Woman poisoned 1-year-old girl for months to exploit her for online donations: Police
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(LONDON) — A woman has been arrested after allegedly poisoning a 1-year-old girl over two months so she could post videos of the child online in order to solicit donations from the public, police said.
The Queensland Police in Australia said that the Morningside Child Protection and Investigation Unit (CPIU) has charged a woman with torture following “extensive investigations into allegations of an infant being poisoned,” according to a statement released on Thursday.
“It will be alleged between August 6 to October 15, 2024, a 34-year-old Sunshine Coast woman administered several unauthorised prescription and pharmacy medicines to a one-year-old girl, who was known to her, without medical approval,” authorities said. “It will be further alleged the woman, disregarding medical advice, went to lengths to obtain unauthorised medicines, including old medicines for a different person available in their home.”
Further investigations into the case allegedly revealed that the woman “carefully concealed her continued efforts to administer the unauthorised medicines until the matter was detected and reported to police by medical staff from a hospital in Brisbane’s south while the child was admitted.”
When announcing the charges against the unnamed woman, police said that the child was subjected to “immense distress and pain” while the woman filmed and posted videos of the child online.
“It is alleged the content produced exploited the child and was used to entice monetary donations and online followers,” police said.
Medical staff reported harm against the child to detectives on Oct. 15, 2024, which lead to police taking immediate action to protect the child during their investigation.
Testing for unauthorized medicines given to the child returned a positive result on Jan. 7, Australian authorities said.
“Morningside CPIU detectives travelled to an Underwood address to arrest the woman and subsequently charged her with five counts of administering poison with intent to harm, three counts of preparation to commit crimes with dangerous things, and one count each of torture, making child exploitation material and fraud,” police said.
She is expected to appear before Brisbane Magistrates Court tomorrow on Friday. Detective Inspector Paul Dalton said offences of this nature are abhorrent and CPIU detectives are committed to protecting children from harm and holding offenders to account.
“Working in CPIU we are too often faced with the worst offences against children,” he said. “We will do everything in our power to remove that child from harm’s way and hold any offender to account. There is no excuse for harming a child, especially not a one-year-old infant who is reliant on others for care and survival.”
(LONDON) — Many residents of northern Gaza and southern Lebanon are expected to return to their homes in the coming days and weeks, with most of the fighting in both areas paused under Israeli ceasefire agreements with Hamas and Hezbollah.
Under Israel’s multi-phased deal with Hamas, some hostages held in the Gaza Strip and Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails have started to be released. Negotiations between Israel and Hamas are expected to continue amid the first phase of the deal, which was slated to last about six weeks.
135,000 tents needed in Gaza
As people return to northern Gaza on Monday, the Gaza government said it “immediately and urgently” needs at least 135,000 tents because 90% of the buildings have been destroyed.
The government called on the international community to help provide “basic supplies” for Palestinians.
8 dead hostages among 33 being released in 1st phase: Israel
Of the 33 Israeli hostages set to be released during the first phase of the ceasefire, eight have been killed by Hamas, according to Israeli government spokesperson David Mencer.
Seven hostages have already been released since the start of the ceasefire, meaning 18 more living hostages will be released by Hamas in the coming weeks.
More hostages are set to be released on Thursday and Saturday, Mencer said.
Threats to ceasefire will ‘bear the full cost,’ Israeli minister says
Katz Israel, the Israeli defense minister, said on Monday that his country would “firmly” enforce the ceasefires that have paused fighting in Gaza.
“Anyone who violates the rules or threatens IDF forces will bear the full cost,” he said in Hebrew on social media. “We will not allow a return to the reality of Oct. 7.”
Tens of thousands trek into northern Gaza
Tens of thousands of people were marching and driving on Monday back to northern Gaza, after Israel allowed them to cross into the north for the first time in over a year.
Long lines of Palestinians — some singing, others smiling and some kneeling to kiss the soil as they stepped into the northern part of the strip — were seen making their way home.
