Celebrity Traitors star Joe Marler seemed stunned when Uncloaked host Ed Gamble questioned him about calling his co-stars ‘scumbags’ after his shock exit from the BBC series
00:05, 07 Nov 2025Updated 00:05, 07 Nov 2025
There was some backtracking where insults were concerned on The Celebrity Traitors on Thursday.
Joe Marler was caught out taking aim at his co-stars after they eliminated him from the show, at the final hurdle. As he watched the moment back in the audience of spin-off series Uncloaked, he called out the celebs who let him down.
What’s rather hilarious is Joe had zero recollection of doing so, but someone heard him. Host Ed Gamble wasted no time in putting Joe on the spot about the moment he called David Olusoga and Nick Mohammed “scumbags” for thinking he was a Traitor.
The moment itself was a shocker that left viewers fuming, and Joe clearly did not see it coming. He was openmouthed with confusion as the stars explained their decision to banish him, all because he’d apologised to Cat Burns for voting her out moments earlier.
As the crowd watched the finale together, Ed heard Joe say “scumbags” as he was voted out of the castle. When Joe joined Ed on the stage for Uncloaked, he told him: “I was sitting in the row in front of you watching that.
“When you saw you get banished, you did shout scumbags at them.” Joe looked really shocked, gasping as he appeared to forget he’d said it. He asked: “Did I?”
It’s then that he completely backtracked and said he “didn’t mean” to call Nick and David that term. He told Ed, and his co-stars: “No, I didn’t mean that.
“I didn’t mean that, I just couldn’t work out… what was it?” He then revealed how he’d been banished for being polite to Cat Burns. One amused viewer posted: “I can’t believe Joe yelled scumbags at them when he was banished.”
Meanwhile, Alan Carr’s victory left the star sobbing. As Alan announced he was and always had been a Traitor, Nick screamed: “Oh f**k,” and nearly collapsed in shock.
David was left speechless as he fell to the table, and stared on in disbelief – despite co-star Joe’s warning before his elimination moments earlier. But they were stunned as Alan then burst into tears, telling his new pals: “It’s been tearing me apart. I am so sorry.”
Nick was first to rush over to Alan, tearful as he consoled him and told him all was fine. He said: “You’ve been absolutely brilliant. You’ve been amazing. It’ a game.”
A son of conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly has publicly revealed that he is homosexual, while at the same time defending his mother’s political views and the Republican Party’s “family values” campaign theme.
“The family values movement is not anti-gay,” said John F. Schlafly, a 41-year-old attorney who lives with his parents in Alton, Ill., and counts among his clients the Eagle Forum, the conservative group founded by his mother.
“These people are not anti-gay. They’re not gay bashers,” John Schlafly said in a telephone interview Friday. “I hold my mother in very high esteem. She’s doing good work.”
He added that he “didn’t agree with everything” he heard at the GOP convention but insisted that “efforts to convey the (Republican) Convention and the platform and speakers as bigots and gay bashers is completely inaccurate. The concept of family values should not be threatening to gays and lesbians. Most gays and lesbians have good relations with their family, as I do.”
Schlafly was “outed,” or revealed to be gay, by QW, a magazine published in New York, two weeks ago. He confirmed his homosexuality in an interview published Friday by the San Francisco Examiner.
“I thought it best to set the record straight,” Schlafly explained. “The media was trying to push the angle that there was some sort of hypocrisy going on, which I felt was inaccurate.”
Phyllis Schlafly characterized the media’s interest in her son’s revelation as “obviously a political hit against me.” She declined to say when she learned her son is gay and added that homosexuality “is not a big subject around (the Schlafly family).”
As for her stand on gay rights, Phyllis Schlafly said: “There’s nothing about my position on gay rights that should be offensive to a gay unless he’s seeking some kind of preferential status.”
While John Schlafly said he did not think it was right for someone to be fired based on sexual orientation, he said he did “not support the so-called gay-rights agenda” and was not sure what he thought of the military’s ban on homosexuals.
In his remarks to the Examiner, he disagreed with one common contention of the religious right, that homosexuality is a choice. “You can say in some sense I choose to write with my right or left hand,” Schlafly said. “But the point is that it is such an automatic decision. That’s how I see homosexuality.”
He also objected “to anyone saying that being gay constitutes not having good moral character.”
ROMEO Beckham has confirmed that he is back with his ex Kim Turnbull after rekindling their romance.
The pair were seen in Paris this weekend, holding hands and looking loved up, just six months after the strain of the Beckham family feud led to them splitting up.
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Romeo Beckham has confirmed he’s back together with Kim Turnbull after the pair held hands in publicCredit: The Mega AgencyThe pair were seen on two occasions in Paris this weekendCredit: Splash
The announced of their split came around the same time that the Beckham family feud kicked off.
A source told The Mail at the time: “Romeo and Kim are both young and they had a lovely time together but at that age things don’t always last forever and they decided to split up.
“They have been friendly since and have even been at the same venues.
“It’s a huge shame, particularly as David and Victoria really adored her and thought she made Romeo happy but it wasn’t to be.
A year ago tomorrow , the Zacatecas native suffered a heart attack and mild stroke in the moments after seeing his Dodgers win Game 2 of the World Series against the New York Yankees. He spent three days in a medically induced coma at St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood and regained consciousness to news from jubilant nurses that the Dodgers had won the championship.
The lifelong baseball fan had no idea what they were talking about. His passion for the sport was lost along with his memory.
When family members put on highlights from the 2024 championship during his rehabilitation at a clinic in Gardena throughout the end of the year, the former carpenter would shrug and change the channel. When someone told him that legendary Dodgers pitcher Fernando Valenzuela had died, Contreras swore that he had just seen his fellow Mexican pitch at the stadium.
It wasn’t until the 2025 baseball season came along that Contreras’ mind began to truly rebound. He watched games from his longtime home in the unincorporated Florence-Graham neighborhood and learned to love the Dodgers anew. But he didn’t cheer like before. Contreras followed doctor’s orders to stay calm when the Dodgers were losing instead of cursing like the past and quietly applaud when the team was winning when he would’ve previously roared.
He’s the father-in-law of my sister Alejandrina. And I wanted to hang out with Don Conrado for Game 1 of this year’s World Series to experience fandom in all its mortality.
Wearing a flat-brimmed fedora and a blue Dodgers 2024 World Series champion, I caught Contreras just as he was entering my sister’s Norwalk home holding on to his walker with the help of Alejandrina’s husband, Conrad. His father talks slower than he used to and can’t drive anymore, but Contreras is once again the same man his family knows: witty, observant and baseball-crazy.
A schoolyard pitcher in his hometown of Monte Escobedo, Contreras fell in with the Dodgers almost as soon as he migrated to the United States in 1970 to join a brother in Highland Park. He used to attend games every week “when $10 got two people into the stadium and you could also eat a hot dog,” Contreras told me in Spanish before Game 1 began.
His stories from those years were immaculate. Don Sutton throwing a shutout. The Cincinnati Reds always “ready to play to the death.” Pittsburgh Pirates slugger Willie Stargell hitting a home run out of Dodger Stadium in 1973 “and all of us just staring above our heads in awe.”
Contreras was such a fan that he took his pregnant wife Mary to watch Valenzuela pitch on the day in 1983 that Conrad was due because they were giving out “I (Heart) Fernando” T-shirts, an anecdote that left their son flabbergasted.
“What happened to the shirt?” Conrad asked his mom in Spanish.
“I threw it away,” replied the 61-year-old Mary.
“They’d cost a lot of money now!” he groaned.
“They were cheap! The color really faded fast.”
Los Angeles Dodgers two-way player Shohei Ohtani hits a two-run home run during the seventh inning of Game 1 of the World Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays at Roger Centre on Friday in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The Blue Jays won, 11-4.
(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
The family continued to attend games through Conrad’s teenage years but stopped “when even the birds couldn’t afford to attend,” Mary said. Conrad, 42, thinks the last time he went to a game with his dad was “at least” 20 years ago. But they regularly watched games on television. It was he who administered the CPR a year ago that saved his dad’s life.
“He was walking around the house angry all that game,” Conrad said.
“No, well, Roberto was making me mad,” Conrado replied, his nickname for Dodgers manager Dave Roberts. “But I can’t get mad anymore.”
I asked how he thought this year’s series would go. He mentioned Shohei Ohtani, whom he kept calling el japonés in a respectful tone because, well, his memory can be fuzzy.
