A young woman who claimed to be Madeleine McCann has been convicted of harassing the missing toddler’s family.
However, Julia Wandelt, 24, was cleared of stalking the couple.
A Polish national born three years after Madeleine, Wandelt said she suspected she had been abducted and brought up by a couple who were not her real parents.
She was having mental health issues at the time and had been abused by an elderly relative.
The relative looked like an artist’s drawing of a man who was once a suspect in the Madeleine case, which she stumbled across during internet research on missing children.
She went to Los Angeles and told a US TV chat show audience: “I believe I am Madeleine McCann.”
Madeleine was nearly four when she vanished from the family’s rented holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal, in May 2007.
She had been left sleeping with her younger twin siblings, Sean and Amelia, while her parents dined nearby with friends, making intermittent checks on the children.
Madeleine is the world’s most famous missing child, the subject of three international police investigations that have failed to find any trace of her.
Wandelt claimed to have a blemish in the iris of her right eye, like Madeleine’s, and to resemble aged-progressed images of her.
Madeleine McCann went missing during a family holiday to Portugal in 2007. Pic: PA
Over three years, she attracted half a million followers on her Instagram account, iammadeleinemccan, and posted her claims on TikTok.
Police told her she was not Madeleine and ordered her not to approach her family, but she ignored the warning.
The McCanns and their children gave evidence in the trial at Leicester Crown Court, describing the upset Wandelt had caused them.
Her co-defendant, Karen Spragg, 61, from Cardiff, was found not guilty of stalking and harassment.
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A trader works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Oct. 30, 2025 in New York.
Angela Weiss | AFP | Getty Images
This week’s equity market wobble, which saw a retreat in U.S. artificial intelligence-related stocks amid ongoing concerns over stretched valuations, has thrust contagion fears into the spotlight for global investors.
Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon warned this week of a “likely” 10-20% drawdown in equity markets at some point within the next two years, while the International Monetary Fund and the Bank of England have both sounded the alarm bells.
Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey highlighted the possibilities of an AI bubble in an interview with CNBC on Thursday, noting that the “very positive productivity contribution” from technology companies could be offset by uncertainty around future earning steams in the sector.
“We have to be very alert to these risks,” Bailey said.
Legrand is one of several European companies which is benefitting from the AI boom. The French company, which sells products to Alphabet, Amazon and others to help cool servers, has seen its shares surge 37% this year, roughly as much as Nvidia.
Anders Danielsson, CEO of Swedish construction group Skanska, which builds data centers and other AI infrastructure assets, shrugged off concerns about a slowdown.
“In the U.S. we have a very strong pipeline of data centers — we don’t see any slowdown there,” he told CNBC. “We are working with large international customers and they are also interested in building data centers in central Europe, and in the Nordics and the U.K. We haven’t seen any slowdown really.”
Meanwhile Kiran Ganesh, multi-asset strategist at UBS, highlighted a notable lack of volatility, adding that the broader narrative remains positive.
“We’ve had a remarkably smooth rally given the scale of investment that’s taken place, given the uncertainty about future cash flows, and given some of those concerns about valuation,” Ganesh told CNBC’s “Europe Early Edition” on Friday.
“As we’ve gone through earnings season, I think it’s reasonable to have expected some volatility, but actually when we look at the results, and they have been reassuring, we’re still up over the course of earnings season and they have been beating expectations. So although some volatility has been materializing this week, we think that’s to be expected and the bigger picture still remains positive.”
Still, many investors appear to be souring on the increasingly-stretched valuations.
In Asia, shares of SoftBank Group — which is active across AI infrastructure, semiconductor and application companies — have fallen sharply, with the Japanese group suffering almost $50 billion in weekly losses. SoftBank resumed its downward trajectory on Friday, after dropping about 10% on Wednesday.
On Tuesday, it emerged that Scion Asset Management, the hedge fund led by “The Big Short” investor Michael Burry, had built short positions against both Palantir Technologies and Nvidia, drawing the ire of Palantir CEO Alex Karp.
“Some big tech stocks are on sale, and are presenting buying opportunities for investors, especially for investors who have missed out on the market’s strength over the past two months,” said Glen Smith, chief investment officer at GDS Wealth Management.
Other investors have flagged concentration risk in U.S. equities, and advocate looking further afield.
Luca Paolini, chief strategist at Pictet Asset Management, said stretched valuations mean the firm is neutral on U.S. names. “Emerging markets are preferred, with diversified exposure across India, Brazil, and broader EM benefiting from AI-driven investment and monetary easing,” Paolini said in a market commentary.
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