Carol Bradbury

[Iain Meiklejohn @meiklejohn21]

What an effort from the laddie, Craig Ferguson! He’s just walked from LA to Boston over 3200 miles, raising over £1 million for Mental Health, to finish in time for Scotland’s first game v Haiti. A pleasure to see him complete his walk! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🥾⚽️🇺🇸❤️ #samh

https://t.co/Z3EgdNBlTC

[🇯🇲𝕋𝕒𝕟𝕪𝕒 𝔻𝕒 𝕌𝕟𝕔𝕠𝕟𝕥𝕣𝕠𝕝𝕝𝕒𝕓𝕝𝕖🫡 @ICtrlUMankylol]

So just to get my head straight and so I’m clear: the first pic is an act of terrorism and the second is an act of protest…… Have I got that correct??🤸🏾‍♀️🤸🏾‍♀️🤸🏾‍♀️

[Raven Cozens-Hardy @RaveCozensHardy]

The video that confirms how corrupt and dishonest @michaelgove really is.
Gove referred or was lobbied for Covid-19 "VIP lane" PPE contracts worth a combined total of roughly £1.16 billion.
@UKHouseofLords expel Gove.

[Missing Andrew Gosden @andrew_gosden]

Police investigating an attempted rape in an #Ealing park (#London) on January 13, 2026 have issued an e-fit of a man they would like to speak to. Call Metropolitan police on 101 quoting 6428/13JAN) https://t.co/Hnm5PmcK8T

[Titch @Titch16487899]

MISSING 👇

[Amnesty UK @AmnestyUK]

🚨BREAKING: Filton 4 sentenced as terrorists

Amnesty opposes the use of terrorism powers in this case.

It is completely disproportionate to punish protesters for criminal damage as if they were terrorists, a sentence which stays with you for life.

The defendants in today’s case were sentenced as terrorists because prosecutors want to make an example of them.

Today's decision shows how direct action protesters could be treated in the future.

The use of terrorism laws against direct action protesters must end.

Together we must continue calling out the abuse of power and fighting for our right to protest.

Read our position:

Criminal Damage, Direct Action, Terrorism: Misuse of counter-terrorism powers in the UK: https://t.co/TqQ4cHnoeb

[Nathan J Robinson @NathanJRobinson]

Instead of discussing how Elon Musk is now the world's first trillionaire, we should talk about how he killed hundreds of thousands of people through his dismantling of food and medical aid to poor countries
https://t.co/8kY171r5w1

[Roger Gall @Shambles151]

"Judge Johnson kept the jury in the dark of his plans to sentence the four as terrorists. This is the first time in British legal history that anyone has been sentenced as a terrorist for damaging property."

Please RT until this is both the 1st & last time.

Thank you.

[Jeremy Corbyn @jeremycorbyn]

Sentenced and imprisoned on grounds of “terrorism” that no jury ever convicted them of.

Meanwhile, the British government continues to aid and abet the greatest crime of our time.

A historic miscarriage of justice — and a truly dark day for civil liberties in this country.

[Warren Gunnels @GunnelsWarren]

Can’t stop thinking about how Wall Street is celebrating Elon Musk becoming the world’s first trillionaire, while he single handedly eliminated humanitarian aid that will lead to the needless deaths of 4.5 million of the poorest children in the world in the next 4 years.

[Jvnior @Jvnior]

🚨🇨🇦 BREAKING: World Cup protestors cover FIFA logo in Toronto with a powerful message

Repost if you think israel should be kicked out.

[Mukhtar @I_amMukhtar]

There's a girl from Belfast who, along with her friend, is offering assistance to minority residents who are afraid to leave their homes to go to the shops or work because of the riots.

Bless them.

[JmRoyle #LFC #YNWA #BLM #RejoinEU @MyArrse]

Three By-Elections last night:

Green - Won 1
Cons - Won 1
Lib Dem - Won 1

Reform UK finished third in two and fourth in one.

[Missing Andrew Gosden @andrew_gosden]

Have you seen Amaya Forbes (13) missing from #Leicester (#Leicestershire) last seen on June 10, 2026?
(has long braided hair, which is dark brown with some dyed red) (Call Leicestershire police on 101 quoting 721 of 10 June) https://t.co/6enmizqyZ1

[Missing Andrew Gosden @andrew_gosden]

Have you seen Carwyn (14) missing from #Weybridge (#Surrey) last seen on June 10, 2026? (Call Surrey police on 101 quoting PR/45260068880) https://t.co/giQBcgQCAc

[South Area - Bromley MPS @MPSBromley]

#MISSING | Can you help us find Tyler, 17, who’s missing from Bromley? He was last seen on Tuesday, 9 June. It’s believed he could be in the Croydon, Lewisham and Plumstead areas. If you have any info please contact police on 101, quoting 01/7666465/26.