“He strikes out too much, but when he hits it, he hits it. If he plays like that, they win the series. But if Toronto hits, forget it.”
One more question before game time, the one too many liberal Latino Dodgers fans are belly-aching over right now: is it ethical to root for the team considering they haven’t been too vocal in opposing Donald Trump’s deportation campaign and owner Mark Walter has investments in companies that are profiting from it?
“Sports shouldn’t get into politics, but all sports owners are with Trompas,” he said, using a nickname I’ve heard more than a few rancho libertarians use for Trump. He shrugged.
“So what’s one to do? They kept la migra out of the stadium,” referring to an unsuccessful June attempt by federal agents to enter the stadium parking lot. “If the team had allowed that, then there’d be a huge problem.”
Mary wasn’t as sympathetic. “Latinos shouldn’t let the Dodgers off so easy. But when Latinos surrender, they surrender.”
It was game time.
Conrad slipped into a gray Dodgers away jersey to match his black team cap. My sister, an Angels follower for some reason, wore a Kiké Hernández T-shirt “because he stands with immigrants.”
“The only good thing about the Dodgers is that they aren’t winning with a gringo,” said Mary, who actually doesn’t care much about baseball because she finds it boring. “It’s someone [Ohtani] who doesn’t want to speak English who’s winning it for them.”
Her husband smiled.
“Let’s see if Mary gets into baseball.”
“That’ll be the real miracle,” she snapped back.
Contreras rubbed his hands in glee as the Dodgers went up 2-0 in the top of the third and merely frowned when the Blue Jays tied it in the bottom of the fourth while we were enjoying takeout from Taco Nazo. “His anger comes in waves, it’s a trip,” Conrad said. “He’s calmer but se enoja.”
“Who?” Conrado deadpanned.
When Dodger starting pitcher Blake Snell left the game with the bases loaded and no one out in the bottom of the sixth, Contreras shook his head in disgust but kept his voice calm.
“This is what gets me mad. They should’ve taken him out long ago, but Roberto didn’t. This is what I was afraid of. When Toronto get on, they get on. They won’t stop until they destroy.”
Earlier in the game, Alejandrina had told Conrado that Kirk was a Tijuana native. The pride in shared roots, albeit generations apart, took a little bit of sting off his home run, which made the score a humiliating 11-2.
“Thank goodness he’s Mexican,” Conrado told his son, patting his knee. “That’s what’s left for us” to be happy about the game.
An inning later, Contreras began to feel woozy. His sugar level was elevated. Mary took off his jacket to fix his insulin device. My sister’s corgi, Penny, jumped onto the couch and lay on his lap.
“They do know when someone someone’s ill, right?” he said to no one before scratching Penny’s tummy and cooing, “You know I’m ill, right? I’m ill!”
When the “massacre” finally ended, Contreras remained philosophical.
“It’s incredible that I’m able to see this. But I’m still malo. My feet hurt, my memory isn’t what it used to be, my sense of balance isn’t there. But there’s the Dodgers. But they need to win.”
Conrad went to the bedroom to grab his father’s walker.
“Do you want a Toronto shirt now?” he joked.
His dad stared silently. “No, that would give me another heart attack.”
“I’m in a huge, massive town I don’t really know,” he says, “and I’m looking for the movie district. And inevitably all the theaters are closed down. They’re all closed down. That’s what the dream is.”
I’m visiting Carpenter at his longtime production house in Hollywood on one of L.A.’s unjustly sunny October afternoons. A vintage “Halloween” pinball machine and a life-size Nosferatu hover near his easy chair. I tell him I don’t think Freud would have too much trouble interpreting that particular dream.
“No, I know,” he says, laughing. “I don’t have too much trouble with that either.”
Nonetheless, it truly haunts him — “and it has haunted me over the years for many dreams in a row,” he continues. “I’m either with family or a group, and I go off to do something and I get completely lost. [Freud] wouldn’t have too much trouble figuring that out either. I mean, none of this is very mysterious.”
Carpenter is a gruff but approachable 77 these days, his career as a film director receding in the rearview. The last feature he made was 2010’s “The Ward.” His unofficial retirement was partly chosen, partly imposed by a capricious industry. The great movie poster artist Drew Struzan died two days before I visited — Carpenter says he never met Struzan but loved his work, especially his striking painting for the director’s icy 1982 creature movie “The Thing” — and I note how that whole enterprise of selling a movie with a piece of handmade art is a lost one.
“The whole movie business that I knew, that I grew up with, is gone,” he replies. “All gone.”
John Carpenter with John Mulaney, appearing as a part of “Everybody’s in L.A.” at the Sunset Gower Studios in May 2024.
(Adam Rose / Netflix)
It hasn’t, thankfully, made him want to escape from L.A. He still lives here with his wife, Sandy King, who runs the graphic novel imprint Storm King Comics, which Carpenter contributes to. He gamely appeared on John Mulaney’s “Everybody’s in L.A.” series on Netflix and, earlier this year, the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. gave him a Career Achievement Award — a belated lovefest for a veteran who was sidelined after “The Thing” flopped, cast out into indie darkness and was never personally nominated for an Oscar.
The thing that does keep Carpenter busy these days (other than watching Warriors basketball and playing videogames) is the thing that might have an even bigger cultural footprint than his movies: his music. With his adult son Cody and godson, Daniel Davies, Carpenter is once again performing live concerts of his film scores and instrumental albums in a run at downtown’s Belasco this weekend and next.
The synthy, hypnotic scores that became his signature in films like “Halloween” and “Escape from New York” not only outnumber his output as a director — he’s scored movies for several other filmmakers and recently made a handshake deal in public to score Bong Joon Ho’s next feature — but their influence and popularity are much more evident in 2025 than the style of his image-making.
From “Stranger Things” to “F1,” Carpenter’s minimalist palette of retro electronica combined with the groove-based, trancelike ethos of his music (which now includes four “Lost Themes” records) is the coin of the realm so many modern artists are chasing.
Very few composers today are trying to sound like John Williams; many of them want to sound like John Carpenter. The Kentucky-raised skeptic with the long white hair doesn’t believe me when I express this.
“Well, see, I must be stupid,” he says, “because I don’t get it.”
“The true evil in the world comes from people,” says Carpenter. “I know that nature’s pretty rough, but not like men.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Carpenter is quick to put himself down. He always says that he scored his own films because he was the only composer he could afford, and that he only used synths because they were cheap and he couldn’t properly write music for an orchestra. When I tell him that Daniel Wyman, the instrumentalist who helped program and execute the “Halloween” score in 1978, praised Carpenter’s innate knowledge of the “circle of fifths” and secondary dominants — bedrocks of Western musical theory that allowed Carpenter’s scores to keep the tension cooking — he huffs.
“I have no idea what he’s talking about,” Carpenter says, halfway between self-deprecation and something more rascally. “It all comes, probably, from the years I spent in our front room with my father and listening to classical music. I’m sure I’m just digging this s— out.”
Whether by osmosis or genetics or possibly black magic, Carpenter clearly absorbed his powers from his father, Dr. Howard Carpenter, a classically trained violinist and composer. Classical music filled the childhood home in Bowling Green and for young John it was all about “Bach, Bach and Bach. He’s my favorite. I just can’t get enough of Johann there.”
It makes sense. Bach’s music has a circular spell quality and the pipe organ, resounding with reverb in gargantuan cathedrals, was the original synthesizer.
“He’s the Rock of Ages of music,” says Carpenter, who particularly loves the fugue nicknamed “St. Anne” and the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. “Everybody would go back to Mozart or Beethoven. They are astonishing — Beethoven is especially astonishing — but they’re not my style. I don’t feel it like I do with Bach. I immediately got him.”
Carpenter was also a film score freak since Day 1. He cites the early electronic music in 1956’s “Forbidden Planet” and claims Bernard Herrmann and Dimitri Tiomkin as his two all-time favorites. Just listen, he says, to the way Tiomkin’s music transitions from the westerny fanfare under the Winchester Pictures logo to the swirling, menacing orchestral storm that accompanies “The Thing From Another World” title card in that 1951 sci-fi picture that Carpenter remixed as “The Thing.”
“The music is so weird, I cannot follow it,” he says. “But I love it.”
Yet Carpenter feels more personally indebted to rock ‘n’ roll: the Beatles, the Stones, the Doors. He wanted to be a rock star ever since he grew his hair long and bought a guitar in high school. He sang and performed R&B and psychedelic rock for sororities on the Western Kentucky campus as well as on a tour of the U.S. Army bases in Germany. He formed the rock trio Coupe de Villes with his buddies at USC and they made an album and played wrap parties.
