Labubu dolls: Danger warning over fakes found in Aberdeen
The council's trading standards team seized the counterfeit Labubu toys from four premises across the city.They did not have the required safety labelling.Trading standards manager Graeme Paton said: "Following the discovery of counterfeit toys, we want to alert consumers and particularly parents to be extra vigilant."These counterfeit toys can seem like a bargain compared with trying to source the genuine toy, especially when they are a much-sought-after item, but they are potentially dangerous."He added: "Counterfeit toys can potentially pose significant dangers to young children such as chemical exposure and choking hazards. "These products routinely lack proper safety testing and we encourage anyone concerned about the safety of toys they've purchased to get in touch with us via Consumer Advice Scotland."
What are Labubu dolls?
Labubu is both a fictional character and a brand.The word itself does not mean anything.It is the name of a character in "The Monsters" toy series created by Hong Kong-born artist Kasing Lung.The vinyl faces are attached to plush bodies, and come with a signature look - pointy ears, big eyes and a mischievous grin showing nine teeth.A curious yet divided internet cannot seem to decide if they are adorable, or just bizarre.
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The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
‘I have different weathers in my brain': how Celeste rekindled her love of music after heartbreak and loss
On Glastonbury's Pyramid stage in June, Celeste appeared wearing smeared black eye makeup and a leather jacket moulded with the impression of feathers, latched at the throat. She evoked glamour and tragedy, a bird with its wings clipped. 'My first album came out nearly five years ago and I didn't expect it to take so long,' she said of its follow-up. 'But I'm here now.' Celeste broke through in 2020, her voice reminiscent of Billie Holiday's racked beauty, but sparkling with a distinctly British lilt: a controlled, powerful vibrato that stirs the soul. Despite her jazz-leaning balladry not being obvious chart fodder, she became the first British female act in five years to reach No 1 with her debut album, Not Your Muse, which was nominated for the Mercury prize. She also won the BBC's Sound of 2020 poll and the Brit award for rising star and was nominated for an Oscar for best original song (for Hear My Voice from The Trial of the Chicago 7) the year after – but her chance to capitalise on those accolades was stalled by the pandemic. She had to halt her touring ambitions. Of the years since, she says: 'Sometimes you worry: are you on your path?' Celeste was haunting and spectacular when I saw her at Glastonbury, but now, as we stroll through Hyde Park in central London, she is relaxed and laughs easily. She becomes distracted by a carousel ride – 'They're my favourite! I love the music' – then she is back to talking about the five-year struggle to make her excellent second album, Woman of Faces, which will be released in November. 'The title was kind of a diagnosis of how I feel sometimes; a device to help me begin to understand my own complexity,' she says. She was born Celeste Waite in California to a mother from Dagenham, east London, and a Jamaican father. Her mother had found her way to Hollywood as a makeup artist and Celeste was born 'quite quickly' after her parents met there. They separated when Celeste turned one and she and her mother moved to England to live in Celeste's grandparents' home. 'It was almost like my mother was my sister, because we were both being looked after by my nan and grandad.' These are happy memories, but she has 'these different weathers in my brain … I've always had this little tinge of melancholy.' Maybe, she says, it stems in part from a lack of rootedness: 'You move from America to England and you don't really remember it, but you know that there's people that you've known there and built connections with. And then you don't have that.' She wondered if she would end up with a mental health diagnosis, 'something more clinical later on down the line. But I didn't feel I really needed that.' Instead, she found solace in other artists' music, 'people's lyrics and emotions and melodies, even how they dress themselves – that's always been quite a big remedy without needing to have a professional'. While she is frequently compared to Adele and Amy Winehouse, unlike them Celeste did not attend the Brit school of performing arts, instead studying music technology at sixth-form college in Brighton and working in a pub as she got her career off the ground. 'I'm really glad I taught myself to sing,' she says, arguing that it gives her 'rawness and authenticity'. Her venture into music was galvanised by the death of her father from lung cancer when she was 16: 'When you lose someone, every day you wake up and you're stunned by the fact that they're gone. And there's a certain point where you say to yourself: I can't do this any more, and that's when you start to either go to the gym or get into a practice. For me, that was where I picked up music and became really focused.' In the mid-2010s, she started uploading music to YouTube and SoundCloud and got a manager. She was picked up as a guest vocalist for producers such as Avicii, while Lily Allen's label released her debut single. 'I worked double shifts in a pub on weekends to afford to go to the studio,' she says. 