Those returning home were moving along two main routes.
Many of those who were were walking home were moving along al-Rashid Street, a path expected to be taken by about 300,000 people.
Many of those who were driving north were doing so along Salah al-Din Road.
A line of cars could be seen stretching for about 8 miles on Monday morning, as they waited for permission to cross into the northern part of Gaza.
-ABC News’ Sami Zyara, Diaa Ostaz, Jordana Miller, Nasser Atta and Samayeh Malekian
1 dead, 4 injured after IDF fired at ‘dozens of suspects’ in central Gaza
The Palestinian Red Crescent Society said its team evacuated one person who was killed, and four people who were injured, after an attack by Israeli snipers near the Wadi Gaza Bridge on Sunday.
Israel Defense Forces said in a statement that troops fired “warning shots” at “several gatherings of dozens of suspects” who the IDF said posed a threat to them.
Additionally, a rocket was destroyed by Israeli troops in southern Gaza, according to the IDF’s statement.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had introductory call with Israel’s Netanyahu
Newly confirmed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had an introductory call on Sunday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to a statement from a U.S. senior defense official.
“Both leaders discussed the importance of advancing mutual security interests and priorities, especially in the face of persistent threats,” according to the statement.
Hegseth, who won Senate confirmation after being selected by President Donald Trump for the role, stressed to Netanyahu that the U.S. is “fully committed” to ensuring that Israel “has the capabilities it needs to defend itself,” according to the statement.
Additionally, the defense official said that “both leaders agreed to remain in close contact.”
Israel-Lebanon ceasefire extended to Feb. 18
The White House announced Sunday that the ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon will be extended until Feb.18.
Lebanon, Israel and the U.S. will also begin negotiations for the return of Lebanese prisoners captured after Oct. 7, 2023.
(LONDON) — Increasingly squeezed by allies and enemies alike, Ukraine’s armed forces are still setting records in their stubborn defense against Russia’s 3-year-old invasion, which — if President Donald Trump’s peace talks bear fruit — may soon see a partial ceasefire.
Month after month, Ukraine has increased the size and scope of its drone assaults within Russia. The high watermark this month came on March 10 as Kyiv launched at least 343 drones into Russia — according to the Defense Ministry in Moscow — representing Kyiv’s largest ever such attack. More than 90 drones were shot down over Moscow, the capital’s mayor describing the assault as “massive.”
The timing was pointed, coming hours before American and Ukrainian officials gathered in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, for ceasefire talks.
While straining to prove to the White House they were ready to discuss peace with Moscow, the Ukrainians were also exhibiting their ever-evolving capability to wage war deep inside Russia.
“We keep developing a lot of different types of long-range deep strikes,” Yehor Cherniv — a member of the Ukrainian Parliament and the chairman of his country’s delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly — told ABC News.
“Our capacity is growing to destroy the capacity of Russia to continue this war,” he added.
Ukraine’s strikes against Russian critical infrastructure, energy facilities, military-industrial targets and military bases have mirrored Moscow’s own long-range campaign against Ukraine. Cross-border barrages in both directions have grown in size and complexity throughout the full-scale war.
Ukrainian short-range drones are harrying Russian forces on the devastated battlefields while long-range strike craft hit targets closer to home. Kyiv this month even claimed the first successful use of its domestically produced Neptune cruise missile, with a range of 600 miles.
Since the opening of U.S.-Russian talks in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Feb. 18, Russia’s Defense Ministry claims to have shot down a total of 1,879 long-range Ukrainian drones — an average of more than 53 each day. On four occasions, the ministry reported intercepting more than 100 drones over a 24-hour period.
“Ukraine is pulling every single lever that it can, as hard as it can, to get it the kind of lethal strike capability that it needs for both of those campaigns,” Nick Reynolds, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute think tank in London, told ABC News.
