Infant highchairs recalled over ‘risk of serious injury or death'
(NEXSTAR) – A high-end highchair was recalled Thursday over a potentially deadly flaw and several reports of serious injuries, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC).
CPSC officials said the decision was made after multiple parents blamed the Bugaboo Giraffe highchair for serious falls that resulted in injuries including a hematoma, facial bruising, abrasions and a temporary loss of consciousness.
The screws that attach the legs to the chair are apparently prone to loosening over time — and even detaching by themselves, the CPSC said, citing incident reports on SaferProducts.gov as well as posts by parents on Reddit and Amazon.
Under one Reddit post titled 'An Unsafe Scam Disguised as a Premium Product,' one parent described what happened after two years of using the highchair, which retails for over $400 on the Bugaboo site.
'I went to pick up the highchair to move it—and it crumbled. Just completely fell apart in my hands. I was furious. This was supposed to be a safe, durable, premium product, and instead, it was falling to pieces right in front of me.'
The post contains a number of complaints about the customer service process, ranging from hang-ups to weekslong waits for email replies.
Parents who bought the chair are advised to stop using it immediately and contact Bugaboo for a repair kit. No refunds are currently being offered.
'Safety is paramount to ensure the well-being of our customers and their children,' Bugaboo states on its website. 'To decrease the potential for incorrect installation of the screws, we have developed a free Repair Kit.'
The kit apparently includes:
'If you have ordered a Bugaboo Giraffe after May 1st, 2025, you will already have the Repair Kit included in your Bugaboo Giraffe box and no further action is needed,' according to Bugaboo. The recall page contains a link for parents who want to check their highchair's serial number.
The recall comes after Consumer Reports sent a letter to the CPSC earlier in the week urging an investigation into the injury reports.
'While we are glad to see the product being recalled, it is unacceptable that Bugaboo is not offering a refund to consumers who want one,' said Gabe Knight, Senior Policy Analyst at Consumer Reports. 'Babies have been injured falling from this high chair, and parents may not feel comfortable using it anymore.
'We applaud the CPSC for recalling this product and alerting consumers to the potential safety risks, but Bugaboo should let caretakers decide whether they want the free repair kit, or their money back,' Knight continued.
As of Friday, 18,280 highchairs had been recalled in the U.S., with another 2,325 in Canada.
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Hamilton Spectator
a day ago
- Hamilton Spectator
Inside the global race to shelter kids from the harms of porn and social media
Desperate parents like it a lot. Their children, not so much. Measures meant to bring safety and order to the digital Wild West, protecting children from the harms of social media and pornography, are coming into force around the world. In Australia, the United Kingdom, Europe and parts of the United States — though not in Canada, at least not yet — lawmakers are pledging to protect kids from an increasingly dark digital realm where the flashy, outrageous and most addictive prevail. To do it, governments are banning younger teens from social networks entirely, forcing companies to proactively block harmful content and put hard-to-crack adults-only locks on sexually explicit websites. It will make for difficult dinner table conversations with the kids, no doubt. Try announcing to a 13-year-old whose every spare moment is filled with TikTok dances and Instagram stories that their access is to be revoked. The technology being used to verify and estimate the age of users — and which is emerging as the future requirement before logging on to Snapchat or Reddit or X or PornHub — has also sparked debate. It is pitting porn sites against tech titans and advocates of free speech against those of child protection. Australian Parliament bans social media for under-16s with world-first law What is not up for discussion, though, is that something must change. 'It's been 20 years that we've been having these discussions and every parent knows that there's a ton of inappropriate content that their kids are being exposed to — content that we use to all agree that they should not be exposed to before the internet and social media was around,' said Jacques Marcoux, director of research and analytics at the Canadian Centre for Child Protection in Winnipeg. French President Emmanuel Macron tapped into this frustration after a teenage student with a knife attacked and killed a school monitor earlier this month . He blamed the shocking act of violence on the rise of overwhelmed single-parent families and the harmful influence of social media. 'We have to ban social media for those under the age of 15,' Macron said in reaction to the killing, adding that he would push for the European Union to establish continent-wide rules or, if they were not forthcoming, he would push ahead alone. 'We can't wait.' Australia already passed the world's first law that, by the end of this year, will block children under the age of 16 from some of the world's most popular apps — a message that 'until a child turns 16, the social media environment as it stands is not age appropriate for them,' then-communications minister Michelle Anne Rowland in charge said last November. 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Britain's communications regulator, Ofcom, is forcing online service providers to conduct mandatory age checks if their platforms feature pornography and to take proactive steps, up to and including age verification, to protect children from online harms. French President Emmanuel Macron, right, has pledged to a ban on social media for those under the age of 15. Prime Minister Mark Carney, meanwhile, has so far declined to pick up the Trudeau-era Online Harms Act. 