'It took my energy away and I wasn't able to sing as well any more.' But she carried on doggedly, got signed to the major label Polydor, bagged the 2020 John Lewis Christmas ad soundtrack and beguiled listeners on songs such as Strange, in which her vocal tone expresses every contradictory emotion in a breakup – resignation, hurt, bafflement, poignancy, even a kind of helpless amusement at how awful it all is – in just four minutes. She is clear that she has received plenty of support and encouragement within Polydor: 'The people that signed me came into music with the intention to make meaningful, poignant, credible music.' But at the commercial end of the industry, there is still 'a huge pressure to make money. If you're not in the top 2% of acts who have such a huge fanbase, you maybe don't get the freedom' to do adventurous work. She says that developing her initial sound caused friction. 'I was hanging around all these jazz musicians like Steam Down and Nubya Garcia, real innovators, and it wasn't easy for me to go into the label and be like: this is what I want to do.' She has managed to preserve a sense of strangeness and singularity. Unlike her earlier peppy soul-pop hit Stop This Flame, familiar to millions as backing music on Sky Sports, most of the songs on Woman of Faces don't even feature percussion – almost unthinkable in 21st-century pop – and there aren't many British singers on major labels doing symphonic jazz. She wanted 'a cinematic feel' and referenced Bernard Herrmann – a composer for films by Hitchcock, Welles and Scorsese – in the studio as she worked with the conductor Robert Ames and the London Contemporary Orchestra. 'Herrmann was a real innovator and it's reflected in people like Busta Rhymes sampling him [on Gimme Some More] all those years later. So we wanted to make sure that if we went into that territory of a cinematic string orchestra, it didn't feel like an impression of the 1950s – it sounded like something new.' With this ambitious scope and Celeste shuttling between sessions in Los Angeles and London, it took a lot longer than expected to complete Woman of Faces. It was originally due to be finished by the end of 2022 and released a year later. 'I didn't expect it to take so long,' she says. 'And if I'm really honest with you, at the end of 2021, into 2022, I experienced some heartache and I fell into such a depression about it all.' A relationship had ended. 'When you lose the person from your life that you really love, there's a grief that comes over you,' she says. The album's first single, On With the Show, was written at her lowest point. 'I didn't really want to go to the studio; I didn't really feel like I actually wanted to live at that point. I didn't find meaning and purpose in the music.' She just had the song title, which she shared with her collaborator Matt Maltese. 'I didn't even have to explain to him what it would be about, because he just knew. We spoke about the song and what it needed to be.' She had also recently seen Marius Petipa's 1898 classical ballet Raymonda. 'It's about a woman in the Crimean war and she has two lovers: one is in Russia and one is in Crimea,' she says. 'I could relate, because she was torn between these two entities: at that point, my dedication to music and my dedication to a person. And one was taking the energy from the other. So On With the Show was about me having to find the courage to let go of something, to meet back in with the path of my life as a singer.' Worse, she says, 'social media had come in to erode my relationship'. As a public figure on social media, 'people can view your relationship and have so much awareness of the fact that you're even in one. There's this really strange, invisible, intangible impression that interactions in that space can leave upon your living reality. I was upset at how much that had come to affect my personal, real life.' On Could Be Machine, a curveball industrial pop song inspired by Lady Gaga, Celeste explores the idea that 'the more time we spend with this technology, the more we become it'. 'My phone had become this antagonist in my life, via communication that I didn't want to receive and the fact it could just be in your hand. It was quite alien, in a way. I hadn't grown up with a phone stuck to my hand and it was something that I had to become more and more 'one' with in my music career.' She says that, during the relationship, love had reverted her to a kind of 'child-like state … a really pure version of yourself, before the world has seeped in and shaped you'. Losing the person who brought her into that state meant that she had to 'learn how to steer and guide' herself to rediscover it. She is leaning on other musicians to help her understand these difficult years. She cites Nina Simone's song Stars, a ballad about the cruelty and melancholy of being a professional musician. 'It says so much about the tragedy of where her life is at that moment in time, but then there's so much triumph in the fact she even gets to express herself in that way.' Another inspiration for Woman of Faces was the 1951 musical romantic comedy An American in Paris and one of its stars, Oscar Levant, who spent time in mental health institutions. 