struggle

The soap legend who played loveable cabbie Charlie Slater in EastEnders has sadly died aged 92, with his family by his side. He once opened up about his son’s struggle that shaped how he played his role on-screen

Derek Martin captured the hearts of the nation as devoted patriarch Charlie Slater in EastEnders, and it turns out his personal family struggle inspired his protective role on screen.

The soap legend, who has sadly died aged 92, was best known for playing Charlie on the BBC soap opera, a role he held from 2000 to 2011, with occasional appearances in 2013 and 2016.

Derek’s heartbroken family described him as a “truly an amazing person who was very talented in the filming industry and many other thing” in a statement issued. It’s understood that he passed away in hospital on Saturday night, with his loved ones by his side.

The former East End butcher, born Derek William Rapp, started his TV career as a stuntman on Doctor Who. However, after breaking his collarbone while filming Elizabeth R, he made the decision to focus on acting. And after appearing in the likes of Law & Order, King and Castle and Eldorado, he soon found himself appearing in The Bill, Only Fools and Horses and Little Britain – as himself. But to millions, he was known as the loveable London cabbie, Charlie on EastEnders.

READ MORE: Derek Martin dead: EastEnders’ Charlie Slater legend dies aged 92

Derek celebrated his 90th birthday in 2023, ringing in the special milestone with his two lookalike sons, David and Jonathan. The soap star spoke candidly about his own son David’s struggle with depression in the past as his EastEnders character dealt with a similiar issue on screen.

Back in 2016 on Albert Square, Charlie’s great-niece Stacey Branning suffered from depression and postpartum psychosis. And her troubles felt close to home for Derek. He said at the time: “At work I had the Stacey storyline. Then, I got home and there was my son, who I’d been worried about during the day, suffering from severe depression.”

Charlie first appeared in the soap in September 2000. Derek, however, had originally auditioned for the roles of Den Watts and Frank Butcher in the 1980s and made the shortlist for both.

When he auditioned for Charlie, he was offered a contract with a minimum term of three years, with the potential to stay for a longer period of time. Of the role of Charlie, Derek said it was like putting on an “old coat, and he had hoped to remain on the show until he died.

His character was known for being the glue which held the Slater family together and was “positive as long as his family was around him.” Nine years after he first arrived in Walford, it was announced that Derek would be taking a break from the show.

In 2016, Charlie was killed off from EastEnders after the character suffered a heart attack, but the actor said it had been “wonderful.” Speaking of his departure, he commented: “I spoke to Dominic, the executive producer, and he explained [the storyline] and said he’d give me a good send-off. In a way, it’s closure, after 11 years, which for an actor is wonderful.”

CARACAS, Venezuela — At the White House, President Trump vows American intervention in Venezuela will pour billions of dollars into the country’s infrastructure, revive its once-thriving oil industry and eventually deliver a new age of prosperity to the Latin American nation.

Here at a sprawling street market in the capital, though, utility worker Ana Calderón simply wishes she could afford the ingredients to make a pot of soup.

“Food is incredibly expensive,” says Calderón, noting rapidly rising prices that have celery selling for twice as much as just a few weeks ago and two pounds of meat going for more than $10, or 25 times the country’s monthly minimum wage. “Everything is so expensive.”

Venezuelans digesting news of the United States’ brazen capture of former President Nicolás Maduro are hearing grandiose promises of future economic prowess even as they live through the crippling economic realities of today.

“They know that the outlook has significantly changed but they don’t see it yet on the ground. What they’re seeing is repression. They’re seeing a lot of confusion,” says Luisa Palacios, a Venezuelan-born economist and former oil executive who is a research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. “People are hopeful and expecting that things are going to change but that doesn’t mean that things are going to change right now.”

Whatever hope exists over the possibility of U.S. involvement improving Venezuela’s economy is paired with the crushing daily truths most here live. People typically work two, three or more jobs just to survive, and still cupboards and refrigerators are nearly bare. Children go to bed early to avoid the pang of hunger; parents choose between filling a prescription and buying groceries. An estimated eight in 10 people live in poverty.

It has led millions to flee the country for elsewhere.

Those who remain are concentrated in Venezuela’s cities, including its capital, Caracas, where the street market in the Catia neighborhood once was so busy that shoppers bumped into one another and dodged oncoming traffic. But as prices have climbed in recent days, locals have increasingly stayed away from the market stalls, reducing the chaos to a relative hush.

Neila Roa, carrying her 5-month-old baby, sells packs of cigarettes to passersby, having to monitor daily fluctuations in currency to adjust the price.