[Missing Andrew Gosden @andrew_gosden]

Have you seen Makayla (14) missing from #Rotherham (#SouthYorkshire) last seen in #EastDene area on June 12, 2026? (Call South Yorkshire police on 101 quoting 247 of 12 June 2026) https://t.co/lelriTZtKq

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

In the summer of 1976, in the small Central Valley farming town of Chowchilla, California, twenty-six schoolchildren on a school bus and their fifty-five-year-old bus driver Ed Ray were taken at gunpoint by three armed men, transported in two vans for approximately eleven hours, and sealed inside a buried moving truck trailer twelve feet underground in a rock quarry near Livermore, California.

The three kidnappers planned to demand a five-million-dollar ransom. They could not reach the police department to make the demand, because the lines were saturated with incoming calls from parents whose children had not come home from the swimming pool. The kidnappers went to sleep.

While they slept, the twenty-seven people they had buried climbed out of the ground.

What happened to them next, in the subsequent decades, transformed the clinical understanding of childhood trauma.

The bus was returning approximately twenty-six children, between the ages of five and fourteen, from a swimming pool excursion at the end of the school year. The driver was Frank Edward Ray, known as Ed Ray, then fifty-five years old, a farmer and longtime school bus driver in Chowchilla.

The three kidnappers were Frederick Newhall Woods the Fourth, then twenty-four years old; James Schoenfeld, then twenty-four; and Richard Schoenfeld, then twenty-two. Frederick Woods's family owned the California Rock and Gravel Quarry in Livermore and a one-hundred-acre estate in Portola Valley. The Schoenfelds were from Atherton. All three were the documented sons of wealthy Bay Area families.

They had planned the kidnapping for approximately eighteen months. They had excavated a pit at the family quarry, lowered a moving truck trailer into it, fitted the trailer with mattresses, water, and food, and covered the entrance with industrial batteries and dirt. The plan was to demand five million dollars in ransom from the State of California.

On the afternoon of the fifteenth of July, 1976, on Avenue 21 in Madera County, the kidnappers stopped the school bus and transferred the children and Ed Ray to two vans with painted-over windows. The vans were driven for approximately eleven hours to Livermore. In the early hours of the sixteenth of July, the kidnappers lowered the children and Ed Ray, one at a time at gunpoint, down a ladder into the buried trailer. When the last person was inside, they removed the ladder, placed two one-hundred-pound industrial batteries over the roof hatch, shoveled dirt across everything, and left.

The kidnappers drove to a hotel and tried to make their ransom call. The Chowchilla Police Department phone lines were saturated with calls from parents reporting their missing children. The kidnappers could not get through. They went to sleep.

While they slept, Ed Ray and the older children — fourteen-year-old Michael Marshall and a small number of others — began stacking mattresses inside the buried trailer to reach the roof hatch. They lifted the metal sheet from below. They began to dig upward through the packed earth by hand. The ventilation was failing. The summer heat was concentrating inside the metal trailer. They dug in shifts for approximately sixteen hours.

In the early morning of the seventeenth of July, the hole broke through to the surface. Twenty-six children and Ed Ray climbed out of the ground. They walked toward the sound of the heavy equipment in the quarry. The quarry workers saw a line of dirty, dehydrated children with bleeding hands emerging from the earth. Ed Ray, by the documented oral history, told the quarry workers that they were from Chowchilla and they were lost.

The three kidnappers were arrested within approximately two weeks. They pleaded guilty and were each sentenced to twenty-seven life sentences without the possibility of parole.

What happened next, both to the case and to the children, is the substantive structural fact that the popular retelling of Chowchilla does not develop.

In 1980, an appellate panel of the California courts ruled that the kidnappers' sentences should be amended to allow eligibility for parole. The Schoenfelds and Woods, whose families funded the appellate process, were thereafter institutionally entitled to periodic parole hearings. In 2012, Richard Schoenfeld was paroled at age fifty-seven. In 2015, his brother James Schoenfeld was paroled. In August of 2022, after eighteen parole hearings and forty-six years in prison, Frederick Newhall Woods the Fourth was paroled at age seventy. All three of the convicted kidnappers are now free.