Three years of Russia’s full-scale war have supercharged drone innovation in Ukraine. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s armed forces and intelligence services have lauded what they call their “drone sanctions” — a tongue-in-cheek reference to drone attacks on Russian fossil fuel, military industrial and other infrastructure targets far beyond the front.
“Our Ukrainian production of drones and their continuous modernization are a key part of our system of deterrence against Russia, which is crucial for ensuring Ukraine’s security in the long term,” Zelenskyy said in a recent Telegram post.
Ukrainian drones have hit targets more than 700 miles inside Russia, have regularly forced the temporary closures of major Russian airports and have bombarded the power centers of Moscow and St. Petersburg. At sea, Ukraine’s naval drones have confined Russia’s fleet to the eastern portion of the Black Sea and made its bases in Crimea untenable.
It is no longer unusual for more than 100 attack drones to cross into Russian territory in the course of one night. Meanwhile, Kyiv is pushing to replace its relatively low-tech propeller-driven unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, with more jet-powered craft — potentially extending range, payload and survivability. “The number of rocket drones production will grow just like our long-range strike drones production did,” Zelenskyy said last summer.
Kyiv’s strikes have particularly disrupted Russia’s lucrative oil refining and export industry, prompting concerns abroad — including in the U.S. — that the Ukrainian campaign is driving up oil prices globally.
Federico Borsari of the Center for European Policy Analysis think tank told ABC News that Ukraine’s evolving long-range strike industry represents a “strategic advantage,” especially if Kyiv is able to protect its industrial sites from Russian strikes and stockpile weapons for future use.
“Ukraine has damaged Russian oil refining facilities hard since 2024 and destroyed several key storage bases of the artillery shells,” Pavel Luzin, a Russian political analyst at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts, told ABC News. “So, the Russians are highly concerned about this.”
“The amount of financial loss and material damage is huge,” Borsari added.
Drones of all ranges are expected to serve a key role in Ukraine’s future deterrence of repeat Russian aggression. Defense Minister Rustem Umerov, for example, said Kyiv is planning a 6- to 9-mile drone “kill zone” to buffer any future post-war frontier with Russia, “making enemy advances impossible.”
Ivan Stupak, a former officer in the Security Service of Ukraine, told ABC News that Ukraine’s drone threat could also prove an important lever in ongoing negotiations with both Moscow and Washington, neither of which want continued — or expanded — drone strikes on Russian oil infrastructure and other sensitive targets.
The weapons could also be vital to future deterrence of repeat Russian aggression, Stupak said, as Ukraine pursues a “hedgehog” strategy by which the country would make itself too “prickly” for Moscow to attempt to swallow again.
Ukraine’s success has not gone unnoticed by its foreign partners. Kyiv appears to be carving out a potentially lucrative niche in providing long-range, low-cost strike platforms.
“There is immense interest from our friends around the world in Ukraine’s developments, our capabilities and our technological production,” Zelenskyy said recently.
Last fall, reports emerged indicating that Ukraine was considering lifting a wartime ban on drone exports, seeking to take advantage of growing demand worth as much as $20 billion annually, per an estimate by Ukrainian lawmaker Oleksandr Marikovskyi.
Ukraine’s military and intelligence services collaborate with domestic and international private companies to expand their drone capabilities. Kyiv has estimated there are more than 200 domestic companies working in the sector. This year, Zelenskyy wants Ukraine to produce 30,000 long-range drones and 3,000 ballistic missiles.
This month’s brief U.S. aid and intelligence freeze has raised concerns within Ukraine’s domestic drone industry, arguably one of the most insulated and resilient areas of the country’s defense sector.
“The reality is that Western-provided intelligence — and the Americans are a big part of that — does feed into a better targeting picture,” Reynolds said. “The efficiency and effectiveness is, in part, tied to that.”
“Ukraine became partly blinded as to how and where Russian anti-aircraft and electronic warfare systems are being deployed,” Stupak said.
If such a freeze is repeated, “I suppose it will be more difficult for Ukraine to avoid anti-aircraft and electronic warfare systems and maybe we will see decreased levels of successful strikes,” he said.