'We invented age verification for pornography,' said Iain Corby, Executive Director of the Age Verification Providers Association, a London-based industry group. Verification was rather straight forward in the early days. A credit card, driver's license, bank account or passport would serve as proof of age, just like in offline life. 'As it became clear that we wanted to try and do this for younger people under 18, none of those things were available. So, the industry innovated and came up with estimation tools,' Corby said. 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The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule soon on a challenge to a Texas law arguing that age-verification laws applied to porn sites violate the First Amendment rights of adults. The website operators say that users' fear of identity theft or the exposure of their online predilections end up deterring them from submitting to the new standards. How Trump the dealbreaker helped create the Iran-Israel crisis Aylo, the Canadian-owned company that runs PornHub, the world's best known adult site, is locked in a fight of its own with the French government. Earlier this month, it blocked access to French users in response to age-verification requirements that the company said were unfairly applied to 17 companies while letting others off the hook. Service was restored this week after a judge temporarily suspended the government order until a court could rule on the legal challenge. 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The bill proposed creating a Digital Safety Commission and Ombudsperson to enforce the new rules and regulations. But there were no explicit measures proposing age blocks for mature or adult content. 'Just to put age-appropriate measures, or something of that nature, was not doing it for me. It's like saying, 'Regulate yourselves, do what you think is right,'' said Independent Sen. Julie Miville-Dechêne, who introduced her own legislation in the Senate that would have made it a crime to make sexually explicit material available to to children on the internet. She worried that the government bill left the possibility of imposing age-verification measures up to the future federal commission — a much-too consequential step to be left to appointees and civil servants, in her opinion. Her Senate bill and the government bill both died when the last Parliament was prorogued and the federal election was called. Miville-Dechêne has refined and re-introduced her legislation . 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Cosmopolitan
3 days ago
- Cosmopolitan
A choking ban and ID checks: all the ways porn is changing in 2025 — and what needs to come next
It's a transformative time for pornography. Long gone are the days where explicit sexual content could only be found in the adult section of video stores. Now, porn is freely available at the click of a button — and it's not just limited to dedicated adult sites. Unsuspecting users are exposed to porn on social media platforms like X and Reddit, which are rife with X-rated content (but not so harshly regulated as porn sites). This easy accessibility means that the public are increasingly exposed to it at a younger age. Recent research shows that the average age in the UK that people first see explicit material online is 13. Concerningly, much of this material seems to depict violence, with a 2023 report finding that 79% of 18 to 21-year-olds who'd seen porn online had encountered videos portraying degrading acts, physical aggression, or sexual coercion. The effects of this have been much discussed in pop culture. In 2021, Billie Eilish famously revealed that she started having nightmares after being exposed to 'abusive' pornography from the age of 11. Meanwhile, the Netflix series Adolescence explored the consequences of young people having access to violent content online without the proper critical thinking skills to challenge certain acts, ideas, and attitudes. Beyond porn, young people are also increasingly exposed to non-consensual intimate content via terrifying 'nudify' apps and deepfake technology, which make it possible for any unsuspecting person (usually a woman) to be virtually stripped naked or superimposed into explicit videos and photos. All of this has led to a growing backlash against sexual content online — and a call for legislators to crack down on it. We can already see this happening in other counties. In Sweden, for example, live cam shows and custom-made pornographic content were banned last month. 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The government's decision was made following an Independent Porn Review which found that media sources, including pornography, have 'effectively established choking as a 'sexual norm', and a belief that choking a partner during sex is 'safe''. This is, obviously, worrying, and it's encouraging that the government is trying to tackle the rise of non-consensual choking, which mostly affects women and girls. It's a move that's been welcomed by safety campaigners and women's charities alike, and generally viewed as a step in the right direction. But will these measures really work? Amid the dire state of sex education in the UK, is this the right focus? And, as right wing conservatism grows, is a crackdown on sexual expression actually moving us forward? Data shows sexual strangulation has been on the rise in recent years, and it seems explicit online depictions of it have contributed to this, particularly among young people. A recent survey by the Institute for Addressing Strangulation (IFAS) found that it's most common among those aged 16 to 34, with 35% of respondents saying they've been choked during sex, while 17% said it had happened without their consent. 