“Inflation and more inflation and devaluation,” Roa says. “It’s out of control.”

Roa could not believe the news of Maduro’s capture. Now, she wonders what will come of it. She thinks it would take “a miracle” to fix Venezuela’s economy.

“What we don’t know is whether the change is for better or for worse,” she says. “We’re in a state of uncertainty. We have to see how good it can be, and how much it can contribute to our lives.”

Trump has said the U.S. will distribute some of the proceeds from the sale of Venezuelan oil back to its population. But that commitment so far largely appears to be focused on America’s interests in extracting more oil from Venezuela, selling more U.S.-made goods to the country and repairing the electricity grid.

The White House is hosting a meeting Friday with U.S. oil company executives to discuss Venezuela, which the Trump administration has been pressuring to open its vast-but-struggling oil industry more widely to American investment and know-how. In an interview with the New York Times, Trump acknowledged that reviving the country’s oil industry would take years.

“The oil will take a while,” he said.

Venezuela has the world’s largest proven oil reserves. The country’s economy depends on them.

Maduro’s predecessor, the fiery Hugo Chávez, elected in 1998, expanded social services, including housing and education, thanks to the country’s oil bonanza, which generated revenues estimated at some $981 billion between 1999 and 2011 as crude prices soared. But corruption, a decline in oil production and economic policies led to a crisis that became evident in 2012.

Chávez appointed Maduro as his successor before dying of cancer in 2013. The country’s political, social and economic crisis, entangled with plummeting oil production and prices, marked the entirety of Maduro’s presidency. Millions were pushed into poverty. The middle class virtually disappeared. And more than 7.7 million people left their homeland.

Albert Williams, an economist at Nova Southeastern University, says returning the energy sector to its heyday would have a dramatic spillover effect in a country in which oil is the dominant industry, sparking the opening of restaurants, stores and other businesses. What’s unknown, he says, is whether such a revitalization happens, how long it would take and how a government built by Maduro will adjust to the change in power.

“That’s the billion-dollar question,” Williams says. “But if you improve the oil industry, you improve the country.”

The International Monetary Fund estimates Venezuela’s inflation rate is a staggering 682%, the highest of any country for which it has data. That has sent the cost of food beyond what many can afford.

Many public sector workers survive on roughly $160 per month, while the average private sector employee earned about $237 last year. Venezuela’s monthly minimum wage of 130 bolivars, or $0.40, has not increased since 2022, putting it well below the United Nations’ measure of extreme poverty of $2.15 a day.

The currency crisis led Maduro to declare an “economic emergency” in April.

Usha Haley, a Wichita State University economist who studies emerging markets, says for those hurting the most, there is no immediate sign of change.

“Short-term, most Venezuelans will probably not feel any economic relief,” she says. “A single oil sale will not fix the country’s rampant inflation and currency collapse. Jobs, prices and exchange rates will probably not shift quickly.”

In a country that has seen as much strife as Venezuela has in recent years, locals are accustomed to doing what they have to in order to get through the day, so much so that many utter the same expression

“Resolver,” they say in Spanish, or “figure it out,” shorthand for the jury-rigged nature of life here, in which every transaction, from boarding a bus to buying a child’s medicine, involves a delicate calculation.

Here at the market, the smell of fish, fresh onions and car exhaust combine. Calderon, making her way through, faces freshly skyrocketing prices, saying “the difference is huge,” as the country’s official currency has rapidly declined against its unofficial one, the U.S. dollar.

Unable to afford all the ingredients for her soup, she left with a bunch of celery but no meat.

Cano and Sedensky write for the Associated Press. Sedensky reported from New York. AP writer Josh Boak in Washington contributed to this report.

The contemplative cinema of Béla Tarr was as excruciatingly beautiful as it was brazenly original, often conjuring comparison to the work of a master painter.

His stark black-and-white imagery in assiduously long takes with creeping camera movements — hallmarks of his filmmaking — demanded that the viewer pause to look, to see, as one might in regarding a Picasso or a Bruegel.

Tarr’s revolution in form, however, cannot be separated from the radical humanity of his filmmaking. In a concentrated collection of 10 features over less than four decades, his gaze was fixed on the resolute dignity of his marginalized and downtrodden characters, which elevated his work beyond the realm of cinephile contemplation.

With the death of the Hungarian master on Tuesday at age 70, that enduring humanity makes his work as essential as ever.