Ukraine’s largest drone attack of the war thus far came days after the U.S. announced its intelligence sharing freeze. It is not clear whether Ukraine used previously shared intelligence to carry out the strike, in which scores of craft reached Moscow.
Some targets are easier to find than others. Airfields — like Engels strategic bomber air base — oil refineries, ports and the like are static and their locations known to Ukrainian military planners.
Still, a lack of intelligence would make it harder for Kyiv to locate and avoid Russian defensive systems. The pause in American intelligence sharing was brief, but for Ukrainians highlighted their level of reliance on U.S. assistance.
A long-lasting paucity of intelligence would represent “an important vulnerability,” Borsari said. “For very long-range targets, they require satellite information, satellite imagery — and most of the time this information comes from Western allies.”
(LONDON) — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his leadership team spent much of 2024 cautiously courting both sides of America’s widening political divide — well aware that repelling Russia’s ongoing invasion relied, in large part, on U.S. largesse.
Kyiv appeared hopeful it could weather President Donald Trump’s dramatic return to the White House, assuring itself and the world that his campaign trail alignment with Russia’s narrative would be tempered by the geopolitical realities of the world’s most powerful office.
But the first month of Trump’s second term has already delivered a radical American pivot. The opening of U.S.-Russia talks in Saudi Arabia — intended to secure peace in Ukraine, but conducted without Kyiv’s involvement — and subsequent fraying of U.S.-Ukrainian ties, poses a new crisis for a nation that has grown used to living with existential peril.
Volodymyr Fesenko, a political scientist and the СEO of the Center for Political Studies “Penta” in Kyiv, told ABC News that recent developments represent “the most acute crisis in relations between the U.S. and Ukraine in their entire history.”
“In the worst case, this is a strategic turn of the U.S. towards Russia, rapprochement with Putin and weakening — or even the destruction — of previous partnership relations with Europe and Ukraine,” Fesenko said. “I am afraid that this is the scenario that will gradually be realized.”
“With Trump’s businesslike approach to bilateral relations, and with his interest in restoring relations with Russia, the previous special partnership relations between the U.S. and Ukraine will no longer exist,” Fesenko said.
Former President Joe Biden’s commitment to involving Kyiv in any talks to end the war was embodied by the “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine” motto. That approach appears to have been replaced with Trumpian transactionalism.
The White House now appears to be strongarming Kyiv into economic, territorial and political concessions, with Trump himself berating Zelenskyy — celebrated by many Americans for his stoic wartime stewardship — as a “dictator without elections” who “better move fast or he is not going to have a country left.”
Zelenskyy and his top officials have pushed back, noting that Ukraine is unable to hold new elections while under martial law. Kyiv has said it is happy to work with the new administration on mutually beneficial economic and security deals, while urging American partners to treat Moscow’s narrative with skepticism. Ukraine’s parliament on Tuesday voted to affirm Zelenskyy’s legitimacy and agree that no elections can be held while the war continues.
The situation is “beyond disturbing” for Kyiv, a source close to the Ukrainian government told ABC News. “It’s hard to imagine that it can be pulled back.”
Ukraine’s leadership is trying to chart a course through the minefield of Trump’s second term, the source added. “They feel that they’re striking this balance of not being impolite or disrespectful when it comes to countering some of the things that, again, at the end of the day, no Ukrainian leader can accept,” the source said.
“They feel that they’re managing it well, which doesn’t mean that they don’t have anxiety,” they added. “They do, because it is a fact that they rely on U.S. support, it is a fact that Europe cannot totally compensate for that support.”
“They’re striking this balance of pushing back, but not in a way where they’re coming off as totally obstructionist and obstinate,” the source continued.
This month’s historic U.S.-Russia meeting in Riyadh laid bare the new administration’s approach to Moscow. The two sides agreed to normalize diplomatic relations and continue talks aimed at ending Russia’s war, all without Ukraine’s involvement.
