Latest news with #onlineforum
Yahoo
4 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Woman Told Family They Need to ‘Step Up or Shut Up' About Chores — and Her Husband's Reply Surprised Her
A Reddit user chronicled her frustrations over her husband and three teenage kids' negative attitude toward household chores 'My husband told me I was too harsh and need to lighten up ... I told him the message wasn't only for the kids, it was for him too. He needs to step up,' she recalled telling her husband A Redditor replied, 'All of them absolutely need to step up'A family's matriarch, who is in school to get a master's degree, served her husband and kids a firm reality check about household chores. The woman chronicled her frustrations over her family's attitude around the house on Reddit's 'Am I the A------' forum, where she also wrote that she was taken aback by her husband's response to her assertiveness. 'I am married and have 3 kids, all are teens. My husband and I both work and my kids are in school and do sports or clubs after school,' she explained, adding that now that she's pursuing her master's degree, she's unable to do the amount of chores and cooking that she used to do. 'I'm doing what I can, but between work, school and everything else at home, it can't all be done,' she continued. 'Yesterday, my husband came to me while I was doing my homework and said the shower curtain liner in our bathroom was moldy. This pushed me over the edge.' Feeling overwhelmed, the mom called a family meeting. 'I had my family come into the living room and told them that if they don't like how something is, they have able bodies and can deal with it themself, that they have the skills to clean,' she wrote. 'My kids were arguing that they shouldn't have to do more, they're in school and busy afterwards,' she added. 'I told them that I don't care, I am busy too, and I can't do it all, that they need to step up or shut up.' Later that night, her husband confronted her about the meeting. 'My husband told me I was too harsh and need to lighten up. He says I was rude and basically telling them their feelings don't matter and I need to lay off of them,' she recalled. 'I told him the message wasn't only for the kids, it was for him too. He needs to step up.' Never miss a story — sign up for to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories. Worrying she might have been 'too harsh' to her family, the mom of three asked Redditors, 'Am I the a------ for telling my family if they don't like the way something is, they can take care of it themselves?' Her July 6 Reddit post has attracted nearly 1,000 responses, with many people siding with her and telling her she's 'NTA [not the a------].' 'All of them absolutely need to step up,' one reader replied, while another commented, 'It's a subtle form of sabotage. He is (subconsciously) 'punishing' you for not taking care of everything in the household yourself.' Read the original article on People
Daily Mail
6 days ago
- General
- Daily Mail
Bride shares picture of 'monstrosity' wedding cake as people say 'nothing prepared me for this'
A bride who entrusted her mother with the task of providing a wedding cake for her big day has left people online in shock after revealing the 'monstrosity'. The anonymous bride posted a picture of the cake she expected to receive followed by an image of the one she was presented with on global discussion forum Reddit. She explained: 'My mother volunteered to pay for our wedding cake. 'I tried to find something simple so it wouldn't cost much…. She swears to this day she didn't make it but I am not convinced'. While the photos were added to the 'baking' subreddit, which is often filled with 'cake fails', users admitted that nothing could have prepared them for this particular example. Titled 'Wedding cake expectation vs reality', the post first showed a picture of what the bride had hoped for, namely, a two-tier cake covered in white icing and topped with floral decorations in autumnal colours to match their October nuptials. The second picture, however, showed the cake she received, which bore very little resemblance to the original. The cake that the bride's mother gave her looked positively homemade - not only was it messy with frosting dripping down the sides, it also looked squashed. Reddit users were genuinely shocked by the disparity between the two cakes And, unlike the cake the bride had requested, the icing coverage was uneven, leaving some sponge exposed. Reddit users appeared to be genuinely astonished by the vast disparity between the two cakes, with one person admitting: 'Nothing prepared me for this.' Another person agreed: 'I must have seen hundreds of cake fails over the years. I still was not prepared.' While a third exclaimed: 'Consider my flabbers gasted.' A fourth person could not accept that the cake wasn't homemade. Their brutal verdict read: 'I just made something that looked like this a few weeks ago with two boxes of [cake] mix and a can of icing. 'I can't believe she proceeded with the drizzle when the layers looked like that. What a monstrosity.' Another Reddit user said: 'I just spat my drink out'. And a sixth person joked: 'That's one Temu version of a cake right there' Temu is a budget-friendly online marketplace, which frequently offers huge discounts and promotions. A seventh didn't mince their words when they insisted: 'That has got to be the best one on here. That's atrocious.' In a separate post, the bride added that the wedding party 'did not eat' the cake - but that it did come from a bakery, according to both her mother and her sister. The bride wrote: 'I asked my sister about this today since so many people were interested. 'She doubled down and said she was with my mother when she picked it up from Haggen.' Yet, despite her disappointment at her mother's cake, the bride's day was far from ruined by it. She said: 'My sister saw what my brought and ran tot he store and got donuts for guests and cheesecake for us to cut. 'She made a cute display with some pumpkins since we had an October wedding. 'I am thankful for her quick thinking.' The bride, who has been married for five years, also revealed that half-a-decade on, she too finds it 'funny'. She wrote: 'Thank you everyone for your great comments, I've read almost every one and they made MY day'.