'I've experienced choking from casual sex partners before, and not always with my consent,' 35-year-old Bryony* tells Cosmopolitan UK. 'I was having sex once with a hook-up from Hinge and he suddenly grabbed my throat. I was so shocked by it that I froze — I would have struggled to talk with his tight grip anyway. He realised by my facial expression that I was taken aback and soon let go. It was a frightening experience.' Erotic asphyxiation is a genuine sexual kink/fetish, but seems to be increasingly misunderstood and mispracticed by those who seemingly don't know what they're doing. It has also sinisterly been used as a defence in many murder trials, including the harrowing case of Grace Milane, whose killer claimed she had died as a result of choking during consensual sex. Following this trial, the 'rough sex gone wrong' defence was banned in the UK — a key step in acknowledging that women cannot consent to their own harm or murder. As mentioned, women's groups have voiced their support for the criminalisation of choking porn, with Andrea Simon, the director of the End Violence Against Women Coalition, saying in a press release: 'Women cannot consent to the long-term harm [strangulation] can cause, including impaired cognitive functioning and memory. Its widespread portrayal in porn is fuelling dangerous behaviours, particularly among young people.' The availability of this kind of violent porn, and porn more broadly, is why the government is introducing its age verification laws next month, as part of the Online Safety Bill, which will force any websites or platforms (presumably including social media sites) that allow pornography to introduce effective age checks. This may include users providing their driver's license or passport, credit card details, or even agreeing to facial age estimation technology. It's unclear how exactly this will work in practice, and whether sites like Pornhub will simply block access in the UK, as they have done in the US, in light of the potential privacy risks. In a statement, digital rights campaigners Open Rights Group warned: 'The roll-out of age verification is likely to create new cybersecurity risks. This could take the form of more scam porn sites that will trick users into handing over personal data to 'verify their age'.' Although the ban is well-intentioned, it's easy to announce something but much harder to implement it in practice. 'In one regard, yes, it's a good idea to [stop people seeing] anything that is clearly harmful to women. But simply banning it isn't going to solve the problem,' says Marcus Johnstone, a criminal defence solicitor at PCD Solicitors. For one, Johnstone continues, 'you can ban lawful porn sites depicting non-fatal strangulation, but then what happens? It goes underground'. There's also the issue of who the liability falls to. 'Are they criminalising the makers, watchers, possessors of the image, [or the platforms that host them]? None of that is very clear,' adds Sean Caulfield, a partner in the crime team at Hodge Jones & Allen. There's no denying that something needs to be done about rising misogyny and violence against women and girls, including non-consensual choking. But what young people really need is comprehensive sex education, including porn literacy. Banning choking porn doesn't seek to tackle the true crux of the problem. Instead, we should be ensuring that all content young people can access on the internet is safe, and that the porn they are being exposed to is appropriately regulated. 'It's clear we need far more effective legislation to ensure online safety,' says Susie McDonald, the CEO of Tender, a charity that educates on healthy relationships. 'But equally critical is the need for all children and young people to access high quality relationships education so they can understand the key tenets of healthy relationships like consent and respect — and recognise the early warning signs of abuse. 'Right now, too many simply don't have access to this vital education,' she continues. 'RSHE needs to play a key role in keeping our young people safe, online and in the real world. We have a responsibility to protect all children as early as possible.' Implementing parameters of safety around online porn, especially for impressionable young people, is key — but so is ensuring they have a full understanding of things like consent, to be able to make appropriate decisions in their own personal lives. 'Adults need to be trusted to make adult choices, but that only works if they're equipped with context and critical thinking skills,' agrees Madelaine Thomas, senior policy advisor at the Digital Intimacy Coalition. 'Porn is entertainment, not education. It is fiction and should be enjoyed as such, not as an instructional guide. Porn shouldn't be used to educate unless it explicitly labels itself as such. The key is in educating that porn is fiction and filling the gap in education to teach so that they don't look to fiction as fact.' For some, strangulation kinks are genuine, and there will be people in consenting sexual relationships who choose to engage in such acts. There is already a law banning porn depicting graphic strangulation, and incoming age verification laws that should, in theory, prevent under 18s from viewing pornography of any kind. Depictions of strangulation shouldn't be freely accessible online, but the problem goes far beyond the porn young people are watching. We urgently need comprehensive sex education, media and porn literacy, and to encourage open, judgment-free conversations about sex, relationships, and consent. There also needs to be more funding for services that work to prevent violence against women and girls, a justice system that actually achieves justice for victims of sexual violence, and education that seeks to address the rise in misogyny among young people — and the real world effects that it has.