He also kept soaking up contemporary influences, listening to Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London” while location scouting for “Halloween.” Peter Fonda later introduced Carpenter to Zevon and he wanted the director to adapt the song into a film that never happened (starring Fonda as the werewolf, but “this time he gets the girl,” Carpenter recalls). In the ’80s he blasted Metallica with his two boys and he still loves Devo.
It’s incredibly rare for a film director to score their own films, rarer still for one to spend decades on stage as a performing musician. The requisite personalities would seem diametrical.
“My dad was a performing musician, so it was just part of the family,” Carpenter says. However, until 2016, when Carpenter first toured with his music, he was consumed with stage fright. “I had an incident when I was in a play in high school,” he says. “I went up and I forgot my lines. Shame descended upon me and I had a tough time. I was scared all the time.”
The director credits his touring drummer, Scott Seiver, for helping him beat it.
“Your adrenaline carries you to another planet when that thing starts,” he sighs with pleasure. “You hear a wall of screaming people. It’s a big time.”
He pushes back against the idea that directors “hide behind the camera.”
“The pressure, that’s the biggest thing,” Carpenter says. “You put yourself under pressure from the studio, you’re carrying all this money, crew, you want to be on time.”
He remembers seeing some haggard making-of footage of himself in post-production on “Ghost of Mars” in 2001 and thinking: Oh my God, this guy is in trouble. “I had to stop,” he says. “I can’t do this to myself anymore. I can’t take this kind of stress — it’ll kill you, as it has so many other directors. The music came along and it’s from God. It’s a blessing.”
John Carpenter is grateful but he doesn’t believe in God. He believes that, when we die, “we just disperse — our energy disperses, and we return to what we were. We’re all stardust up there and the darkness created us, in a sense. So that’s what we have to make peace with. I point up to the infinite, the space between stars. But things stop when you die. Your heart stops, brain — everything stops. You get cold. Your energy dissipates and it just… ends. The End.”
This is not exactly a peaceful thought for him.
“I mean, I don’t want to die,” he adds. “I’m not looking forward to that. But what can you do? I can’t control it. But that’s what I believe and I’m alone in it. I can’t put that on anybody else. Everybody has their own beliefs, their own gods, their own afterlife.”
He describes himself as a “long-term optimist but a short-term pessimist.”
“I have hope,” he says, “put it that way.” Yet he looks around and sees a lot of evil.
“The true evil in the world comes from people,” says Carpenter, who has long used cinematic allegories to skewer capitalist pigs and bloodthirsty governments. “I know that nature’s pretty rough, but not like men. You see pictures of lions taking down their prey and you see the face of the prey and you say: ‘Oh, man.’ Humans do things like that and enjoy it. Or they do things like that for power or pleasure. Humans are evil but they’re capable of massive good — and they’re capable of the greatest art form we have: music.”
The greatest?
“You don’t have to talk about it. You just sit and listen to it. It’s not my favorite,” he clarifies, alluding to his first love, cinema — “but it’s the one that transcends centuries.”
Music has always been kinder to him than the movie business. That business recently reared its ugly head when A24 tossed his completed score for “Death of a Unicorn.” (At least he owns the rights and will be putting it out sometime soon.) In addition to the high he gets from playing live, he is currently working on a heavy metal concept album complete with dialogue. It’s called “Cathedral” and he’ll be playing some of it at the Belasco.
It’s essentially a movie in music form, based on a dream Carpenter had. Though not one he finds scary. What scares Carpenter, it seems, is not being in control.
That happened to him in the movie world, it’s happening more and more as what he calls the “frailties of age” mount and it happens in that nightmare about getting lost in a big city and not finding any theaters.
“But I can’t do anything about it,” he says. “What can I do? See, the only thing I can do is what I can control: music. And watching basketball.”
A few months ago, my younger daughter, Darby, and I were settling into our seats at the local AMC. As the previews rolled, she gasped. “I know that voice,” she said. “That’s Aidan. Mom, that’s Aidan.”
I looked up just in time to see a familiar shock of brown curls. It was indeed Aidan Delbis, former member of the Falcon Players at Crescenta Valley High School in La Crescenta, a kid I had seen perform alongside my daughter in countless student plays.
Only now he was seated at a kitchen table with Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone as the words “Bugonia” and then “directed by Yorgos Lanthimos” flashed across the screen.
“Did you not know?” I asked my daughter. CV is a fine public school with a good theater program, but it isn’t exactly an incubator for nepo babies and aspiring stars. That one of their own had stepped off last year’s graduation stage and into a major film production should have been very big news long before a trailer hit theaters.
“No,” she said, furiously messaging various friends. “But now they will.”
Now they will indeed. When he joined the cast of “Bugonia,” Delbis didn’t just become a part of Lanthimos’ highly anticipated remake of Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 black comedy “Save the Green Planet!” He also entered the mythology of which Hollywood dreams are made: A 17-year old sends in his first-ever open-call submission and lands a major role in a very big movie.
With a script by Will Tracy and obvious Oscar potential, “Bugonia” had its world premiere in August at this year’s Venice Film Festival before launching onto the festival circuit, including screenings in Toronto and New York, in preparation for its release this Friday. A slightly absurdist, darkly funny thriller with political undertones, it revolves around the kidnapping of a pharmaceutical company’s CEO, Michelle (Stone), by wild-eyed conspiracy theorist Teddy (Plemons) and his loyal cousin Don (Delbis).
From left, Emma Stone, Aidan Delbis and Jesse Plemons in the movie “Bugonia.”
(Atsushi Nishijima / Focus Features)
Teddy believes Michelle is an alien sent to destroy Earth. Don believes in Teddy. Though he falls in with Teddy’s plans, he often questions them, serving as a continual reminder that even within Teddy’s paranoid view of the universe, there is such a thing as going too far. Don is, in many ways, the heart of the film.
He is also, like the actor who plays him, autistic.
Delbis — who chooses to self-describe as autistic rather than neurodivergent — is not someone who has long nursed dreams of stardom. He took drama classes all through high school, but it wasn’t until his junior year, Delbis says, “that I started to get more into the process. I found the general process of acting, of understanding and investing in different personalities, to be fun and sometimes scary.”
Still, he says, “I wasn’t really sure that I wanted it to be my main career. But it so happened that this happened while I was in high school, and here we are.”
Here is the Four Seasons on a very rainy October afternoon where Delbis, now 19, has just finished his first solo photo shoot and is sitting, fortified by Goldfish crackers (his go-to-snack), for his first long one-on-one interview. He went to some of the film festivals and just returned from “Bugonia’s” London premiere, where he signed autographs on the red carpet and enjoyed flying first class. His parents, Katy and David Delbis, are seated nearby, as is his access and creative coach, Elaine Hall.
Delbis is a tall, good-natured young man who speaks with a distinctive cadence and in an unwaveringly calm tone. Aside from a habit of repeating himself as he searches for what he wants to say next, he seems more comfortable discussing his experience with filmmaking than many of the dozens of more experienced actors I have interviewed in this very hotel over the years.
“We should try to be more empathetic to people with different worldviews because you never really know what those people are going through,” Delbis says. “The movie feels very relevant to that theme.”
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
“It all started,” he says, “when my mom was friends with this agent, April, and one day she sent Mom an audition that seemed pretty promising, so I submitted for that. And they really liked it and called me back.”
It actually started a bit further back than that. With Plemons and Stone already cast, Lanthimos had decided that he wanted a nonprofessional actor to play Don.
“We went really wide in trying to find someone really special,” the Greek-born director of “The Favourite” and “Poor Things” says in a phone interview. “With these two experienced actors, I wanted to bring in a different dynamic. As we looked at people, I felt that the character would be more interesting if he was neurodivergent.”
Casting director Jennifer Venditti put out an open call, which April Smallwood of Spotlight Development saw and sent to Delbis’ mother, Katy.
“A happy-go-lucky young man, neurodivergent — it practically described Aidan,” Katy says in a later interview. La Crescenta may not be an industry hub, but, like many in L.A., the Delbis family has a Hollywood connection. Aidan’s older brother, Tristan (who is also neurodivergent), works at a movie theater; father David is about to retire after years at the Writers Guild Health Fund; and Katy, a self-described “creative,” has done some acting herself. But no one saw film-acting as a potential career for Aidan, who was set to take a gap year after high school. And, Katy says, she had no idea what sort of movie it was for. “It said for a ‘big film,’ but they always say that.”
