Forsyth stepped down. The Bafta-winning presenter is also behind the hit BBC game show The Traitors and won best entertainment performance at the 2023 awards. She will be fronting its charity spin-off series, The Celebrity Traitors, in which 19 famous faces will enter the castle in the Highlands, including comedian Alan Carr, actor and broadcaster Sir Stephen Fry and retired diver Tom Daley. Stephen Lambert, who is also recognised in the King's Birthday Honours and is the founder and chief executive of Studio Lambert, said: 'I'm thrilled that Claudia Winkleman is being honoured too; her brilliant hosting has played such a key role in the success of The Traitors.' Studio Lambert is the production company behind The Traitors, Gogglebox, Race Across the World, and Squid Game: The Challenge. Winkleman hosts the Channel 4 general knowledge gameshow One Question, where she recently described wanting to cry after a father and daughter won £100,000, making history on the programme for winning the top prize without looking at all of the possible answers. She also presents Channel 4's The Piano, in which she is joined by singer-songwriter Mika and Grammy-winner Jon Batiste, as they hunt for Britain's most talented undiscovered pianists. She will host a concert for this year's BBC Proms, including a matinee and evening Traitors-themed performance, which is expected to have a range of famous classical works, alongside new arrangements of some of the music from the popular psychological reality programme. Winkleman is a trustee of the The British Museum and a patron of Child Bereavement UK.
Atlantic
2 hours ago
- Atlantic
The L.A. Distortion Effect
One hallmark of our current moment is that when an event happens, there is little collective agreement on even basic facts. This, despite there being more documentary evidence than ever before in history: Information is abundant, yet consensus is elusive. The ICE protests in Los Angeles over the past week offer an especially relevant example of this phenomenon. What has transpired is fairly clear: A series of ICE raids and arrests late last week prompted protests in select areas of the city, namely downtown, near a federal building where ICE has offices, and around City Hall and the Metropolitan Detention Center. There have been other protests south of there, around a Home Depot in Paramount, where Border Patrol agents gathered last week. The majority of these protests have been civil ('I mostly saw clergy sit-ins and Tejano bands,' The American Prospect 's David Dayen wrote). There has been some looting and property destruction. 'One group of vandals summoned several Waymo self-driving cars to the street next to the plaza where the city was founded and set them ablaze,' my colleague Nick Miroff, who has been present at the demonstrations, wrote. As is common in modern protests, there has also been ample viral footage from news organizations showing militarized police responding aggressively in encounters, sometimes without provocation. In one well-circulated clip, an officer in riot gear fires a nonlethal round directly at an Australian television correspondent carrying a microphone while on air; another piece of footage shot from above shows a police officer on horseback trampling a protester on the ground. All of these dynamics are familiar in the post-Ferguson era of protest. What you are witnessing is a news event distributed and consumed through a constellation of different still images and video clips, all filmed from different perspectives and presented by individuals and organizations with different agendas. It is a buffet of violence, celebration, confusion, and sensationalism. Consumed in aggregate, it might provide an accurate representation of the proceedings: a tense, potentially dangerous, but still contained response by a community to a brutal federal immigration crackdown. Unfortunately, very few people consume media this way. And so the protests follow the choose-your-own-adventure quality of a fractured media ecosystem, where, depending on the prism one chooses, what's happening in L.A. varies considerably. Anyone is capable of cherry-picking media to suit their arguments, of course, and social media has always narrowed the aperture of news events to fit particular viewpoints. Regardless of ideology, dramatic perspectives succeed on platforms. It is possible that one's impression of the protests would be incorrectly skewed if informed only by Bluesky commentators, MSNBC guests, or self-proclaimed rational centrists. The right, for example, has mocked the idea of 'mostly peaceful protests' as ludicrous when juxtaposed with video of what they see as evidence to the contrary. It's likely that my grasp of the events and their politics are shaped by decades of algorithmic social-media consumption. Yet the situation in L.A. only further clarifies the asymmetries among media ecosystems. This is not an even playing field. The right-wing media complex has a disproportionate presence and is populated by extreme personalities who have no problem embracing nonsense AI imagery and flagrantly untrue reporting that fits their agenda. Here you will find a loosely affiliated network of streamers, influencers, alternative social networks, extremely online vice presidents, and Fox News personalities who appear invested in portraying the L.A. protests as a full-blown insurrection. To follow these reports is to believe that people are not protesting but rioting throughout the city. In this alternate reality, the whole of Los Angeles is a bona fide war zone. (It is not, despite President Donald Trump's wildly disproportionate response, which includes