Meanwhile, Trump’s bid to win access to hundreds of billions of dollars worth of Ukrainian mineral resources further unsettled Kyiv. “We’re going to get our money back,” the president said of the would-be deal, the first draft of which Zelenskyy rejected, declaring, “I can’t sell our state.”
But after a week of intense negotiations, both sides now suggest they have all but reached a deal, with Trump saying Monday he expects to see Zelenskyy in Washington next week.
The reversal of the U.S. approach is striking. Where once Biden and his team refused to engage with Moscow outside of an unprecedented sanctions campaign, Trump and his top officials are now lauding a revival in bilateral ties.
Where Biden once led the “ironclad” commitment to defending Ukraine against Kremlin aggression “for as long as it takes,” Trump falsely suggested Ukraine “should have never started” the war.
The Biden administration’s steady flow of vital military and economic aid, meanwhile, has been replaced with Trump’s push to recoup what he sees as poorly invested American money. “I want them to give us something for all of the money that we put up,” Trump told CPAC on Saturday. The president has focused in on the value of American aid to Kyiv, which he claims is as high as $500 billion. Zelenskyy disputed the figure and said American aid was given as grants, not loans. The Kiel Institute for the World Economy — a research institute in Germany that tracks foreign aid to Ukraine — said the U.S. has contributed around $119 billion to Ukraine over three years of war. The majority — $67 billion — was in the form of military equipment.
America’s rising Ukraine-skepticism is being expressed on all fronts. In an extraordinary illustration of the re-alignment on Ukraine, the U.S. sided with Russia in a vote against a United Nations General Assembly resolution condemning Russia, which passed on Monday with the support of the U.S.’ traditional Western allies. The UN Security Council passed a U.S.-drafted resolution which called for an end to the conflict without criticizing Russia. France and the U.K. abstained on the UNSC vote.
Zelenskyy has said Ukraine will not agree to any peace deal that does not protect it against renewed Russian aggression. The Trump administration’s rapid policy shift has pushed European allies to mobilize to provide their own long-term support — and protection — of Ukraine. Britain, France and others are discussing deploying European troops to Ukraine to guard any peace deal.
Though financially and logistically dependent on foreign partners, Ukraine’s armed forces are among the world’s most potent and experienced. Zelenskyy said in January that 980,000 Ukrainians are now under arms, dwarfing any other European military.
Despite Trump’s unproven claims to the contrary, well-respected polling organizations in Ukraine have found that Zelenskyy retains the trust of the majority of Ukrainians. His compatriots want the war to end on what they consider fair terms, but a December survey by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology poll indicates that 57% are prepared to carry the conflict’s burden for as long as necessary, despite heavy casualties, ongoing attacks on infrastructure and severe economic strain.
There are more testing days to come. Moscow has said that the U.S. and Russian negotiating teams will meet for a second round of talks within the next two weeks.
“It should not look like Americans and Russians are trying to reach a deal about Ukraine’s fate behind our backs,” Oleksandr Merezhko, a member of the Ukrainian parliament representing Zelenskyy’s party, told ABC News.
“But what is really important for us is that such communication between Americans and Russians should not lead to the decisions concerning Ukraine,” said Merezhko, who is also the chair of the parliament’s foreign affairs committee.
“I hope that it might be a part of a political game on the part of Trump, who is trying to lure Putin into negotiations to demonstrate to his voters that he is at least trying to deliver on his promise,” Merezhko added.
“That’s why we need constant communication with Trump and his team — if there is a vacuum, it can be filled by pro-Russian narratives.”
Yuriy Boyechko, the founder and CEO of the Hope for Ukraine charity, told ABC News he believes Trump “is taking a side of the aggressor.”
“Ukrainians won’t sign a surrender,” he added. “We will keep on fighting to preserve a free and democratic Ukraine even if our top ally — the U.S. — walks away. We have no other choice.”
ABC News’ Patrick Reevell contributed to this report.