She thought of it a bit like the time Delbis, a member of the high school track team, decided he also wanted to try out for basketball. “As I drove him to the school,” Katy said, “I told him that he might not get on since there were a lot of kids who had been playing basketball for years, which he had not. He said, ‘Mom, I just want to see what it’s like.’”
Now Delbis wanted to see what it would be like to audition for a “big film.”
Aidan Delbis in the movie “Bugonia.”
(Atsushi Nishijima / Focus Features)
He had recently performed the Vincent Price monologue from “Thriller” for the school talent show, which Katy filmed on her phone, so Smallwood submitted that. Venditti called Smallwood the next day and met with Delbis over Zoom. Thus began a monthslong process of meetings, rehearsals and auditions.
“We focused on him right away,” Venditti says. “He seemed to have it all. And he was very committed.”
“I was really unaware of how big a project it was,” Delbis said. “I had never seen a film by Yorgos.”
In March, Lanthimos, Stone and Plemons were in L.A. for the Oscars, so they all met with Delbis and came away impressed.
Lanthimos thought of casting a neurodivergent actor in a part because it would bring a natural clarity and unfiltered unpredictability to the role. He didn’t consider it any more challenging than working with any other actor. And when he met Delbis, Lanthimos says, “I just thought: That’s him.”
“Just from watching that first tape, you could see there was something so magnetic about him,” said Stone during a recent phone interview. (She is also a producer on the film.) “Don is the audience’s window, the one who can see through the charade.”
Still, there were many more steps to take.
“It’s a big leap for any nonprofessional,” Stone says. “It’s a big part in what is essentially a three-hander.”
From left, director Yorgos Lanthimos, Emma Stone, Aidan Delbis and Jesse Plemons at the Venice Film Festival, where “Bugonia” had its world premiere in August.
(Alessandra Tarantino / Invision / AP)
For an autistic actor, it’s an even bigger leap. As talented as Delbis might be, he also had to be able to handle the pressures, boredom and chaos of a film set. Venditti reached out to Hall. The founder of the Miracle Project and mother to a now-adult neurodivergent son, Hall is an acting coach who has worked for more than 20 years to increase the presence and understanding of neurodivergent and disabled people. She is often asked to gauge the ability of actors to take on a certain role — their ease with the material, their physical stamina, their level of independence and their emotional accessibility.
Delbis, she says, ticked all the boxes. He loves horror films, he was on the track team and he was, at the time, about to travel without his parents on a school trip to Sweden.
He is, as he says himself, “a low-key guy,” so Hall gave him some exercises to help him portray more extreme emotions and prepare him for when other cast members might do the same. (One subsequent rehearsal involved a scene in which one of the actors screamed repeatedly.)
Often, Hall says, perfecting these exercises can take weeks; Delbis, working with his mother, did it in a weekend. She also helped him prepare for his meeting with and then chemistry read with Plemons.
Delbis says he was “a bit nervous, though I don’t know why.” He did not recognize Plemons’ name or his face. “I had watched ‘Breaking Bad,’ but I didn’t realize Jesse played Todd. Halfway through [the read], I told him he looked like Todd and he said, ‘That’s because I played him.’ I’ve seen him in other things since then,” Delbis adds. “He’s a very solid actor.”
More important, he says, “Jesse seemed to me to be a very cool guy.”
That feeling is mutual. “When we brought Aidan in, I was excited and a little nervous,” Plemons says during a phone call from London. They started with one of the more extreme scenes from the film. “I was finding my feet too. When it became apparent that he was going to be fine with the darker scenes, I said, ‘This is him; this is Don.’”
While all this was happening, Delbis was finishing his senior year, which included a starring role in a production of “Almost Maine.” “It was not overly hard,” he says, but sometimes it was a lot. “I did one read and then I had to go to rehearsal for the play.”
Venditti remembers that day very well. “Here we were being so careful, treating him like he was fragile and not wanting to overload him,” she says laughing, “and he’s just calmly multitasking.”
When Delbis got the role in May, he and his family signed a nondisclosure agreement, which is why none of his friends knew his news after graduation, and Delbis and his family flew to the U.K. to begin filming. It was a tough secret for his parents to keep. But “any time it looked like I might slip,” Katy says, “Aidan shut me down.” He celebrated his 18th birthday near the set outside of Windsor, where production ran for three months before moving for two weeks in Atlanta.
Hall was hired to be Delbis’ on-set access and creative coach, a job she believes she has invented, meant to make the experience for neurodivergent and disabled actors easier. She suggested that Lanthimos and Tracy simplify Delbis’ script pages, stripping down the description of action “so he wouldn’t get stuck thinking he had to do exactly what was on the page,” she says, which they were happy to do.
“We didn’t want to put any limits on him,” Lanthimos says.
Delbis chose most of his costumes (except a beekeeping suit, motivated by the plot, which he says “was very hot”), which mirrored his own wardrobe preferences down to the horror film t-shirts and mismatched socks. Even the food Teddy and Don eat during the film reflects Delbis’ taste: mac ’n’ cheese, taquitos, spaghetti.
Hall ensured Delbis had extra time before filming, during which she could help him prepare with rehearsal and centering exercises. She visited the set before he arrived so she could tell him exactly what to expect and worked with the production team to ensure that he had his own space between takes. “They built us a little house, with horror posters on the wall and stuffed animals that looked like his cats,” she says. As there were no Goldfish available in the U.K., the production had them flown in.
“Having Elaine there was amazing,” Venditti says. “The idea of having someone to act as eyes and ears of what people are actually experiencing on set, I think it’s groundbreaking. I don’t know why we haven’t done it before.”
Delbis spent a fair amount of time with Plemons, who Hall said occasionally stepped in to help if she had to be away from set.
“We did a decent amount of goofing around,” Delbis says. “The bond that developed between us occurred quite naturally. I consider Jesse a friend.”
For his part, Plemons enjoyed being around someone who spoke his mind.
“I so appreciated Aidan’s inability to tell a lie,” Plemons says. “On a set, you spend so much time waiting around, and he would say, ‘What are we doing? What is taking so long?’ Which was exactly what I was thinking. He’s a very smart, sensitive, self-assured guy, and if you’re unclear in what you’re saying, he will let you know.”
“Aidan is just so funny,” says his “Bugonia” co-star Emma Stone. “We spent a lot of time together in a basement and Aidan had so many jokes about that.”
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
Stone says that while she and Delbis had a friendly rapport, she hung back a little when they weren’t shooting. “I didn’t want to form the same kind of bond Aidan had with Jesse because [in the film] it’s them against me and I didn’t want to do too much to mess with that.”
But, the two-time Oscar winner says, “Aidan is just so funny. He was on a jag during the kidnapping scene. We spent a lot of time together in a basement and Aidan had so many jokes about that.”
“I went through all of ‘Bugonia’ thinking I had never seen Emma in anything,” Delbis says. “Then I realized my parents had shown me a clip of a woman getting very involved in a birthday card — ‘Pocketful of Sunshine’ — and that was from ‘Easy A.’”
When he was filming, Delbis was all business. Several of the takes which he ad-libbed made it into the film and Delbis is proud of that.
“Despite being in more extreme situations than I’ve been in, there’s something of Don’s emotion and struggles that did feel very familiar to me,” he says. “Feelings of great distress and helplessness and conflictedness and confusion. I have felt that in classes in high school.”
“Aidan has great instincts,” Lanthimos says. “In a scene toward the end [of the film], he was so moving, it was the first time I have ever teared up on set.
There were difficult days — one moment with Plemons, Delbis says, took many takes. “It was hot AF and involved me getting more worked up that I am used to getting,” he remembers. But he appreciated Lanthimos’ willingness to let him try things. “In one scene, Jesse throws a chair and I thought that seemed pretty cool. So at the end of the day, they let me throw a chair. I hope that makes it into the outtakes reel.”
He was also very pleased when the crew threw him a s’mores party at the end of filming. “There was a fire pit on set that looked perfect for s’mores,” he says. “And I told them that, so it was my idea to have a s’mores party.”
Delbis is happy with how the film turned out, including his performance. “I think I looked pretty baller in that suit,” he says of one scene. Though he doesn’t have an opinion on the authenticity debate — whether autistic actors should always be the ones to play autistic characters — he thinks it’s “cool that writers and directors are starting to be more conscientious and give more realistic and respectful depictions of neurodivergent people and characters.”