'I was really moved by what he seemed to carry in his being. And, I suppose, I relate a lot to artists who carry this pain, but their work eases it.' Whereas Celeste was previously in thrall to American blues and R&B ('the older sense of what R&B was in the 1940s'), down to the way she might 'time things and phrase things and even pronounce things', she has 'learned what my true voice is and who I really am as a person. I still have some of that phrasing and pronunciation there, but I exist a lot more as myself, therefore I sing a lot more as myself.' Buoyed up by her and others' art, does she feel happy? 'Yes!' She grins and throws her hands in the air. 'The main thing is finding happiness within the relationships I maintain around me and making sure those are kept really positive and nourishing.' She is glad to be in her 30s: 'Age becomes kind of taboo for a woman in the music industry – but then you hear people like Solange speak about women really coming into their true sense of who they are within their work. There's been a shift.' And if the happiness in her career ever dissipates, she has decided she will simply move on. 'I don't really see the need to live in a feeling of oppression, when I know there's so much freedom outside this world. And anyway, I'm sure I would find my way back to it again. But on my own terms.' Women of Faces is released on 14 November on Polydor In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@ or jo@ In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at
Sky News
an hour ago
- Sky News
Brian Cox: Trump talking 'b*******s' on Scottish independence
Why you can trust Sky News Hollywood actor Brian Cox has told Sky News that Donald Trump is talking "bollocks" after suggesting there should be 50 or 75 years between Scottish independence referendums. The US president said a country "can't go through that too much" when questioned by reporters during his visit to Scotland this week. The Emmy-winning star, who is an independence supporter, has hit back, branding him "that idiot in America". The 79-year-old told Sky News: "He's talking bollocks. I'm sorry, but he does. It's rubbish. Let's get on with it and let's get it [independence] done. We can do it. "It's been tough as there's a great deal of undermining that has gone on." 2:13 SNP fraud probe causing 'harm' Mr Cox said the police fraud investigation examining the SNP's finances has done "enormous harm" to the party and wider independence movement. Nicola Sturgeon was arrested as part of the long-running police probe but cleared of any wrongdoing earlier this year. The former first minister's estranged husband Peter Murrell, who was SNP chief executive for two decades, appeared in court in April to face a charge of alleged embezzlement. He has entered no plea. Brian Cox is preparing to return to the Scottish stage for the first time in a decade in a play about the Royal Bank of Scotland's role in the 2008 financial crash. Ahead of the Edinburgh festival performances, the veteran actor told Sky News: "I think it's a masterpiece. It's certainly one of the best pieces of work I've been involved in. 'My friend Spacey should be forgiven' The Succession star was also asked about his "old friend" Kevin Spacey. The former House of Cards actor, 65, was exiled from the showbiz world in 2017 after allegations of sexual misconduct. Spacey has admitted to "being too handsy" in the past and "touching someone sexually" when he didn't know they "didn't want him to". Spacey stood trial in the UK for multiple sexual offences against four men in July 2023 but was acquitted on all counts. Mr Cox told Sky News: "I am so against cancel culture. Kevin has made a lot of mistakes, but there is a sort of viciousness about it which is unwarranted. "Everybody is stupid as everybody else. Everybody is capable of the same mistakes and the same sins as everybody else." Asked if he could see a return to showbiz for Spacey, Cox replied: "I would think so eventually, but it's very tough for him. "He was tricky, but he has learnt a big lesson. He should be allowed to go on because he is a very fine actor. I just think we should be forgiving."
Times
an hour ago
- Times
Conned by the Tinder Swindler: how his victims took revenge
If Simon Leviev were to enter the busy north London café in which I'm sitting with Cecilie Fjellhoy and Pernilla Sjoholm, 'He would wet his pants and run,' Sjoholm says. Posing as a diamond heir, Leviev — better known as the Tinder Swindler — has defrauded victims around the world out of more than $10 million. While the 2022 release of the smash hit Netflix documentary The Tinder Swindler laid bare the women's devastation — the crippling debt they were left trying to escape, and, for Fjellhoy, the marriage and baby-filled future Leviev had promised being exposed as a sham — now they say the tables are finally turning. 'I have way more power than he does,' Sjoholm, 38, says with a smile. 'He's not a real man; he's scared of two blonde women.' The enormous reach of the documentary — the most watched in Netflix's history on its release, racking up 166 million hours of viewing time within its first month on the platform — made Leviev recognisable to many would-be victims. 'He's really angry with all the successes that we have had,' Fjellhoy, 36, says. 'I think he really wanted us to be miserable for the rest of our lives.' Instead, the women say they are in a strange way grateful for the Leviev-shaped wrecking ball that tore through their worlds nearly a decade ago. Both now travel the world giving talks about online safety and romance fraud, while Sjoholm has cofounded IDfier, an identity verification platform designed to weed out those lurking beneath AI and deepfakes. It has also strengthened their determination to seek better protections for victims. 