分类： society

Thirty-one years after a headless, handless dismembered corpse was pulled from the River Seine west of Paris, one of France’s most chilling cold cases has finally come to trial, with 79-year-old Marie-Thérèse Garcia — the country’s oldest female detainee — standing accused of the kidnap and murder of her former sister-in-law Corinne Di Dio.

The tragedy dates back to June 1995, when 37-year-old Di Dio vanished without a trace. Just days after her disappearance, boaters spotted a heavy metal trunk chained shut floating on the river’s surface. When authorities pried it open, they found the dismembered remains of a woman, missing her head and hands — key identifying features that delayed a formal match until 1997, when investigators confirmed the body was Di Dio’s. To this day, the missing body parts have never been recovered.

Garcia emerged as a person of interest early in the investigation, but the case was twice dropped due to a crippling lack of evidence. That stalemate broke in recent years, however, when advances in DNA analysis unlocked a critical breakthrough: two hair strands recovered from inside the trunk were linked to Garcia or another woman sharing her maternal lineage. In 2023, Garcia was taken into custody to await trial, and all her requests for conditional release, made on the basis of her advanced age and poor health, have been rejected by courts.

Dubbed “Ma Dalton” by the French press, after the intimidating, redoubtable grandmother gang leader from the iconic Lucky Luke comic series, Garcia has repeatedly and forcefully proclaimed her innocence. In a recent interview with *Le Parisien*, she dismissed the entire prosecution’s case as “built on sand,” arguing that without concrete answers about what exactly happened to Di Dio, a conviction is impossible under French law. “No-one knows what happened. And in law if you don’t know, you can’t convict,” she stated, pointing out the hair evidence used against her does not even match her 1995 hair color — the hairs recovered were brown, while she had jet-black hair at the time of Di Dio’s disappearance.

Her defense attorney, Najwa El Haïté, has further pushed back against the charges, noting that the brutal, dismembered killing bears all the hallmarks of professional organized crime, not a first-time offender with no prior criminal record like Garcia. “The way [Di Dio] was killed – they were the methods of the underworld, of organised crime. No head, no hands – that’s not the method of a Marie-Thérèse, a woman with no criminal record,” El Haïté argued.

The case is complicated by the fact that both Garcia and Di Dio had deep ties to the French criminal underworld. In the 1980s, Di Dio was in a relationship with Antonio Marquez-Gomez, a Spanish man with known connections to drug trafficking networks. The pair shared a son, Romain, now 41 years old, who was frequently cared for by Garcia, who was also romantically involved with Marquez-Gomez’s brother, Francisco. The pair’s broader social circle included Jean-Jacques and Philippe Maurice, two infamous brothers with deep underworld ties; Philippe Maurice made history as the last person sentenced to death in France before receiving clemency from then-President François Mitterrand.

Over the course of the three-week trial, prosecutors will lay out their theory that Garcia lured Di Dio to her home south-west of Paris near Rambouillet, where she stabbed Di Dio to death in her living room before dismembering her body. Prosecutors claim the killing grew out of two motives: a pact between Garcia and Marquez-Gomez to take 10-year-old Romain away from his mother, and a bitter personal grudge Garcia held over Di Dio’s affair with Francisco.

Marquez-Gomez is also facing murder charges in connection with the killing, but he is believed to be hiding in Colombia and remains untraceable by law enforcement.

For Romain, the case has reopened decades of unhealed trauma. He told *Le Parisien* that just days after his mother disappeared, Garcia handed him over to his father, who by then was living in Madrid with a new wife and children. “I’m 10 years old, and suddenly I’m in Spain with a father I barely know and a family whose language I do not understand. That moment is not just a memory, it’s a scar,” he said.

Prosecutors are bringing forward multiple pieces of additional circumstantial evidence to bolster their case. The most damning may be testimony from Garcia’s own daughter Nancy, who told police in 2004 that she overheard her mother discussing the murder on the phone shortly before Di Dio vanished. A second, eerie incident also raised suspicions: in 2022, when a young couple including Garcia’s great-niece disappeared, police overheard Garcia tell an associate over a tapped phone line that if she found the people responsible, she would “cut them up and put the pieces in a suitcase.”