deploying hundreds of U.S. Marines to the area and federalizing thousands of National Guard members.) I spent the better part of the week drinking from this particular firehose, reading X and Truth Social posts and watching videos from Rumble. On these platforms, the protests are less a news event than a justification for the authoritarian use of force. Nearly every image or video contains selectively chosen visuals of burning cars or Mexican flags unfurling in a smog of tear gas, and they're cycled on repeat to create a sense of overwhelming chaos. They have titles such as 'CIVIL WAR ALERT' and 'DEMOCRATS STOKE WW3!' All of this incendiary messaging is assisted by generative-AI images of postapocalyptic, smoldering city streets—pure propaganda to fill the gap between reality and the world as the MAGA faithful wish to see it. I've written before about how the internet has obliterated the monoculture, empowering individuals to cocoon themselves in alternate realities despite confounding evidence—it is a machine that justifies any belief. This is not a new phenomenon, but the problem is getting worse as media ecosystems mature and adjust to new technologies. On Tuesday, one of the top results for one user's TikTok search for Los Angeles curfew was an AI-generated video rotating through slop images of a looted city under lockdown. Even to the untrained eye, the images were easily identifiable as AI-rendered (the word curfew came out looking like ciuftew). Still, it's not clear that this matters to the people consuming and sharing the bogus footage. Even though such reality-fracturing has become a load-bearing feature of our information environment, the result is disturbing: Some percentage of Americans believes that one of the country's largest cities is now a hellscape, when, in fact, almost all residents of Los Angeles are going about their normal lives. On platforms such as Bluesky and Instagram, I've seen L.A. residents sharing pictures of themselves going about their day-to-day lives—taking out the trash, going to the farmers' market—and lots of pictures of the city's unmistakable skyline against the backdrop of a beautiful summer day. These are earnest efforts to show the city as it is (fine)—an attempt to wrest control of a narrative, albeit one that is actually based in truth. Yet it's hard to imagine any of this reaching the eyes of the people who participate in the opposing ecosystem, and even if it did, it's unclear whether it would matter. As I documented in October, after Hurricanes Helene and Milton destroyed parts of the United States, AI-generated images were used by Trump supporters 'to convey whatever partisan message suits the moment, regardless of truth.' In the cinematic universe of right-wing media, the L.A. ICE protests are a sequel of sorts to the Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020. It doesn't matter that the size and scope have been different in Los Angeles (at present, the L.A. protests do not, for instance, resemble the 100-plus nights of demonstrations and clashes between protesters and police that took place in Portland, Oregon, in 2020): Influencers and broadcasters on the right have seized on the association with those previous protests, insinuating that this next installment, like all sequels, will be a bigger and bolder spectacle. Politicians are running the sequel playbook—Senator Tom Cotton, who wrote a rightly criticized New York Times op-ed in 2020 urging Trump to 'Send in the Troops' to quash BLM demonstrations, wrote another op-ed, this time for The Wall Street Journal, with the headline 'Send in the Troops, for Real.' (For transparency's sake, I should note that I worked for the Times opinion desk when the Cotton op-ed was published and publicly objected to it at the time.) There is a sequel vibe to so much of the Trump administration's second term. The administration's policies are more extreme, and there's a brazenness to the whole affair—nobody's even trying to justify the plot (or, in this case, cover up the corruption and dubious legality of the government's deportation regime). All of us, Trump supporters very much included, are treated as a captive audience, forced to watch whether we like it or not. This feeling has naturally trickled down to much of the discourse and news around Trump's second presidency, which feels (and generally is) direr, angrier, more intractable. The distortions are everywhere: People mainlining fascistic AI slop are occupying an alternate reality. But even those of us who understand the complexity of the protests are forced to live in our own bifurcated reality, one where, even as the internet shows us fresh horrors every hour, life outside these feeds may be continuing in ways that feel familiar and boring. We are living through the regime of a budding authoritarian—the emergency is here, now—yet our cities are not yet on fire in the way that many shock jocks say they are. The only way out of this mess begins with resisting the distortions. In many cases, the first step is to state things plainly. Los Angeles is not a lawless, postapocalyptic war zone. The right to protest is constitutionally protected, and protests have the potential to become violent—consider how Trump is attempting to use the force of the state to silence dissent against his administration. There are thousands more peaceful demonstrations scheduled nationally this weekend. The tools that promised to empower us, connect us, and bring us closer to the truth are instead doing the opposite. A meaningful percentage of American citizens appears to have dissociated from reality. In fact, many of them seem to like it that way.