'We want the laws to change. This is not just money loss,' Sjoholm says. It's on a par with 'murder, in my eyes. This is emotional abuse; people take their lives due to this. It's a serious, serious crime.' Fjellhoy says that the way the likes of banks and police treat victims of romance fraud can be worse than the original deception. 'A far tougher pill to swallow — and why I'm still traumatised — is the treatment of me after it,' she says. 'No victim should be placed into a courtroom and have to defend themselves. And the criminal who started everything, he's just been taken out of the equation.' • Read more expert advice on sex, relationships, dating and love Though it was affecting, the film inevitably couldn't capture the complexity of the women's relationships with Leviev — real name Shimon Hayut (he has no connection to the Leviev diamond dynasty after which he renamed himself to bolster his credentials) — nor the aftermath. And so Fjellhoy and Sjoholm have written Swindled Never After: How We Survived (and You Can Spot) a Relationship Scammer, an unflinching account of their brushes with suicide and bankruptcy, global fame and public blame, along with online safety tips and expert insight from criminologists and psychologists. The goal, the women say, is to try to stem the rapidly rising tide of romance fraud, which cost the UK £106 million last year. It is also their chance to reframe the victim-shaming that so often follows crimes of this kind. For them, the question is not why do people fall for such scams, but rather why do perpetrators prey on innocent victims in the first place? And why does it remain nigh-on impossible to bring them to justice? Fjellhoy was 29 when she swiped right on Leviev, who told her he was visiting London, where she lives, on a business trip. They met for coffee at the Four Seasons and, within 24 hours, she was boarding a private jet to his next meeting in Sofia, Bulgaria, along with his young daughter, her mother and a smattering of 'business associates'. She liked his 'magnetism' and style, she says, and, having grown up on a diet of Disney fairytales, was earnestly looking for everlasting love. But her 'prince of diamonds', as he dubbed himself, would within months lose his sparkle, his penchant for Rolls-Royces and five-star hotel stays quickly becoming Fjellhoy's problem. Leviev, now 34, made her acquire a platinum Amex card — so former acquaintances wishing to do him harm, he said, couldn't track his movements — and maxed it out immediately. He urged her to meet him in Amsterdam with $25,000 (some £18,000) in cash, and requested similarly vast sums on so many occasions that she ended up taking out nine loans totalling $250,000. When he sent her a cheque for $500,000, which then bounced, it occurred to her that 'the man who held me in his arms, kissed me on the forehead, shared a bed with me and planned a future with me… All that was a lie.' That realisation 'makes me tear up, even today'. Fjellhoy, then working in tech with a full social life and strong support network back in her native Norway, considered herself an unlikely victim of such deception. But between the deep sense of violation at the hands of a master manipulator and being hounded by creditors (four took her to court), 'I felt like I was drowning; someone was dragging me to rock bottom,' she writes in Swindled Never After. In one particularly dark moment, a lorry driving towards her in the next lane gained a sudden appeal. 'Wouldn't it be better to end it here?' she wondered, before forcing herself to return home, visit the local hospital and get a referral to a psychiatric unit. After three weeks there, and seven years of therapy and medication, it is only in recent months that she has come off antidepressants. 'I never wanted to be on them,' she says. But, 'I needed them. I was thinking of stopping a couple of times, but then when you get hit with a lawsuit [by creditors], or police officers barging in, you need antidepressants,' she says. 'I tell you, that is not something that is for the faint of heart.' Sjoholm, the more voluble of the two, was also left contemplating suicide after learning of Leviev's lies. Their platonic nine-month relationship involved her being flown via jet to parties in Mykonos and Rome (in some cases, unknowingly paid for by Fjellhoy), and the offer of a $15,000 monthly rental budget so that they could move in together. Rather than being 'gold-diggers', as internet critics have suggested, Sjoholm says they were 'milking cows' for Leviev, whose network of victims doesn't discriminate against gender, individuals or companies, or global location. Sjoholm lost $45,000 funding his playboy lifestyle — the deposit she'd saved for a home — an amount then doubled by legal fees when she unsuccessfully attempted to take the bank who had wired her payments to Leviev to court. The course of their lives would be altogether different had Fjellhoy not contacted a Norwegian newspaper in 2019. Its journalists found Sjoholm waiting outside the Mandarin Oriental in Munich as she met Leviev. When he left and saw the cameras, he turned aggressive, issuing death threats that 'were not cryptic; they were spoken as if they were a done deal: 'I've paid a price for your head. It wasn't even that expensive — it only cost €1,000 because you aren't worth any more.' ' • Sweet Bobby and me: the catfishing that shocked the world The fallout left Sjoholm questioning not only 'what I would do to myself; I didn't know what Simon might try to do to me.' Those feelings worsened following the film's release. During what she now looks back on as 'the lowest point in my life', she began making fake posts on Instagram to mislead the now millions of people watching her every move, in case Leviev's threats — or the legions of 'incels' she says were now supporting him — led to a nasty end. Today Sjoholm, who is Swedish but lives in Spain, is in a far better place. She was introduced to her partner via mutual friends four years ago and, as mother to their two-year-old twins, has found her 'life's purpose'. (They call Fjellhoy, who spent three months at their home after they were born, 'auntie'.) Moving on has been crucial, she says. 