French media have described Garcia as a headstrong woman who is generous to her close circle but unforgiving to anyone she sees as an enemy. Garcia continues to maintain that all evidence against her is purely circumstantial, insisting: “And if I’d wanted to remove every woman who Francisco slept with, there wouldn’t be many women left in the world. There’s no proof against me. No clue. No motive. It’s all built on sand.”

LONDON – Supermodel Naomi Campbell has taken the stand in a UK tribunal to challenge a five-year ban on serving as a charity trustee, arguing she was deliberately misled by a close colleague who was entrusted to manage the operations of her global disaster relief nonprofit.

The case stems from a 2024 ruling by the Charity Commission for England and Wales, which disqualified the 56-year-old supermodel after a year-long investigation uncovered widespread and serious financial mismanagement at Fashion for Relief, the philanthropic organization Campbell founded to support poverty alleviation and disaster response worldwide.

Regulators found that over a six-year period ending in 2022, just 8.5% of the charity’s total spending went to direct charitable grants to causes it was supposed to support. The investigation also uncovered that thousands of pounds in charitable funds were diverted to cover Campbell’s personal luxury expenses during a stay at a high-end resort in Cannes, France, including spa services, premium room service, and personal tobacco purchases.

Campbell launched her appeal against the disqualification last year, framing herself as an unwitting victim of systemic fraud and forgery carried out by her co-trustee, Bianka Hellmich. Appearing before the tribunal on Tuesday, the supermodel doubled down on those claims, alleging that Hellmich forged her signature on key financial documents and lied about holding professional credentials as a charity law specialist.

Campbell admitted she did not conduct independent background checks on Hellmich, saying she had reasonably assumed her colleague was operating in full compliance with legal and regulatory requirements for charitable organizations. In a pre-hearing written statement, Campbell emphasized that she has never pursued philanthropic work for personal financial gain, and never will.

The Charity Commission has also barred Hellmich from serving as a charity trustee for nine years, after the inquiry found she received roughly £290,000 ($385,000) in unauthorized payments for unapproved consultancy work. A third trustee, Veronica Chou, received a four-year disqualification over the findings.

Andrew Westwood, Campbell’s legal representative, told the tribunal that Hellmich persuaded Campbell to take a largely ceremonial “figurehead” role at the charity, while Hellmich carried out a years-long, coordinated scheme of mismanagement and deception that hid the organization’s true financial state from the founding trustee.

Fashion for Relief was first established in the United States in 2005 and officially registered as a charity in the UK in 2015. Its stated mission was to bring together global fashion industry leaders to fund poverty relief and emergency support for communities affected by natural disasters and humanitarian crises. The organization was dissolved and struck from the UK register of charities earlier this year following the regulator’s investigation. Additional witnesses are scheduled to give testimony on Wednesday as the tribunal hearing continues.

After months of widespread public speculation over where the 12-year-old second-in-line to the British throne would continue his secondary education, Kensington Palace officially announced Tuesday that Prince George will enroll at Eton College when the new academic term begins this coming September.

For weeks, royal watchers and education analysts had debated the prospective choice, with many pundits floating Marlborough College — the boarding school that Prince George’s mother, Princess Catherine, attended during her youth — as the likely favorite. But the palace put all conjecture to rest with a brief, clear confirmation: “Kensington Palace can confirm that Prince George will attend Eton College from this September.”

Founded all the way back in 1440 by King Henry VI, Eton College is one of the United Kingdom’s most prestigious all-boys boarding schools, with a centuries-long reputation for grooming the nation’s future leaders. Its alumni roll includes multiple former British prime ministers, ranging from Britain’s first prime minister Robert Walpole to 21st-century officeholders David Cameron and Boris Johnson.

The choice of Eton also places Prince George in a long line of close royal family members who attended the institution. His father, Prince William, heir to the British throne, studied at Eton, as did George’s uncle Prince Harry and his great-uncle, Earl Charles Spencer. Even today, the school retains many of its historic traditions, including requiring all students to wear its iconic formal uniform: tailored tailcoats, stiff white collars, and pinstriped trousers.