Telegraph
08-07-2025
- Telegraph
‘My son took his own life after a website showed him how'
David Parfett's son Tom was dying while a group of people from around the world not only did nothing to help him, they egged him on. He was live-blogging his own death on a suicide forum after ingesting a poison fellow users had recommended that he order online. Forty-four people reacted with 'hugs' and 'sad face' emojis to his post saying he had taken the lethal substance. Messages said 'RIP' and 'all the best'. As his profile goes silent, one member concludes: 'I think they are gone'. The 22-year-old, studying philosophy at St Andrews University in Scotland, died alone at a Premier Inn in Surrey in 2021 in, David is sure, 'excruciating pain'. It would be a year before his father saw a photo of the packet that contained the poison – which we are not naming – sold for just $59 (£47). Written on it was the website from which it was purchased. David would later learn the site was run by Kenneth Law, a Canadian chef who is now facing 14 counts of first-degree murder and another 14 of counselling and aiding suicide, in Ontario. He denies the charges. He is also accused of sending more than 1,200 packages of poison to young people across the globe. In the UK, the National Crime Agency is investigating potential offences linked to the deaths of 98 individuals who purchased items online to assist with suicide, including several deaths linked to Law, but no charges have yet been brought. Poisoned, a new two-part Channel 4 documentary, tells how Tom's death sparked an international hunt to unmask Law after David turned to James Beal, an investigative reporter at The Times. He had been despairing at the failure of the police to join the dots between various cases. 'It's very, very limited information available to families,' he says. 'You kind of get patted on the head, and then you're into a very blinkered process. At the end of the day, it's the journalists who stopped it, rather than police.' Neha Raju, 23, another Law customer, died in Guildford six months after Tom but Surrey Police did not appear to link the deaths. The first episode also features heartbreaking testimony from families across the world. Louise Nunn talks about her daughter, Immy, who took her own life in her flat in Brighton aged 25. She had more than 780,000 followers on her TikTok account, Deaf Immy, with humorous videos raising awareness of deafness and mental health. In Arizona, while police thought a young man named Miles had taken an accidental overdose, his sister Malyn, who worked for the cyber unit of the FBI, put her skills to use. She began tracing the links between the suicide forum used by her brother – 'an echo chamber of despair' – and Law's website, which looked like it purveyed specialist foods, selling the poison (though Miles did not buy his substance from Law's sites). The second episode is a powerful call to arms by David as he and other families, along with Beal, piece together the global fallout from the forums and Law's poison-shipping enterprise. David is seen listening to the recording of the phone conversation that an undercover Beal had with Law. The Canadian revealed that Britons were some of his most 'frequent buyers', numbering 'literally in the hundreds', and admitted 'many, many, many, many' had died. So sure was he that he would get away with it, he added with a chuckle: 'They're not going to bring me over to the UK for this. It's too small.' 'That was really hard, to hear the voice of the person that I believe murdered my son,' says David on a video call from his home in Twickenham. 'But also oddly satisfying, having spent so long shouting in the dark about this, trying to get somebody to pay attention. That was the moment that I knew we could at least take one supplier off the streets.' For David, his son will always be the little Manchester United fan who ran around in his David Beckham shirt until he was too big to fit into it; whose perennial honesty saw one teacher praise his 'excellent moral compass'. Tom was open with his father about his suicidal thoughts, triggered by a school friend who had taken his own life at university. But David believes he was 'more vulnerable to being influenced online', as someone who had been diagnosed with autism at 12 and was struggling with extreme anxiety 'around academic achievement, friends, relationships'. Tom had dropped out of university during his Covid-disrupted second year. He restarted the course, but was sectioned for 24 hours after talking about suicide. His father, a 57-year-old data director, had previously appreciated the benefits that an online world brought to Tom, including allowing him to make short films, as he grew up in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, with his two siblings. 