He is more concerned that audiences understand what he thinks is the most important message of the movie.
“We should try to be more empathetic to people with different worldviews because you never really know what those people are going through,” he says. “The movie feels very relevant to that theme. God knows, people aren’t always willing to be tolerant.”
No sooner had the Toronto Blue Jays clinched a World Series spot against the Dodgers than the torrent of memes, posts and tweets flowed, all with some version of this one-liner: Finally, Shohei Ohtani is on the plane to Toronto.
On a December day two years ago, as Ohtani navigated free agency: three reports surfaced: there was a private plane flying from Orange County to Toronto (true); Ohtani had decided to sign with the Blue Jays (false); and Ohtani was on a flight to Toronto (false).
When the jet landed, surrounded by reporters and photographers and even a news helicopter, an entire country fell into despair. The gentleman on the plane was not Ohtani.
He was Robert Herjavec, a star on “Shark Tank” and a prominent Canadian businessman with homes in Toronto and Southern California.
“It is my only claim to fame in the sports world: to be mistaken for someone else,” Herjavec said Tuesday.
Herjavec said he hopes to attend at least one World Series game in Los Angeles and another in Toronto. He is not the Dodgers’ $700-million man, but he said he would enjoy meeting Ohtani.
“I’m very disappointed,” Herjavec said with a laugh, “he hasn’t reached out to me for financial advice.”
He is no different than the rest of us, Ohtani’s teammates included. Watching Ohtani play calls to mind the words Jack Buck used to call Kirk Gibson’s home run: I don’t believe what I just saw.
“To me, as a layman and a couch athlete, the ability to throw a ball at 100 mph and then go out and hit three home runs?” Herjavec said. “It’s mind boggling.”
To be a successful businessman takes talent too, no?
“That’s the beauty of business,” he said. “I always say to people, business is the only sport where you can play at an elite level with no God-given talent.”
On that fateful Friday, Herjavec and his 5-year-old twins were en route to Toronto, and normally he would have known what was happening on the ground before he landed. However, he had turned off all the phones and tablets on board so he could play board games with his children in an effort to calm them.
“I gave them too much sugar,” he said. “They were wired.”
Upon landing, Canadian customs agents boarded the plane, in a hopeful search for Ohtani. Herjavec and his kids got off the plane, descending into a storm of national news because the Blue Jays are Canada’s team.
I asked Herjavec if he ever had disappointed so many people at any point in his life. He burst out laughing.
“That is such a great question,” he said. “That is my crowning achievement: I let down an entire nation at one time.”
The Blue Jays have a rich history. In 1992-93, they won back-to-back World Series championships, the feat the Dodgers are trying to duplicate.
The Jays have not appeared in the World Series since 1993, but that is not even close to the longest or most painful championship drought in Toronto.
The Maple Leafs, playing Canada’s national sport, have not won the Stanley Cup since 1967. That would be like the Dodgers or Yankees not winning the World Series since 1967.
“Speaking of letting people down,” Herjavec said.
The difference between Americans and Canadians, he said, is that Americans expect to win and Canadians believe it would be nice to win.
He counts himself in the latter camp. He can call both the Dodgers and Blue Jays a home team, but he is rooting for Toronto in this World Series.
“I have to,” he said, “because I’ve already disappointed the entire country once.
“I’m hoping, with my moral support, this will redeem me to Canadians.”
Louis Tomlinson has opened up about losing friend Liam PayneCredit: You Tube/The Diary Of A CEOLiam tragically died a year ago in ArgentinaCredit: AFPThe pair kept up their friendship even after One Direction split in 2016Credit: Getty
The pair were firm friends after being in One Direction together from 2010 and 2016 and they continued their friendship after the band split up.
Speaking about the grief of losing Liam, Louis told The Independent: “I naively thought that, at this point, I’d unfortunately be a little bit more well versed with grief than other people my age.
“I thought that might mean something, but it didn’t at all. It’s something I’ll never really accept. I don’t think.”
This isn’t the first time Louis has opened up about Liam as he recently spoke about him during an appearance on Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO podcast.
He told the Dragons’ Den star: “I could just go on and talk all day about how amazing he was, but I think we all looked up to him.
“I don’t think we would have been brave enough to say at that age when I was in the bnd, I think I would’ve had too much pride, but we all looked up to him massively.”
“I had the same feeling that I had with Felicity, and I think anyone has this when they’re around someone who’s struggling; my 150 per cent wasn’t nearly enough.
“And that’s when it’s my own arrogance thinking that I could have helped really, because it was so much deeper than what I could have done for him. He was definitely struggling at that time in his life.”
Liam had flown to Argentina with girlfriend Kate Cassidy for a five-day holiday, to see his ex-1D bandmate Niall Horan in concert.
Liam extended the trip but Kate returned home to the US.
LONDON — Prince Andrew said Friday he is giving up his royal title of the Duke of York and other honors after his friendship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein returned to the headlines.
Andrew, the younger brother to King Charles III, said in a statement released by Buckingham Palace that “the continued accusations about me distract from the work of His Majesty and the royal family.”
“With His Majesty’s agreement, we feel I must now go a step further. I will therefore no longer use my title or the honours which have been conferred upon me,” Andrew said in his statement Friday. “As I have said previously, I vigorously deny the accusations against me.”
The news came in the wake of the release of excerpts of an upcoming posthumous memoir from Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who has alleged she was trafficked by Epstein and had sex with Andrew when she was 17.
It’s the latest fall from grace for the 65-year-old prince, who had already stepped down from public life in 2019 over his links to Epstein despite his denials of any wrongdoing.
Giuffre died by suicide in April at the age of 41. In the memoir, she details alleged encounters with Prince Andrew, who she sued in 2021, claiming that they had sex when she was 17. Andrew denied her claims and said he didn’t recall having met her.
Andrew, once second in line to the British throne, has long been a source of tabloid fodder because of his links to Epstein, other questionable characters and money woes.
His attempt to refute Giuffre’s allegations backfired during a November 2019 BBC interview. Viewers saw a prince who proffered curious rebuttals — such as disputing Giuffre’s recollection of sweaty dancing by saying he was medically incapable of perspiring — and showed no empathy for the women who said Epstein abused them.
Within days of the interview, Andrew stepped down from his royal duties. Giuffre sued him and the case was settled in 2022 for an undisclosed sum. A statement filed in court said that the prince acknowledged Epstein was a sex trafficker and Giuffre was “an established victim of abuse.”
As well as no longer using the title of the Duke of York, a long-established title that was gifted to him by his mother Queen Elizabeth II at his wedding to Sarah Ferguson in 1986, Andrew will also give up other titles: Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order and Royal Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter. He will remain a prince, which he has been entitled to since birth.
Andrew’s ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson will also no longer use the title of Duchess of York. Their children, Beatrice and Eugenie, will remain princesses.
Andrew’s chaotic marriage to Ferguson, widely known as Fergie, lasted a decade though the two remain close, living together at a 30-room mansion near Windsor Castle. He has long been criticized for his opulent, globe-trotting lifestyle.
Andrew had been the poster boy of the royal family for many years, and his romantic links to a number of models and starlets during his youth were widely chronicled in the British press.
His star status within the royal family was at its peak after he flew in multiple missions as a helicopter pilot in the Royal Navy during the 1982 Falklands War when British forces sailed to the south Atlantic to eject the Argentine military that had invaded the U.K. overseas territories.
WASHINGTON — President Trump is showing little urgency to broker a compromise that would end the government shutdown, even as Democrats insist no breakthrough is possible without his direct involvement.
Three weeks in, Congress is at a standstill. The House hasn’t been in session for a month, and senators left Washington on Thursday frustrated by the lack of progress. Republican leaders are refusing to negotiate until a short-term funding bill to reopen the government is passed, while Democrats say they won’t agree without guarantees on extending health insurance subsidies.
For now, Trump appears content to stay on the sidelines.
He spent the week celebrating an Israel-Hamas ceasefire deal he led, hosted a remembrance event for conservative activist Charlie Kirk and refocused attention on the Russia-Ukraine war. Meanwhile, his administration has been managing the shutdown in unconventional ways, continuing to pay the troops while laying off other federal employees.
Asked Thursday whether he was willing to deploy his dealmaking background on the shutdown, Trump seemed uninterested.
“Well, look, I mean, all we want to do is just extend. We don’t want anything, we just want to extend, live with the deal they had,” he said in an exchange with reporters in the Oval Office. Later Thursday, he criticized Democratic health care demands as “crazy,” adding, “We’re just not going to do it.”
Spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told Fox News that Democrats must first vote to reopen the government, “then we can have serious conversations about health care.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune echoed that approach before leaving for the weekend, saying Trump is “ready to weigh in and sit down with the Democrats or whomever, once the government opens up.”
Thune said he’d also be willing to talk, but only after the shutdown ends.
“I am willing to sit down with Democrats,” Thune posted on social media Friday.
“But there’s one condition: End the Schumer Shutdown. I will not negotiate under hostage conditions, nor will I pay a ransom,” he added.
Frustration is beginning to surface among rank-and-file Republicans, with bipartisan conversations breaking out on the Senate floor as members look for ways to move things forward. Still, even those Republicans admit little happens in Congress without Trump’s direction.
Leaving the Capitol on Thursday, GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski said, “We’re not making much headway this week.” For things to progress, Murkowski acknowledged Trump may need to get more involved: “I think he’s an important part of it.”
“I think there are some folks in his administration that are kind of liking the fact that Congress really has no role right now,” she added. “I don’t like that. I don’t like that at all.”
Trump has not been slowed by the shutdown
While Congress has been paralyzed by the shutdown, Trump has moved rapidly to enact his vision of the federal government.
He has called budget chief Russ Vought the “grim reaper,” and Vought has taken the opportunity to withhold billions of dollars for infrastructure projects and lay off thousands of federal workers, signaling that workforce reductions could become even more drastic.
At the same time, the administration has acted unilaterally to fund Trump’s priorities, including paying the military this week, easing pressure on what could have been one of the main deadlines to end the shutdown.
Some of these moves, particularly the layoffs and funding shifts, have been criticized as illegal and are facing court challenges. A federal judge on Wednesday temporarily blocked the administration from firing workers during the shutdown, ruling that the cuts appeared politically motivated and were carried out without sufficient justification.
And with Congress focused on the funding fight, lawmakers have had little time to debate other issues.
In the House, Johnson has said the House won’t return until Democrats approve the funding bill and has refused to swear in Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva. Democrats say the move is to prevent her from becoming the 218th signature on a discharge petition aimed at forcing a vote on releasing documents related to the sex trafficking investigation into Jeffrey Epstein.
So far, the shutdown has shown little impact on public opinion.
An AP-NORC poll released Thursday found that 3 in 10 U.S. adults have a “somewhat” or “very” favorable view of the Democratic Party, similar to an AP-NORC poll from September. Four in 10 have a “somewhat” or “very” favorable view of the Republican Party, largely unchanged from last month.
Democrats want Trump at the table. Republicans would rather he stay out
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries have said Republicans have shown little seriousness in negotiating an end to the shutdown.
“Leader Thune has not come to me with any proposal at this point,” Schumer said Thursday.
Frustrated with congressional leaders, Democrats are increasingly looking to Trump.
At a CNN town hall Wednesday night featuring Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders, both repeatedly called for the president’s involvement when asked why negotiations had stalled.
“President Trump is not talking. That is the problem,” Sanders said.
Ocasio-Cortez added that Trump should more regularly “be having congressional leaders in the White House.”
Democrats’ focus on Trump reflects both his leadership style — which allows little to happen in Congress without his approval — and the reality that any funding bill needs the president’s signature to become law.
This time, however, Republican leaders who control the House and Senate are resisting any push for Trump to intervene.
“You can’t negotiate when somebody’s got a hostage,” said South Dakota Sen. Mike Rounds, who added that Trump getting involved would allow Democrats to try the same tactic in future legislative fights.
Trump has largely followed that guidance. After previously saying he would be open to negotiating with Democrats on health insurance subsidies, he walked it back after Republican leaders suggested he misspoke.
And that’s unlikely to change for now. Trump has no plans to personally intervene to broker a deal with Democrats, according to a senior White House official granted anonymity to discuss private conversations. The official added that the only stopgap funding bill that Democrats can expect is the one already on the table.
“The President is happy to have a conversation about health care policy, but he will not do so while the Democrats are holding the American people hostage,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said Thursday.
A product of the Congress Trump has molded
In his second term, Trump has taken a top-down approach, leaving little in Congress to move without his approval.
“What’s obvious to me is that Mike Johnson and John Thune don’t do much without Donald Trump telling them what to do,” said Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona.
His hold is particularly strong in the GOP-led House, where Speaker Mike Johnson effectivelyowes his job to Trump, and relies on his influence to power through difficult legislative fights.
When Republicans have withheld votes on Trump’s priorities in Congress, he’s called them on the phone or summoned them to his office to directly sway them. When that doesn’t work, he has vowed to unseat them in the next election. It’s led many Democrats to believe the only path to an agreement runs through the White House and not through the speaker’s office.
Democrats also want assurances from the White House that they won’t backtrack on an agreement. The White House earlier this year cut out the legislative branch entirely with a $4.9 billion cut to foreign aid in August through a legally dubious process known as a “pocket rescission.” And before he even took office late last year, Trump and ally Elon Musk blew up a bipartisan funding agreement that both parties had negotiated.
“I think we need to see ink on paper. I think we need to see legislation. I think we need to see votes,” said Ocasio-Cortez. “I don’t accept pinky promises. That’s not the business that I’m in.”
Both parties also see little reason to fold under public pressure, believing they are winning the messaging battle.
“Everybody thinks they’re winning,” Murkowski said. “Nobody is winning when everybody’s losing. And that’s what’s happening right now. The American public is losing.”
Cappelletti and Kim write for the Associated Press. AP writer Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report.
SACRAMENTO — U.S. Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III announced today that he will resign at the end of July or in early August.
He told a news conference that an independent prosecutor investigating his personal financial affairs had found no grounds for legal action against him and therefore he could leave the Reagan Administration with a clear name.
“I have stated that I would not resign under a cloud or until I was completely vindicated,” Meese said, adding that the filing of a report by independent counsel James McKay–rather than an indictment–”fully vindicates me.”
Meese’s tenure at the Justice Department has been marked by repeated controversy surrounding his conduct and marred by resignations by senior personnel.
Won’t Be ‘Hounded’
Explaining why he had now decided to resign, Meese, who has always maintained his innocence, declared, “to allow myself to be hounded out of office by false accusations or allegations, unjust political attacks and media clamor would undermine the integrity of our system of justice which I have championed. . . . “
He said: “I have informed the President that I will be leaving the Administration towards the end of July or early in August.”
Earlier today, McKay ended his investigation of Meese without bringing criminal charges, but filed a report that raised questions about Meese’s ethics.
Sources close to the nearly 14-month-old probe said the secret report, totaling more than 800 pages, referred certain matters on Meese’s ethical behavior to the Justice Department for further review.
The department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, the agency’s internal ethics unit, is expected to review whether Meese violated federal ethics rules that prohibit actions that create the appearance of impropriety.
Allegations Detailed
McKay, who previously said he had insufficient evidence to indict Meese on most key matters under scrutiny, detailed in the report his probe into various conflict-of-interest charges against the attorney general.
It was filed under seal with a special panel of three federal appeals court judges. After Meese’s defense attorneys comment on the report, the judges will decide when to release it.
Meese, the nation’s top law enforcement officer who had President Reagan’s continued support throughout the inquiry, has denied any wrongdoing.
Most of McKay’s investigation centered on action Meese took as a government official that benefited his longtime friend and former lawyer, E. Robert Wallach, and on assistance that Wallach extended to Meese.
Wallach has been indicted on charges of attempting to illegally influence Meese and other government officials in helping win lucrative government contracts for the scandal-plagued Wedtech Corp., a defense contractor.
The most serious charge against Meese involved his role in a failed Iraqi oil pipeline deal that allegedly called for payoffs of as much as $700 million over 10 years to Israel and the Israeli Labor Party.
Meese received a secret 1985 memo from Wallach, who represented one of the project’s promoters, outlining the alleged payoff plan in return for an Israeli commitment not to attack the pipeline.
Meese then helped set up a meeting between a top White House national security adviser and former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres to discuss the project.
Telephone Contacts Probed
McKay also investigated Meese’s meetings with regional Bell Telephone company executives while holding $14,000 in phone stock.
In an effort to get her husband to open up she asked: “Do you feel like you are falling for me though? Do you like me?”
