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Daily Mail
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Stalker shoots dead beauty influencer TikTok star hours after she posted final video cutting her 17th birthday cake
A man has been arrested in Pakistan for shooting a TikTok star dead just hours after she posted a video of herself celebrating her 17th birthday, according to police. Sana Yousaf, who turned 17 last week and had more than a million followers across her social media accounts, was killed at her home in the capital Islamabad on Monday evening. The 22-year-old man arrested on suspicion of her murder had spent hours loitering outside her home in the lead up to her death, police said. 'It was a case of repeated rejections. The boy was trying to reach out to her time and again,' Islamabad police chief Syed Ali Nasir Rizvi said during a news conference. 'It was a gruesome and cold-blooded murder,' Rizvi added. Yousaf had more than 800,000 followers on TikTok, a wildly popular platform in Pakistan, where she posted lip-sync videos, skincare tips, and promotional content for beauty products. The last video posted on her account was hours before her murder, in which she was seen cutting a cake for her birthday. The comments section of the video was flooded with tributes from fans and fellow TikTok creators, with many reading: 'Rest in Peace' and 'Justice for Sana'. Influencer Waliya Najib wrote: 'This doesn't feel real. You were glowing, just being 17. I'm so sorry this world didn't protect you. Rest in peace, sweetheart.' UK-based content creator Kashaf Ali wrote: 'This is so awful. A literal 17 year old with so much innocence, killed for what?' Violence against women is pervasive in Pakistan according to the country's Human Rights Commission, and cases of women being attacked after rejecting marriage proposals are not uncommon. Earlier this year, a father who moved his family from the United States to Pakistan was arrested after shooting his daughter dead in an alleged 'honour killing' over her use of social media. Anwar ul-Haq, believed to be a US citizen, was charged with murder after he admitted to shooting his 15-year-old daughter Hira dead. Mr ul-Haq had reportedly forbidden his daughter from making TikTok videos which he deemed 'inappropriate', and decided to kill her when she continued to post. Hira's family 'had an objection to her dressing, lifestyle and social gathering,' according to police. He said the father of the 15-year-old girl initially suggested that an unidentified gunman had killed his daughter, but after he was taken into custody for questioning he confessed to the crime. In 2021, 27-year-old Noor Mukadam was beheaded by her Pakistani-American boyfriend, Zahir Jaffer, after she rejected his marriage proposal in a case that sparked widespread anger. In 2016, Khadija Siddiqui survived being stabbed 23 times by a jilted ex-boyfriend. Yousaf's death comes after another TikTok beauty influencer was brutally murdered last month. Valeria Marquez, a 23-year-old TikToker and aesthetician, was shot multiple times while broadcasting live from inside her beauty salon in western Mexico. Her senseless killing was just another example of the violence against women epidemic which Mexico is grappling with. The country has long been plagued by 'machismo' culture and violence against women, which can range from comments on the street to, in its most extreme form, acid attacks and brutal murders.
Wall Street Journal
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
New Media Delivers ‘Diddy-lations' and Dispatches From Sean Combs Trial
Steps away from the carefully coiffed and formally dressed television news reporters covering the Sean 'Diddy' Combs sex-trafficking trial, another gaggle of correspondents assembles, filming posts for such platforms as YouTube, TikTok and Instagram. Among those gossiping, opining and joking amid the array of smartphones propped up on tripods outside the federal courthouse are a woman wearing a red wig and Louis Vuitton fanny pack, and a man in a fedora, Yeezy boots and ripped jeans. Nearby, a man sporting a Kermit the Frog cap is livestreaming. They have Substacks, podcasts and YouTube channels built for buzzy cultural moments and know that to many of their followers, takes can be more interesting than facts. This new kind of broadcaster—the social-media influencer—aims to entertain as much as inform, often winning the attention of millions of Americans interested in the day's events but uninterested in getting their news from legacy media. 'Diddy has a different confidence today,' Samson Crouppen, who has more than 480,000 followers on TikTok, said in a recent video, which has notched more than 370,000 views. Another of his posts has reached 2.8 million. Crouppen had never covered a court case before Combs's. A comedian and social-media consultant from Los Angeles, he describes himself on social media as the '#1 Comedy Journalist.' He refers to his reports from the Combs trial as 'Daily Diddy-lations.' In the sex-trafficking trial, the hip-hop mogul faces accusations that he ran a criminal enterprise coercing women into drug-fueled sex parties. Combs has denied any wrongdoing. A representative for Combs said the events were threesomes, not sex parties. His lawyers have said that the sex was consensual and that Combs didn't commit sex trafficking. So far, the trial has included testimony from such high-profile figures as Combs's ex-girlfriend Cassie Ventura and the musician Kid Cudi. In his videos, Crouppen has called Combs the 'Diddler' and said he stands for 'independent journalism not bought by the legacy media.' Crouppen said he would acknowledge and apologize when he makes an error. 