'It really helped him bring out that creative side. He had access to just the wider internet from probably the age of 13, 14. One of the reasons I am delighted that Poisoned has been made is that I don't want other parents in a situation like me, where they know somebody who potentially is considering suicide and are naive enough to not consider the internet to be a danger.' The scales fell from his eyes as he tried to track his son's 'digital footprints to understand what had happened'. Within minutes, David found himself on a suicide forum, not knowing at the time that it was the same one that led to Tom's death. David set up a profile 'pretending to be depressed' and ordered poison from Law. It arrived within 'a few days' – but he only found out a year later that Tom's purchase had come from the same man. Seeing a photo of an identical packet during the inquest process 'was a very hard moment', he tells me, 'understanding how easy it had been to find this poison and how cheap it had been to buy it'. Neither of the Parfetts had to turn to the 'dark web', but simply went through Google. As David says in the film: 'There were no checks. It was like buying a book online, all too easy... like posting a loaded gun to somebody and saying, 'Pull the trigger'.' Just a few weeks after discovering them, David is shown in the film scrolling through the stream of posts his son made as his life was coming to an end. As the real responses pop up menacingly on the screen, he says in the documentary: 'I know Tom would have died in agony. Yet nobody called an ambulance. Nobody tries to find him.' There were more horrors still to uncover. On the forum, David stumbled upon Tom's profile name listed and crossed out by one of the moderators, 'as someone who's been 'successful',' he says. 'It's absolutely callous.' He believes many of those involved in running such sites actually think they are 'doing a service. They seem to passionately believe that it's every individual's right to kill themselves whenever they want to, and they want to support people doing so.' He adds that he suspects, for some, 'there's a dark side, I guess maybe a sexual side to this as well – effectively some kind of kick from knowing that you've influenced someone to die.' Assisting suicide is a crime punishable by up to 14 years in prison in both the UK and Canada. The substance that killed Tom is reportable under the 53-year-old Poisons Act, compelling UK companies to alert the Home Office to buyers they believe are seeking to cause harm to themselves or others. But these rules do not apply to companies abroad. In April, regulator Ofcom opened an investigation into the forum used by Tom over whether it 'has failed/is failing to comply with its duties under the Online Safety Act 2023'. The evening before I speak to David, the Technology Secretary Peter Kyle told the audience of BBC Question Time: 'Suicide platforms, which have led to the death of children, are now no longer available in this country.' It is a bold claim refuted by David, but days later, the same forum announced that it has voluntarily decided to bar access to UK users from July. At the same time, it is publicising a method to get around the block. The trustees of the Thomas William Parfett Foundation, a charity set up in Tom's memory to campaign for suicide prevention, issued a statement to The Telegraph saying: 'We've seen this and other platforms use the tactic of a voluntary block in the UK and in other countries. They are likely to remove the voluntary block in the near future. We call for this site to be blocked in the UK through application of the Online Safety Act to stop the harms that this platform facilitates.' A government spokesperson responded: 'Under the Online Safety Act, services must take action to prevent users from accessing illegal suicide and self-harm content, and ensure children are protected from content that promotes or instructs on these behaviours – otherwise they could face tough enforcement action, including substantial fines. We're already seeing this in practice – Ofcom has launched enforcement action against companies failing to meet their online safety duties, including a suicide forum. Other harmful forums have also since withdrawn access for UK users.' David says he is calling for a 'single minister who's accountable for this and that there's proper training and resources. I guess the analogy would be, for fraud cases you get specialist police officers, specialist processes. People understand fraud.' He says 'the Home Office look at import of poison into the UK through the lens of counter-terrorism. The Department of Health own a suicide prevention policy, but none of these people are joined up at all. And then you've got Peter Kyle's department who look at it from a tech and regulation point of view.' However, even if one set of poisons is rigorously regulated, David fears that another will soon be put on the market, while suicide discussions are taking place 'on most of the major [social media] platforms. It's an ever-moving target and needs constant policing.' He is not seeking damages from anyone, insisting: 'I'm focused on looking forward – on other people avoiding the hell that we've been through as a family.' Having taken time off after Tom's death, and now redundancy, it has become 'a full-time job'. 