Married at First Sight’s best moments
Married at First sight has brought eight explosive series of drama to the small screen. These are some of the best moments
When series 8 couple Rozz Darlington and Thomas Kriaras brought secretly brought a sex toy to the couple’s dinner party. Unbeknownst to their fellow cast members who they were having dinner with, Rozz wore a vibrating egg gadget whilst husband Thomas had the controls.
Nikita’s exit in series 6. Nikita was removed from the show early on due to her behaviour, which led to her husband Ant re-entering the experiment with Alexis.
A slightly more heart warming highlight from series 6 was watching Dan and Matt’s relationship unfold. Dan and Matt were the first same-sex couple on the show, and their relationship was both ground-breaking and adorable.
Emma and James’ wedding in series 1. They were the first couple to ever get married on the UK version of the show. Emma and James, had a beautiful ceremony that set the tone for the series.
The dinner party showdowns are always a MAFs highlight with explosive arguments and unexpected alliances forming.
The question was met with an awkward silence untilReissgiggled and said: “Easy girl. It’s been two days.”
Then during a boat trip she asked: “”Do you visualise me in your future?”
An annoyed Reiss threw an epic strop and responded: “I can’t cope! You’re too much.
“I don’t need pressure yet, it’s so early.
“I don’t like it. I know you’re saying you want to see the real me you aint going to find that out over night.
“You know I’m a closed book. If you’re constantly pressuring me you’re just going to keep me closed.”
Fans will have to wait until tomorrow night to see if the couple can patch things up after their latest row.
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Reiss explains to the group that he felt disrespected by his wife’s actionsCredit: channel 4
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Leisha explains that it has never been a problem before
CELEBRITY Traitors fans have been left in disbelief, as Alan Carr gave away a huge clue that he’s a traitor.
The first ever all star edition of the BBC programme kicked off last night as fans saw Claudia Winkleman chose her THREE celebrity traitors to play the game.
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Celebrity Traitors fans have been left in disbelief, as Alan Carr gave away a huge clue that he’s a traitorCredit: BBC
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Viewers of the show have had their doubts about Alan’s ability as a traitorCredit: BBC
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Jonathan said he might have to have a word with Alan after the winkCredit: BBC
Comedian Alan alongside TV presenter Jonathan Ross and singer and Brit nominee Cat Burns were chosen to be the devilish three to cause mayhem in the game.
This sentiment was highlighted even more during Thursday evening’s episode, as Alan winked at Jonathan after committing the first murder.
After wondering around in a mild panic, he eventually headed into the kitchen with his friend Paloma Faith and actress Ruth Codd.
Read More on Celeb Traitors
He committed the deadly act before heading down to the fire outside with other celebrities and winking at Jonathan to let him know he had fulfilled the brief.
He also said in another very telling move: “It’s done,” while subtly trying to let Jonathan know that he’d committed the murder.
Fans took to X to share their shock at Alan’s wink and ‘it’s done’ statement.
One person penned: “Oh wow, Alan has to be the worst traitor to have ever existed.”
Another questioned: “Did he really just wink at Jonathan?” while a third said: “Absolutely howling. As if Alan just winked at Jonathan in front of everyone.”
Celebrity Traitors fans left shocked by Alan Carr’s first victim as he commits murder in plain sight
A fourth person penned: “Oh Alan, talk about making it obvious.”
And someone else quipped: “I’m in disbelief at Alan as a traitor so far. He’s making Linda look like James Bond.”
Later in the turret, Jonathan and Cat asked him who he had chosen, and Alan revealed he had been forced to pick his friend Paloma.
The Traitors viewers were shocked that Alan had betrayed his pal, with one writing on X: “Noooooo Alan! Not Paloma!”
Another added: “Paloma girl. You was GOT.”
A third commented: “I cannot believe Paloma Faith is going to be dead by the end of the day…”
After committing the murder, all the celebrities turned up to breakfast, before Claudia arrived and told them to get ready for a funeral.
The celebrities than joined the procession before arriving at three coffins.
They were then given clues to work out which three celebrities the Traitors had put in the coffins.
It ended up being Lucy Beaumont, Paloma and Niko Omilana.
Claudia then walked the line and dramatically closed the lid on Paloma, leaving the remaining celebrities absolutely gobsmacked.
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Paloma Faith became the show’s first victimCredit: BBC
STAVANGER, Norway — President Trump’s bid to win the Nobel Peace Prize has drawn added attention to the annual guessing game over who its next laureate will be.
Longtime Nobel watchers say Trump’s prospects remain remote despite a flurry of high-profile nominations and some notable foreign policy interventions for which he has taken personal credit.
Experts say the Norwegian Nobel Committee typically focuses on the durability of peace, the promotion of international fraternity and the quiet work of institutions that strengthen those goals. Trump’s own record might even work against him, they said, citing his apparent disdain for multilateral institutions and his disregard for global climate change concerns.
Still, the U.S. leader has repeatedly sought the Nobel spotlight since his first term, most recently telling United Nations delegates late last month “everyone says that I should get the Nobel Peace Prize.”
A person cannot nominate themself.
Public lobbying campaigns but a private committee decision
Trump’s boasts and previous high-profile nominations make him the blockbuster name on the list of bookmakers’ favorites. But it’s unclear whether his name comes up in conversation when the five-member Nobel committee, appointed by Norway’s parliament, meets behind closed doors.
Trump has been nominated several times by people within the U.S. as well as politicians abroad since 2018. His name also was put forward in December by U.S. Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-NY), her office said in a statement, for his brokering of the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states in 2020.
Nominations made this year from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Pakistan’s government occurred after the Feb. 1 deadline for the 2025 award.
Trump has said repeatedly that he “deserves” the prize and claims to have “ended seven wars.” Last week, he teased the possibility of ending an eighth war if Israel and Hamas agree to his peace plan aimed at concluding the nearly two-year war in Gaza.
“Nobody’s ever done that,” he told a gathering of military leaders at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia. “Will you get the Nobel Prize? Absolutely not. They’ll give it to some guy that didn’t do a damn thing.”
Israel and Hamas have since agreed to the first phase of the peace plan for Gaza, paving the way for a pause in the fighting and the release of the remaining hostages held by Hamas in exchange for Palestinian prisoners. In the early hours of Thursday, families of hostages and their supporters started chanting “Nobel prize to Trump” as they gathered in Tel Aviv’s hostages square.
Sustained peace efforts prioritized over quick wins
Nobel veterans say the committee prioritizes sustained, multilateral efforts over quick diplomatic wins. Theo Zenou, a historian and research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society, said Trump’s efforts have not yet been proven to be long-lasting.
“There’s a huge difference between getting fighting to stop in the short term and resolving the root causes of the conflict,” Zenou said.
Zenou also highlighted Trump’s dismissive stance on climate change as out-of-step with what many, including the Nobel committee, see as the planet’s greatest long-term peace challenge.
“I don’t think they would award the most prestigious prize in the world to someone who does not believe in climate change,” Zenou said. “When you look at previous winners who have been bridge-builders, embodied international cooperation and reconciliation: These are not words we associate with Donald Trump.”
Avoiding political pressure
The Nobel committee was met with fierce criticism in 2009 for giving then-U.S. President Barack Obama the prize barely nine months into his first term. Many argued Obama had not been in office long enough to have an impact worthy of the Nobel.
And Trump’s own outspokenness about possibly winning the award might work against him: The committee won’t want to be seen as caving in to political pressure, said Nina Græger, director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo.
Trump’s prospects for the prize this year are “a long shot,” she said. “His rhetoric does not point in a peaceful perspective.”
The Nobel announcements began with the prize in medicine on Monday, and continued with physics on Tuesday and chemistry on Wednesday. The literature prize is being awarded on Thursday. The winner of the prize in economics will be announced on Monday.
Lewis writes for the Associated Press. Stefanie Dazio in Berlin and Darlene Superville in Quantico, Va., contributed to this reporting.
Big Brother star George has broken his silence after being kicked out of the houseCredit: Shutterstock Editorial
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George left his Big Brother co-stars horrified with his commentCredit: ITV
Now, since leaving the house, George has said: “As a flag bearer of freedom of speech I never hesitate to discuss and question any topic regardless of how contentious it may be.
“Sadly, the boundaries of what is deemed offensive are subjective and I evidently went too far this time by crossing their line one too many times.”
He added: “It is a shame that specific debate could not be had and that it has had to end like this. Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for me.”
Sources tell The Sun that George left his co-stars horrified after making offensive comments which could be interpreted as antisemitic and was immediately called to the Diary Room and ejected from the house.