'I don't let this consume my life. Because if I were to sit there and just look into what [Leviev's] doing every day, and be angry and be annoyed, then I am continuing to let him defraud me.' Although defiant, she concedes that the anger still eats at her sometimes. There are 'days where I feel like I'm struggling; that I would have loved to give all this money, for example, towards my children and their future. And I gave it away to a criminal instead.' She is, at least, free from the choppy waters of the online dating pool, which is 'definitely worse' now compared with when the women met Leviev. • The handsome army hero who turned out to be an AI dating scam Fjellhoy has returned to the apps — 'I still love love' — albeit with more caution. 'Of course, I have my guard up; I haven't been in a long-term relationship since then. So I think it has had a bigger impact than I would like to say,' she admits. Now, her swiping comes with extra mental gymnastics: is this person who he says he is? Or, 'Are they just going on a date because they think it's interesting to hear the Tinder Swindler story?' (She is not worried about being financially duped again, she says, as, 'There's nothing left. I'm bankrupt. I can't even get a credit card.') She toyed with avoiding mention of the documentary to potential suitors entirely, but has opted to list it on her dating profile — her way of avoiding what she thinks will otherwise lead to 'draining' conversations down the line. 'It's not baggage,' Fjellhoy says of her unique backstory — although one match did immediately block her on learning of her Netflix fame. 'But before this, it was just so much easier.' It is unclear what struggles, if any, Leviev has been left to face. In 2019, he was jailed for 15 months in his native Israel for using a fake passport, but was released after just five. Aside from a 2015 conviction for defrauding three Finnish women — one of whom Fjellhoy met on that first private plane ride — he has mostly evaded justice. He has repeatedly alleged that he is making a documentary with Netflix (the platform says this is not true), was selling personalised video messages on Cameo for $200 and has threatened to start a podcast. Last year he said that the women's claims were 'all a big show and will eventually fall apart… I'm like Trump. I can't be knocked down; I'm invincible.' His victims believe he has evaded prosecution and punishment thanks to the complex nature of his frauds, plus the fact that they span numerous countries and jurisdictions. That so many people continue to get in touch asking whether Leviev has finally been caught and charged only highlights how broken the system remains, the women feel. 'Not to have had justice in this case is a disfavour for the fraud community as a whole,' Fjellhoy says. 'Because if you can't even get him' — someone whose case is highly public and is known to authorities the world over — 'what are you even talking about?' All the while, his victims continue to contact Fjellhoy and Sjoholm — most recently, a man who said he'd been working as Leviev's driver in Dubai, where he now lives, posting photos of his lavish lifestyle. 'He [the driver] wrote to me in dire straits,' Fjellhoy says. 'And that's the issue. People reach out to us and then it's, 'Oh, shouldn't you just let it go, Cecilie? Shouldn't you not look up what [Leviev's] doing?' Well, we're being approached by his victims today,' she says of the dozens of other victims who have contacted her since The Tinder Swindler aired. 'So when people ask me to move on, I get a bit annoyed. Because it's impossible when you haven't received justice and he's still out there. I think there are very few victims who have their criminal so blatantly shaming them and going out in public, telling us that we're liars.' Neither of the women, who are in daily contact and consider themselves 'sisters', has spoken to Leviev for years. Sjoholm's last communication with him was before the documentary aired, while Fjellhoy confronted him in Israel in 2022. 'There have been no repercussions for him; he's never felt any uneasiness with anything. So to see him be that uneasy for once and not knowing what to do, for me that was more than enough.' What do they think drives him to pursue such an appalling line of 'work'? 'Narcissism', they speculate; and 'control… [to] hurt people'. They plan to continue campaigning for harsher punishments for fraudsters and for social media sites to better scrutinise those on their platforms. 'Everyone deserves to feel safe online,' Fjellhoy says. 'We have to fight. It's a marathon. In the end, we will win.' Swindled Never After: How We Survived (and You Can Spot) a Relationship Scammer by Cecilie Fjellhoy and Pernilla Sjoholm (Podium Publishing, £15.99) is published on August 19