'I truly believe that Tom would still be here if he hadn't been able to find an internet site that gave him very specific instructions about options on how to kill himself,' he says, advising concerned parents: 'Please don't be naive like I was. Please don't be embarrassed to ask the direct question, 'Are you thinking of self-harming? Are you thinking of taking your own life?'' Law may be behind bars and awaiting trial, but David knows there is so much still to do – and is convinced that purchasing poison online today is 'no harder at all' than when his desperate son turned to the internet four years ago. 'There are other Kenneth Laws out there doing exactly the same thing.' Poisoned: Killer in the Post airs on Channel 4 on Wednesday 9 July and Thursday 10 July. For further information on online safety go to the Thomas William Parfett Foundation and the Molly Rose Foundation; Samaritans operates a 24/7 helpline, which you can call free on 116 123, or email jo@
RNZ News
08-05-2025
- Business
- RNZ News
Palmerston North hydroponics retailer takes Reddit to court to take down 'harmful' posts, unmask user identities
By Jeremy Wilkinson, Open Justice reporter of They have filed legal proceedings in the District Court against Reddit. Photo: Reddit A hydroponics retailer is attempting to take on one of the world's largest online forums after it refused to remove user comments which they claim threaten their family and are harmful to their business. Tayte Cozens and Nadine Eales own indoor grow supplier Home Grown Kiwi and have filed legal proceedings in the District Court against Reddit in an attempt to have the posts taken down and to reveal the identities of the people behind them. According to a court minute released to NZME, the pair suspect a disgruntled customer or competitor has used the forum to post untrue or negative reviews and information about the business. They claim it has caused a substantial loss of income and emotional harm to Cozens in particular. While they have their suspicions about who might be behind the posts, they can't prove it because users on the forum aren't required to use their real names. Some of the posts, which are all live on a subpage of the website called r/NZtrees, where users generally share tips on how to grow cannabis, are almost three years old. The case is being heard in the Palmerston North District Court, where Cozens and Eales have sought an order for Reddit to take down the posts, to publish a correction and to give the pair a right of reply in a way the court determines. All these remedies are available to the court under the Harmful Digital Communications Act. Cozens and Eales are also seeking an order that Reddit tell the court who the anonymous posters are, however, such an order can only be made to an Internet Protocol Address Provider (IPAP), also known as an Internet Service Provider. Their application did not identify a specific IPAP that would be subject to the order if it were to be made by the court. At a hearing on the matter held in March, Cozens told the court that Reddit was operating in New Zealand, but had no physical office in the country as far as he was aware. "If Reddit is doing nothing to allow these posts to continue ... then how are we allowing them to operate in New Zealand?" he asked. "In the meantime, my business is suffering, and people have lost their jobs." Judge Stephanie Edwards advised at that hearing that there was an extent to which New Zealand law could apply overseas. "There are plenty of companies that operate here that aren't based here," she said. Following the hearing, Judge Edwards ordered that a technical adviser be appointed to assess the feasibility of the orders Cozens and Eales were seeking and how realistic it would be to enforce those orders. Today, the case returned to court and lawyers for Reddit submitted that it had proactively removed nine of the posts which they considered had violated its rules. However, they advised that others remained up and Reddit would not be disclosing the identities of its users. Judge Edwards offered Cozens the opportunity to withdraw his claim on the basis that Reddit had removed some of the posts and warned him that if he lost in court, he'd be liable to pay legal fees. Cozens, who is self-represented, said he understood the potential consequences and opted to continue his case. The court's technical adviser returned his report, but only 10 minutes before the hearing began. Given the parties and the judge had limited time to consider the report, Judge Edwards scheduled another hearing for a later date. Cozens asked what would happen in the meantime and claimed that he would continue to be the subject of abuse on the website. He claimed he was getting "hammered daily" by these kinds of posts and Reddit doesn't do anything about it. "The post is absolutely disgusting. I'm getting this daily, they're not." Reddit's lawyers offered to provide Cozens with a direct email to help him report posts and comments on the site. * This story originally appeared in the New Zealand Herald .