At present, Prince George is a student at Lambrook, a private preparatory school located in Berkshire. The school, which sits close to the royal family’s Windsor residence west of London, also counts George’s two younger siblings — 11-year-old Princess Charlotte and 8-year-old Prince Louis — among its current students.

On a quiet park bench in Debrecen, eastern Hungary, 33-year-old social worker Barbara Elek refreshes her email inbox with trembling hands. Ten days removed from her third round of in vitro fertilization, she and her 34-year-old chef husband Levi wait for life-changing news: whether their years-long struggle to start a family has finally succeeded. If the treatment fails, Barbara says, the grief of losing a pregnancy will not be their only burden. If they cannot prove an expected child by November 1, the couple stands to lose everything they have built financially.

Like tens of thousands of other young Hungarian couples, Barbara and Levi accepted a 10 million forint (£25,000) interest-free loan and a linked mortgage subsidy under a landmark pronatalist policy introduced by former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government in 2010. In exchange for promising to have two children within a set timeline, the pair gained access to unprecedented financial support. But under the policy’s fine print, couples who fail to meet their child-bearing commitment face crippling penalty interest between 1.5 and 3.5 million forint (£3,700-£8,600) – a sum Barbara and Levi say they simply cannot afford.

Orbán’s 15-year experiment in state-backed fertility promotion stands as one of the most ambitious population policy overhauls in modern history. When Fidesz took power in 2010, Hungary faced a demographic crisis: its fertility rate rested at 1.25 children per woman, far below the 2.1 replacement rate needed to sustain a stable native population, compounded by mass emigration and minimal immigration. Orbán’s approach rejected the Western solution of increased immigration, famously stating: “We don’t need numbers, we need Hungarian children.” Over 15 years, the government rolled out billions in incentives: tax breaks for large families, interest-free home loans, mortgage subsidies, and grants for home renovations and larger vehicle purchases, all restricted to married, heterosexual couples with formal employment.

For a decade, the policy appeared to deliver on its promises. Hungary’s fertility rate climbed steadily, hitting 1.59 by 2020, earning the program praise from conservative circles around the world, particularly in the United States. But by 2025, that progress had evaporated: the fertility rate fell back to 1.31, barely higher than its 2010 baseline. Demographers now widely classify the initiative as a failure to meet its core goal of reversing population decline. What went wrong with one of the world’s most aggressive pronatalist projects, and what lessons can other nations grappling with falling fertility learn from Hungary’s experience?

Supporters of the policy argue it still softened the blow of a continent-wide fertility decline. “Without these policies, there would be hundreds of thousands of fewer children,” says Fruzsina Skrabski of pro-family NGO Three Princes, Three Princesses, who notes the program simply did not go far enough to reverse long-term demographic trends. For large families like Maté and Agi Gorondy of suburban Budapest, who have five children under 10 and may have more, the incentives have been life-changing. The couple leveraged generous maternity pay, tax cuts, and subsidies to renovate their home and buy a larger vehicle; as a mother of more than two children, Agi will pay no income tax if she returns to work. Maté says a cultural shift is visible even at the neighborhood level: “Four- or five-child families are no longer rare” in his community, a shift reflected in mid-2010s data that saw a steady rise in families with three or more children, peaking in 2020 before declining again.

Critics, however, point to deep structural flaws that limited the policy’s impact. The benefits were unevenly distributed, notes János Tóth, a demographic studies professor at the University of Szeged: the incentives worked well for lower-middle-class rural families, but did little to boost fertility in urban areas, where birth rates are lowest and the cost of living has eroded the value of the 10 million forint baby loan amid soaring inflation. Tóth adds that the policy focused too heavily on encouraging additional children from existing parents, rather than removing barriers to first-time parenthood – “the first child is the most important.”