Meanwhile, the children — now adults in their fifties and sixties — became, in the documented clinical literature, the most extensively studied group of childhood trauma survivors in the history of American psychiatry.

Dr. Lenore Terr, a child psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco, began interviewing the Chowchilla survivors approximately five months after the kidnapping. She conducted follow-up interviews at four years, at five years, at thirteen years, and at twenty-five years post-kidnapping. Her studies, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry and other clinical journals between 1979 and 2003, documented sustained psychological consequences in the children: recurring nightmares, post-traumatic re-enactment behaviors, foreshortened future expectations, sustained anxiety, sustained depression, and personality changes.

The dominant clinical view in 1976, before Terr's research, was that children naturally recovered from traumatic events without lasting consequences. The official institutional advice given to the parents of the Chowchilla children was to take the children home, return to normal routines, and assume that the children would recover.

Terr's documented follow-up research established that they did not.

The published Chowchilla studies are the documented empirical foundation of the modern clinical concept of childhood post-traumatic stress disorder. The diagnostic criteria for PTSD in children subsequently codified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders are substantially derived from Terr's documentation of the Chowchilla survivors.

Michael Marshall, who as a fourteen-year-old had led the digging that broke through the trailer roof, has publicly stated in subsequent decades that he replayed the kidnapping continuously in his memory and struggled with substance abuse for many years. Other survivors have publicly described decades of sustained anxiety, recurring nightmares, and lasting effects on their family relationships.

Ed Ray remained, throughout the remainder of his life, in contact with the survivors. He died in May of 2012 in Chowchilla, at the age of ninety-one.

The structural reading of the documented institutional record of Chowchilla is that the popular framing — twenty-six children buried alive and rescued — is incomplete in two specific ways.

The first is that there was no rescue. Twenty-seven people climbed out of the ground because Ed Ray and the older children dug through twelve feet of packed earth with their hands.

The second is that the event did not end on the seventeenth of July, 1976. Lenore Terr's longitudinal research on the survivors became the empirical foundation of the modern clinical understanding of childhood post-traumatic stress disorder. The survivors' continued suffering became the documented basis for changing how American medicine understood childhood trauma.

The three men who buried them in the ground are now free.

If their story moved you, drop one word in the comments — Chowchilla, Ed Ray, Terr, anything that comes to mind. Tap the like button so more people find this story. The page is small. Every reaction helps us keep telling the stories where no rescue came and the survivors' continued suffering became the empirical foundation of how we understand childhood trauma.

[Artur Nadolny @ArturNadol7566]

A KNIGHT, A KNIGHTHOOD, AND £2.7 MILLION IN SCHOOL MONEY. GUESS WHO ENDED UP SUSPENDED.

Copland Community School, Wembley, 2009. Headteacher Sir Alan Davies, knighted for services to education, was quietly pocketing £400,000 in bonuses in a single year. Three times the going rate. While teaching a school full of kids in one of London's most deprived boroughs.

Hank Roberts, teacher, union rep, and apparently the only adult in the building paying attention, blew the whistle.

His reward? Davies immediately suspended him. Along with two other union reps. They faced dismissal.

The total racket came to £2.7 million in illegal bonuses, carved up between Davies and his associates, including the deputy head, the HR manager, the bursar, and the chair of governors. A lovely little club.

Brent Council had been letting foundation schools like Copland appoint their own auditors. Turns out that is a bad idea. Who could have predicted it.

It took four years for Davies to end up at Southwark Crown Court, where he pleaded guilty to six counts of false accounting in 2013 and received a suspended sentence. A suspended sentence. For stealing £2.7 million from a school. You cannot make this up.

His knighthood was stripped in 2014. In 2019, after a High Court case, he was ordered to repay £1.4 million. Hank Roberts, the man who started all of this by refusing to stay quiet, called it publicly and said he would do it all again.

The school closed and was replaced. The system that allowed it to happen? Still very much open for business.

Sources: @guardian @TES @BBCNews @NEUnion @BKTAdvertising

[sue#NHSLove💙💙💙#FBNHS suesuezep.bsky.social @SueSuezep]

Many MPs are loudly demanding cuts to the benefits budget to fund defence. Have any of these advocates suggested cutting MPs’ own generous expenses, subsidies, pensions, perks & benefits first? Or is austerity only for everyone else?