Newsweek
3 days ago
- Newsweek
Woman Gets Revenge on 'Snooping Neighbor,' It Leaves Internet in Hysterics
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. A group of neighborhood women found an unconventional way to handle a persistent snooper in their midst—and Reddit users are loving it. The incident was detailed in a post shared by u/foodf***flee on June 17 to the r/pettyrevenge subreddit. The tale of subtle yet scathing retaliation against a nosy neighbor has earned 5,000 upvotes and dozens of comments from amused Reddit users. According to the post, titled "Snooping Neighbour Got a Taste of Their own Medicine," the story originated from the Redditor's mother and centers around a woman named Judy, whose habit of snooping through other people's homes had become a well-known nuisance in their social circle. "This is my mom's story," the user wrote. "Every week a few neighborhood ladies plan a meet-up in any one of their houses. Three weeks ago it took place at our home, and my mom caught Judy coming out of my old bedroom when she had left on the pretext of going to the washroom." Though Judy claimed she "lost her way," the excuse didn't hold up. "She had been in our home before," the post noted. That incident led the mother to consult with others in the group, who revealed similar experiences of finding Judy in unauthorized parts of their homes. When confronted, the post claimed, Judy became "rude and defensive." A stock image of a woman sticking her head out from behind a door. A stock image of a woman sticking her head out from behind a door. Getty A recent survey by Talker Research for Newsweek found that disputes among neighbors are surprisingly common, ranging from noise complaints and lawn battles to property damage, intrusions and boundary disputes. Rather than confronting Judy directly, the women in the Reddit post opted for what the poster describes a taste of her own medicine. "Last Saturday, when the get together was at Judy's place, my mother and her friends bought googly eyes stickers and one by one they left the room on pretext of washroom and pasted those stickers all around the house," the user wrote. They even stuck them on Judy's mailbox, front door, and fence. The result? "A couple of neighbors had quite a show of her breakdown on Sunday going in and out, up and down her house looking for more stickers and removing them. Pretty sure the plan worked," the post concluded. Gregg Ward, executive director at The Center for Respectful Leadership, also cautioned against retaliatory behavior. "If your neighbor doesn't behave in ways you want them to, the last thing you should do is get into a tit-for-tat battle with them," Ward previously told Newsweek. "It never ends well." Jodi RR Smith, an etiquette consultant, agreed, telling Newsweek that the situation could have been handled with more grace and boundaries. "What the mom decided to do, with the rest of the group, was just cruel," Smith said. "Judy knows she is a snoop. Judy knows the group knows she is a snoop. Now Judy knows that the group had a discussion and decided to make her the focus of their practical joke." Smith suggested a more tactful approach, recommending hosts preemptively set boundaries in a group setting, such as by saying: "As you know the bathroom is at the top of the stairs. The door is open. Please do not enter any rooms where the door is closed." "And if the behavior continues, a direct conversation is key, saying something like 'Judy, I need you to stop snooping around in my home. If this continues, I will not be able to invite you back," Smith noted. She added: "Judy now needs to decide if she will alter her behavior and if she wants this group as friends." 'Genius' Reddit users responded with glee to the mom's "petty" reaction to her neighbor's behavior. "Genius! This is the way," wrote u/goodOmen78. Another user, u/Due_Classic_4090, added: "That is so petty, I love it!!!! Hahaha." U/Fire_or_water_kai agreed, calling it a "master class in petty!" U/pc_principal_88 said: "This was actually pretty satisfying to imagine. Hopefully she gets the hint and chills tf [the f***] out when it comes to snooping thru peoples things, etc." While Judy's future status in the neighborhood group remains unclear, one Redditor, u/obscurititty404, summed up the lingering question for many, saying: "It blows my mind that she's still invited to those events!" Newsweek has contacted the original poster for comment via the Reddit messaging system. Do you have a similar story to share? Let us know via life@ and your story could be featured on Newsweek.