Other experts argue the temporary rise in fertility simply reflected a timing shift, not a permanent increase in total births. “These policies prompted a cohort of people to have children they would have had anyway, just a little earlier than planned,” explains Eva Fodor, co-director of the Democracy Institute at Central European University. After the initial rush of earlier planned births, rates naturally fell back to trend. A similar pattern has played out across Eastern Europe: the Czech Republic, which did not implement Hungary-scale pronatalist incentives, saw an identical rise and subsequent fall in fertility over the same period.

For many Hungarian parents, financial support was never the main barrier to having more children. Antonia Miskolczi, a 29-year-old first-time mother in Budapest, says fears over Hungary’s underfunded public healthcare system far outweighed any financial incentive when she and her husband decided to limit their family to two children. After seeing social media warnings of under-resourced public hospitals and hearing horror stories from relatives, Antonia chose to deliver her son at a private clinic. “I don’t think big promises are needed. Just fix the fundamentals and the willingness to have children will increase,” she says. “Improving education and healthcare should be the very first step if people are going to feel comfortable having children.”

Fodor’s 2019 research with middle-class professional Hungarian women confirms this gap. Most respondents viewed one-time government payments as insufficient, citing a persistent lack of reliable childcare, functional public health infrastructure, and work flexibility as their core barriers to expanding their families. While Hungary expanded childcare access under Orbán, many families still report services are insufficient to meet demand.

Hungary is far from alone in its struggle to reverse falling fertility. Across the globe, more than half of all countries now have fertility rates below replacement level, a trend that has accelerated since the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. South Korea, for example, has spent more than £215 billion since 2008 on fertility incentives including £20,000-£30,000 baby bonuses and monthly child benefits, yet its fertility rate fell to 0.8 in 2025. Demographers point to overlapping global crises driving this trend: pandemic uncertainty, the war in Ukraine, soaring global inflation, and widespread political instability have all eroded public confidence in the future, a key driver of decisions to have children. “Fertility tends to decline because people don’t have confidence in the future,” notes Vienna Institute of Demography demographer Tomas Sobotka.

Looking at global success stories, Nordic countries like Sweden have come closest to sustaining higher fertility through a different model: policies that prioritize work-family balance, including shared parental leave, universal affordable childcare, and support for dual-earner households. While Sweden’s fertility has also fallen in recent years, it remains far higher than most of Europe, and has avoided the extreme decline seen in East Asia. “Countries that make it easier for men and women to share work and care are far better protected against deep fertility decline,” Sobotka explains.

By contrast, Fodor argues, Orbán’s policy reinforced rigid traditional gender roles that frame women as the primary caregivers, a cultural norm that discourages many women from having children in the modern workforce. “Even state-owned companies are not flexible, they do not take into account the fact that men and women both may have responsibilities outside of the labour market,” Fodor says. This aligns with patterns seen in South Korea, where rigid traditional gender roles and a lack of work-life balance leave women bearing the full burden of childcare, driving many to delay or forgo having children entirely. Only Israel, among OECD nations, sustains a fertility rate above replacement level, a trend experts attribute more to strong cultural norms around family building than high government spending.

Orbán’s government spent roughly 5% of GDP on its family initiative, and the policy remained popular enough that Hungary’s new prime minister Peter Magyar did not campaign to roll it back after taking office in April 2026. While experts agree that any financial support for families is a net positive, Fodor argues the money could have delivered far more impact if invested in institutional infrastructure and gender equality. “If that money had been spent on social institutions and gender equality and promoting men’s role in domestic work, I think a similar increase in the fertility rate could have been achieved,” she says.

For Barbara and Levi, the policy’s contradictions have come at a devastating cost. The Hungarian National Bank estimates one in five couples who took out the baby loan five years ago have not had children, many for reasons of infertility entirely outside their control. The new government has said it is reviewing the policy’s penalty terms, but no changes have been announced yet.

The long-awaited email finally arrived. The implanted embryo had not survived. “It’s horrible, just horrible,” Levi said, holding his crying wife. In a country that brands itself as family-friendly, the couple has been left with neither the child they dreamed of, nor the financial stability the policy promised – caught in a failed experiment that has left millions of families facing uncertainty.

*This report is published ahead of the June 16 launch of BBC News Magyarul, a new Hungarian-language service from BBC World Service serving Central European audiences.*