“I despise stories,” Tarr once explained to an interviewer, “as they mislead people into believing that something has happened. In fact, nothing really happens as we flee from one condition to another. … There are only states of being — all stories have become obsolete and cliched, and have resolved themselves. All that remains is time.”

His films typically did not concern themselves with the plot of individual lives, which in reality are revealed in retrospect, if at all. They focused instead on human experience as it unfolds, moment by uncertain moment, capturing everyday foibles, errors and foolishness in the face of quotidian ruthlessness. As in Samuel Beckett’s tragicomic theater and novels, Tarr’s movies, by turns funny and heartbreaking, dignify human struggle with an uncommon tenacity of vision and empathy.

Some of Tarr’s most memorable scenes feature landscapes, often bleak and despairing settings of decaying Hungarian towns, punctuated with close-ups of characters’ faces. Asked by film historian David Bordwell about this juxtaposition, Tarr replied: “But the face is the landscape.”

Tarr arrived in the late 1970s declaring his intention to “kick in the door” of contemporary cinema. He did so, more than once.

He announced himself with a trilogy of domestic dramas. “Family Nest,” “The Outsider” and “The Prefab People” focused on couples and individuals trapped by commonplace struggles and social constraints, a thematic affront to late-communist Hungary. Featuring handheld camerawork and frequent close-ups, these early works evoke the quasi-improvisational style of John Cassavetes smothered in claustrophobia.

Tarr followed with a TV adaptation of “Macbeth” (1982), filmed in two shots, the second lasting more than an hour. After a brief experimentation two years later with a wild palette of color in “Almanac of Fall,” he returned to his discoveries in “Macbeth,” a stylistic transformation that would define the rest of his career.

“Damnation” (1988) opens with an extended shot of a system of towers and cables transporting vast buckets of mining materials across a desolate plain. A harsh grinding of the elevated cable system is the only sound. (In Tarr films, sound features as evocatively as image.) Slowly the camera pulls back to reveal an interior window, and then the back of a man’s head in silhouette, as our protagonist watches the monotonous procession.

The audience experiences the scene of agonizing beauty as the man does. We remain with him throughout the movie, as we follow his futile pursuit of a married cabaret singer with whom he is irrevocably in love. The story does not unfold as a typical narrative, but in a series of scenes that feel distinct yet unified, like a collection of short stories.

Tarr worked with a common team of filmmakers in nearly all his films, including his longtime partner and editor, Ágnes Hranitzky, cinematographer Fred Kelemen, composer Mihály Víg and a core group of actors.

“Damnation” marked Tarr’s first collaboration with his friend László Krasznahorkai, the Hungarian novelist and 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature winner. The pairing of literary and filmmaking masters, which spanned five features over a quarter of a century, recalled that of Graham Greene and Carol Reed, but nothing in movie history quite compares.

Tarr’s two greatest works, “Sátántangó” (1994) and “Werckmeister Harmonies” (2000), were based on Krasznahorkai‘s novels (the latter derived from his “The Melancholy of Resistance”). The books are cornerstones of Krasznahorkai’s Nobel-winning oeuvre, and the films are two of the defining movies of their era and established Tarr as a giant of cinema.

“Sátántangó” is an epic equivalent in running time to some four feature films, which Susan Sontag called “devastating, enthralling for every minute of its [more than] seven hours.” It often appears on critics’ lists among the greatest films ever made.

The movie follows a group of petty cheats, liars and drunks who are duped by nefarious opportunists who visit their crumbling town. Tarr employs the extended take to even greater lengths, creating an exquisite manipulation of our sense of time, and some of the most memorable scenes in modern filmmaking.

In “Werckmeister Harmonies,” another opportunist visits another desperate town, this time accompanying a traveling exhibit of a preserved whale. The depictions of mob violence are chilling evocations of the darkest moments of the 20th century. The culminating episode, as the mob smashes and ransacks a hospital and terrorizes its patients, ultimately reveals a frail elderly man, standing naked and alone in an empty bathtub as the club-wielding assailants approach. His appearance, stopping them in their tracks, is one of the most heartrending moments of any movie.

Tarr followed with “The Man From London,” which he and Krasznahorkai adapted from a novel by Georges Simenon, about a seaside railway signalman who confronts a moral quandary involving a murder mystery.

In 2012 came “The Turin Horse,” in which director and novelist reimagined the story of the whipping of a horse in the Italian city that was said to have triggered philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s mental breakdown. The movie follows the unfortunate horse as it is led away by its owner to his rural home he shares with his daughter. Their repetitive routines and the young woman’s daily burdens are reminiscent of Chantal Akerman’s classic “Jeanne Dielman.”