'When you screw stuff up people correct you, and it creates engagement,' he said. Influencers outside the courthouse in Manhattan have raised thousands of dollars from fans looking to support their work. Their dispatches from the Combs trial are often heavy on personal impressions and suspicions, and short on such traditional journalism staples as fact-checking and comments from all sides. Emilie Hagen, who has been covering the trial on Substack and Instagram, said mainstream reporters are careful what they say. And she said she is focusing on the facts. 'But the majority of people don't want that. They want new media to be more salacious,' she said. Hagen, based in Los Angeles, has a journalism degree and makes much of her living as a content creator. She has been covering the trial in New York, using $3,000 in funding from her more than 134,000 Instagram followers and Substack subscribers. In an Instagram video, she interviewed a woman who said she was offered $20 an hour to stand outside the courthouse wearing a shirt supporting Combs. She didn't get comment from Combs's team for the video but included in a subsequent Substack post that a 'direct source from Diddy's camp' said neither the star nor his legal team was behind the paid demonstration. The Instagram video has more than 3.6 million views. Some 52% of TikTok users who were surveyed in 2024 said that they regularly get news on the platform, according to the Pew Research Center. The change in news-consumption habits stretches beyond pop culture, a longtime staple of social-media postings. Influencers are also now popular sources of information on politics. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris sought to appeal to voters by appearing on influencer-led podcasts. The Trump administration has let influencers into the White House briefing room. 'They're frustrated with ABC, NBC, CNN, Fox,' said Jess Rauchberg, an assistant professor of communication technologies at Seton Hall University. 'They want something that feels more real.' Loren LoRosa, a senior news producer on the radio show 'The Breakfast Club' who has been covering the trial on social media and on her podcast, 'The Latest With Loren LoRosa,' recently stood outside the courthouse blending recaps of the day's testimony with personal takes on the lawyers' approaches. In a video, she contrasted how Combs's lawyers attacked the credibility of one witness while taking a different approach with another witness, Kerry Morgan, a former friend of Ventura. The defense 'thought that this was going to prove a lot of the points they wanted to prove. They let her rock,' LoRosa said. LoRosa was wearing a hoodie and gold bracelets in the video. She said in an interview that her more than 225,000 Instagram followers like to see what outfits she is wearing and are interested in her personally, 'not just the facts.' Write to Isabella Simonetti at
The Guardian
17-05-2025
- The Guardian
The livestreamed killing of an influencer could be femicide – a misunderstood crisis
Valeria Márquez was killed in one of the most horrifically public ways possible. On Tuesday evening, the 23-year-old Mexican social media influencer, who had built up a large following with videos about beauty and makeup, was recording a TikTok livestream in the beauty salon where she worked in Jalisco, a state in west-central Mexico. A man entered the establishment and, with her video still running, shot her dead. Many details of the case are still unclear. However, Márquez's death is being investigated as a femicide, according to a statement by the Jalisco state prosecutor. Femicide is defined as the intentional killing of a woman or girl with gender-related motivations. (The term for killing males because of their sex, something that has occurred during war and genocide, is androcide.) While femicide is a universal and age-old issue, it is poorly understood. It is also sometimes wilfully misunderstood by some men's rights activists, who like to argue that it is a nonexistent problem because men make up the majority of victims (and perpetrators) of homicide. So it's worth spelling out the parameters of femicide. If a woman is killed in a robbery gone wrong, that's (probably) not femicide. If she is killed by an ex-boyfriend who views women as the property of men rather than autonomous human beings, that's femicide. 'Honour'-related killings are also obviously femicide. We are missing a lot of data on femicide. 'Too many victims of femicide still go uncounted: for roughly four in 10 intentional murders of women and girls, there is not enough information to identify them as gender-related killings because of national variation in criminal justice recording and investigation practices,' UN Women wrote in a report last year. Naming the problem – understanding why femicide is different from homicide – is important, because it helps us solve it. If more institutions took misogyny and domestic violence seriously, we'd see fewer dead women. A report by the World Health Organization notes, for example, that 'stronger gun laws related to men previously cited for or convicted of intimate partner abuse are of particular importance in reducing rates of femicide'. Justice for Márquez doesn't just involve finding her killer and ensuring they are punished. If this was femicide, it means being very clear about the misogyny that led to her death. It means holding all the lawmakers and institutions that perpetuate this misogyny to account. Justice means understanding that her death wasn't some sort of tragic one-off, but part of a far larger problem. 'If I die, I want a loud death,' the Palestinian photojournalist Fatima Hassouna wrote on social media shortly before she was killed by an Israeli airstrike this year. 