“Everyone was absolutely disgusted,” an insider says. “Nobody could believe what he said – he was clearly out to shock people.”
It’s understood that ITV will air scenes featuring George on tonight’s show but won’t air the comments that led to him being kicked off the show.
US scientist Dr Fred Ramsdell was on the last day of a three-week hike with his wife Laura O’Neill and their two dogs, deep in Montana’s grizzly bear country, when Ms O’Neill suddenly started screaming.
But it was not a predator that had disturbed the quiet of their off-grid holiday: it was a flurry of text messages bearing the news that Dr Ramsdell had won the Nobel Prize for medicine.
Dr Ramsdell, whose phone had been on airplane mode when the Nobel committee tried to call him, told the BBC’s Newshour Programme that his first response when his wife said, “You’ve won the Nobel prize” was: “I did not.”
To which Ms O’Neill replied that she had 200 text messages that suggested he had.
The winners share a prize fund worth 11m Swedish kronor (£870,000).
After Ms O’Neill received the messages, the couple drove down to a small town in southern Montana in search of good phone signal.
“By then it was probably three o’clock in the afternoon here, I called the Nobel Committee. Of course they were in bed, because it was probably one o’clock in the morning there,” Dr Ramsell said.
Eventually, the immunologist was able to reach his fellow laureates, friends and officials at the Nobel Assembly – 20 hours after they first tried to reach him.
“So it was an interesting day,” he said.
Dr Thomas Perlmann, the secretary-general of the Nobel Assembly, told the New York Times it was the most difficult attempt to contact a winner since he assumed the role in 2016.
While the committee was trying to reach him, he “was living his best life and was off the grid on a preplanned hiking trip,” a spokesperson for his lab, Sonoma Biotherapeutics, said.
When asked by the BBC whether he thought it might be a trick that his wife might play on him, Dr Ramsdell said: “I have a lot of friends, but they’re not coordinated enough to pull off this joke, not with that many of them at the same time.”
It was the latest incident in an often comic history of laureates learning they had won the prize.
In 2020, economist Paul Milgrom unplugged the phone when the Nobel committee called – in the middle of the night – to tell him he had won the Nobel for economics.
Instead, his co-winner Bob Wilson was forced to walk over to Milgrom’s house, dressed in his pyjamas, and deliver the news through the security camera on his front door.
When a journalist informed the novelist Doris Lessing she had won the 2007 Nobel Prize for literature, she responded: “Oh, Christ.”
Former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who championed the creation of an independent commission to draw California’s congressional districts, returns to state voters’ TV sets on Tuesday in a new ad opposing a November ballot measure by state Democrats to boost their party’s ranks in Congress.
A committee opposing Proposition 50, which would replace districts drawn by an independent commission with ones crafted by partisans, plans to spend $1 million per day airing the ad statewide. Schwarzenegger describes the ballot measure as one that does not favor voters but is in the interest of entrenched politicians.
“That’s what they want to do is take us backwards. This is why it is important for you to vote no on Proposition 50,” the Hollywood celebrity and former governor says in the ad, which was filmed last week when he spoke to USC students. “The Constitution does not start with ‘We, the politicians.’ It starts with ‘We, the people.’ … Democracy — we’ve got to protect it, and we’ve got to go and fight for it.”
Redistricting is the redrawing of congressional boundaries that typically occurs once a decade following the U.S. census to account for population shifts. The process rarely attracts the attention it has this year because of a heated battle to determine control of a closely divided Congress in the final two years of President Trump’s tenure.
After Trump urged Texas and other GOP-led states to redraw their congressional districts earlier this year to boost the number of Republicans in the House, California Democrats, led by Gov. Gavin Newsom, countered by putting a rare mid-decade redistricting on a special-election November ballot that would likely boost the number of Democrats in the body.
Schwarzenegger, long a champion of political reform, is not part of any official Proposition 50 campaign. Since leaving office, he has prioritized good governance at his institute at USC and campaigned for independent redistricting across the nation.
His remarks were filmed, and the ad is being aired by the most well-funded effort opposing Proposition 50, which is bankrolled by Charles Munger Jr., a major GOP donor who underwrote the ballot measures that created California’s independent commission.
Munger has already donated $30 million to a campaign opposing the November ballot measure, according to fundraising disclosures filed with the secretary of state’s office. The other large opposition effort has raised more than $5 million. The main group supporting Proposition 50, led by Newsom, has raised more than $54 million.
These fundraising figures are based on required disclosures of large contributions. More complete fundraising numbers must be filed with the state on Thursday.
TV legend Johnny Ball has revealed he has been secretly fighting prostate cancer.
The 87-year-old, who first found fame presenting Play School in 1967, was diagnosed in August 2022.
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TV legend Johnny Ball, father of presenter Zoe Ball, has revealed he secretly battled cancerCredit: Getty Images – Getty
He then underwent three months of daily radiation treatment and is now in recovery.
He told The Mirror: “I was diagnosed with prostate cancer in August 2022 and, thankfully, after three months of daily radiation treatment, starting in the September, I’m through it, I’m fine.”
Johnny, who has regular annual checks, says he knows how fortunate he has been to survive.
He said: “My friend Harry Secombe didn’t survive it, Bob Monkhouse didn’t survive it. I’m 20 years younger than them and I am lucky, because now we can cure it.”
Spanish cops have now released an image of James, in their desperate attempt to locate him.
He is pictured ordering food at the kebab joint wearing a blue T-shirt with his Jack Russell on his lap.
In one photograph, three diners appear to be enjoying a meal behind him as he stands at the checkout.
It comes as official records show James reported his passport as lost or stolen at the Irish Embassy on August 19 – a day after he was last seen or heard from.
At the time, his half-sister Nikita said: “We know he’d had a drink but as a family we don’t believe he would recklessly set sail in the dark at night,” she said.
“It doesn’t make sense for it to be ‘oh he fell overboard’ because he was drunk, there are a lot of holes in the story.”
Paddy’s Anchor previously shared appeals by James’ worried family on social media saying: “Many of you have been asking, so we want to share this post from Jemsie’s family.
“His sister is still searching for him after he was last seen here in Las Palmas.
CCTV Footage of last recorded sighting of missing British woman Sarm Heslop revealed in BBC documentary
“His boat has since been found off the coast of Gran Canaria, but there has been no contact from him since.”
A call was made between August 24 and 25 in relation to James’ boat as police found it a day later 50 miles offshore.
At first they said James’ Jack Russell, known as Thumbelina, wasn’t on board but later said she was found with the boat.
Timeline of James Nunan’s disappearance
August 18:
18:16: James films himself on Facebook Live walking at Playa del Confital beach
22:00: He is last seen leaving Paddy’s Anchor bar in Las Palmas
22:39: Bank records show he purchased food from Rico Doner Kebab
August 19: His passport is reported “lost or stolen” to an Irish consulate in Gran Canaria
August 22: James’ mum reports him missing to Essex Police
Between August 24/25: A call was made in relation to James’ boat
August 25: Police find his boat 50 miles off the south coast of Gran Canaria
August 27: Police say they have also found his dog Thumbelina
There remains no information on where James could be.
A witness came forward to claim he spoke to James as he said the Brit was drunk but not acting in any unusual manner.
He had reportedly told him about his sailing adventures and that he planned to head to Lanzarote.
Some pub staff also claimed they were told not to speak to anyone about his mysterious disappearance.
A man reportedly answered phone calls at the pub saying: “It’s an open investigation and we’ve been told not to speak to anyone and I’ve just got to go with that I’m afraid.”
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James was sailing around the world when he vanished
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James’ Jack Russell, known as Thumbelina, was found
Asked if it was local police or Mr Nunan’s family who had asked him not to speak, he said: “I can’t talk about it, sorry.”
After his boat was found with the dog on board, it was towed back to Argineguin in the south of Gran Canaria.
A spokesperson for the Civil Guard said: “We are looking into this case. Several lines of investigation are being pursued.”
Jemsie had been about five-and-a-half months into his solo sailing trip when he vanished – and had been planning to travel to Brazil.
Nikita added that a distress signal was sent out in relation to his boat between August 24 and 25.
The dog found on board has since been taken to an animal shelter.
Jemsie’s father has travelled to the island searching for any signs of the missing 34-year-old.
The Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office has confirmed it is “supporting the family of a British man who has been reported missing in Spain“.
The National Police in Las Palmas and court officials on the island have been approached for comment.
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He was headed for Brazil on his world tour
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Police confirmed he last used his card to buy food at Rico Doner Kebab