'I don't want to be just breaking news, or a number in a group, I want a death that the world will hear, an impact that will remain through time … ' That quote has haunted me ever since I read it. So many women who die premature and violent deaths die quiet deaths. They become statistics. Márquez must not just become another femicide statistic. Let her death, which has shone a spotlight on femicide, be loud. Let it have an impact that will remain through time. The president is obsessed with Swift and has posted about the pop star multiple times. The big Viagra budget, which has been widely discussed for years, isn't problematic in itself. The issue is that while the government has no problem spending this money on what is arguably gender-affirming care for cis men, it keeps yelling that trans people are a drain on resources. The issue is in the news once again after a judge in the Talbott v USA case, which challenges Trump's transgender military ban, noted that the military spends eight times more on erectile dysfunction medication than on gender-affirming care for trans service members. Liz Stead, 78, got kicked out of the military in 1969 when higher-ups sniffed out proof (a love letter) of Sapphic activity. She was also given a criminal conviction for 'perceived same-sex sexual activity'. As the BBC reports, she only found out about the conviction when applying for a scheme that awards financial redress for veterans sacked during a ban on homosexuality. Due to the fact that Israel isn't allowing international journalists into Gaza and murdering the Palestinian journalists and aid workers who are trapped in the enclave, it's impossible to really know how many children have been killed or starved to death by now. But we know there are more child amputees in Gaza than anywhere else in the world and, by one estimate, Israel kills a child in Gaza every 45 minutes. We also know that young children who do survive will never recover from being malnourished and traumatized in those formative years. While many people stay silent about a genocide that has been funded and enabled by the US, UK and Europe, the children's educator and entertainer Rachel Accurso (known and loved by parents of toddlers everywhere as Ms Rachel) has been speaking up about children in Gaza. And, quite predictably, she's getting vile abuse for it – including a piece in the New York Times that amplifies baseless, ridiculous and dangerous claims that she may be funded by Hamas. Sign up to The Week in Patriarchy Get Arwa Mahdawi's weekly recap of the most important stories on feminism and sexism and those fighting for equality after newsletter promotion A French study has found that men emit 26% more pollution because they eat more red meat and drive more. Of course we all need to be cognizant of our environmental impact, but it feels increasingly futile when billionaires pop to the grocery store on their private jets and warmongers pollute the planet. Last year, the Guardian reported on a study that found that '[t]he planet-warming emissions generated during the first two months of the war in Gaza were greater than the annual carbon footprint of more than 20 of the world's most climate-vulnerable nations'. In Jacobin, the anthropologist Kristen Ghodsee argues that 'the tradwife phenomenon and the manosphere are two sides of the same coin, reflecting the shift toward authoritarian politics'. Sometimes it's the people you most suspect. Tayo Bero spells out exactly how disturbing this is. 'You can't write a folk song – a folk song becomes one,' says Seeger. 'And they have helped to engender change because the community felt they spoke for them.' Chimpanzees are a hygienic bunch, a new study has found: they wipe their bums and even clean up after sex. Like orangutans, they also apply chewed plant material – which may have medicinal properties – to their wounds. In short, they are probably more knowledgeable about medical matters than the US health secretary. Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
Telegraph
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Mexican TikTok beauty influencer shot dead on livestream
A 23-year-old Mexican social media influencer was shot dead at a beauty salon in Mexico while on a TikTok livestream. Valeria Marquez, known for posting beauty and lifestyle content for her 200,000 followers, was at her Blossom the Beauty Lounge salon in western Guadalajara in Jalisco state on May 13 when the incident occurred. The shooter reportedly rode up to the salon on a motorcycle before entering the building on the pretext of giving Marquez a gift, but instead opened fire. In the livestream Marquez is seen talking to the camera and showing off a pink stuffed-animal pig. Moments before her death, she is seen looking up and saying: 'They're coming', before a voice off-camera asks: 'Hey, Vale?' Marquez responds: 'Yes,' before muting the sound on her phone. The footage then shows her clutching her ribcage and falling backwards in her seat as she was shot in the chest and head. The livestream ends with an unidentified woman picking up her phone. Jalisco state authorities said that she had no vital signs when medics arrived. Marquez told her followers earlier in the livestream that someone had come to the salon before she arrived to give her an 'expensive gift'. She had reportedly looked concerned. Authorities have not named a suspect, but police said that her murder is being investigated as a potential feminicide – the killing of women and girls on the basis of gender, which has become a growing problem in Mexico. Several days earlier, a female mayoral candidate in the state of Veracruz on the east coast was shot dead during a livestream, alongside three other people. Violence has been a major problem in Jalisco, in which the New Generation Jalisco Cartel (CJNG), a drug gang known for extreme and often public violence, has a heavy presence. Hours before Marquez's shooting, former congressman Luis Armando Córdova Díaz was shot dead at a nearby café in Jalisco.