After the release of the film, among his most acclaimed, Tarr stunned the film world by announcing it would be his last feature. He was just 56 at the time.

He went on to open an international film school in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, known as film.factory, which continued until 2017, and he produced a number of movies.

Tarr was long outspoken in denouncing authoritarian governments, whether Hungary’s old communist model or the current populist nationalism of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, France’s Marine Le Pen and President Trump. He supported students at the University of Theatre and Film Arts in Budapest — his former school — who had occupied their campus in 2020 in protest of Orbán’s policies.

In 2019, Tarr embarked on one more film-related project, “Missing People,” an exhibition at the annual Vienna Festival. The film portion of the program, according to reports about the event, featured the faces of some 270 homeless people living in the Austrian capital.

The project appeared a few months after Orbán’s adoption of a Hungarian law that essentially criminalized homelessness. A final act in the radical humanity that was the art of Béla Tarr.

Deir el-Balah and Nuseirat, Gaza Strip – In her tent made of fabric sheets with a roof covered in white plastic tarp, Sanaa Issa tries to steal a quiet moment with her daughters.

Sanaa spoke to Al Jazeera as the new year approached, and with a ceasefire officially in place in Gaza. But, lying on a wet blanket in a tent with rain pouring down, Sanaa doesn’t have a huge amount to be positive about.

“We didn’t know whether to blame the war, the cold, or the hunger. We’re moving from one crisis to another,” Sanaa told Al Jazeera, describing a harsh year she, and other displaced Palestinians like her, have faced in the Gaza Strip.

Amid worsening humanitarian conditions, the once-ambitious hopes of Palestinians in Gaza, dreams of a better future, prosperity, and reconstruction, are gone. In their place are basic human needs: securing flour, food and water, obtaining tents to shield them from the cold, accessing medical care, and simply surviving bombardments.

For Palestinians like Sanaa, hope for the new year has been reduced to a daily struggle for survival.

Sanaa is a 41-year-old mother of seven, who has been solely responsible for raising her children after her husband was killed in an Israeli strike in November 2024, at the end of the first year of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

“Responsibility for the children, displacement, securing food and drink, making tough decisions here and there. Everything was required of me at once,” Sanaa, who fled with her family from al-Bureij to Deir el-Balah, both in central Gaza, said.

Sanaa’s biggest challenge in 2025 was securing “a loaf of bread” and getting her hands on even a kilogram of flour every day for her family.

“During the famine, I slept and woke up with one wish: to get enough bread for the day. I felt I was dying while my children were starving before me, and I could do nothing,” she said bitterly.

The search for flour eventually saw Sanaa decide to go to the US-backed GHF aid distribution points that opened at the end of May across Gaza.

“At first, I was scared and hesitant, but the hunger we live through can force you to do things you never imagined,” Sanaa said, describing her weekly visits to the aid points.

Visiting the sites, which the US and Israel supported as alternatives to long-established aid organisations, was inherently dangerous. More than 2,000 Palestinians were killed in and around GHF sites, according to the United Nations, before the GHF officially ended its mission in late November.

But going to the sites wasn’t just a risk to Sanaa’s life, it was a path that “took away her dignity”, leaving lasting scars.

On one occasion, Sanaa was hit by shrapnel in her arm while waiting for aid at the Netzarim distribution point in central Gaza, and her 17-year-old daughter was injured in the chest at the Morag point east of Rafah.

But her injuries didn’t stop her from trying again, although she began to go alone, leaving her children behind in relative safety.

Desperation

The war in Gaza led to severe interruptions in food and humanitarian aid, the last of which began in late March 2025, eventually leading to the declaration of a famine. It continued until October 2025, gradually easing after the ceasefire announcement.

During this period, the United Nations officially declared a state of famine, confirming that parts of Gaza had entered catastrophic hunger stages, with acute shortages in food, water, and medicine, and high rates of malnutrition among children and pregnant women.

Thousands of residents had to search for food using dangerous methods, including by waiting for long hours at the GHF sites.

“Hunger lasted a long time; it wasn’t a day or two, so I had to find a solution,” Sanaa said. “Each time, people crowded in their hundreds of thousands. Some would spend the night there, hundreds of thousands of displaced people – men, women, children, old and young.”

“The scenes were utterly humiliating. Bombing and heavy gunfire on everyone, not to mention the pushing and fighting among people over aid.”

The crowds meant that Sanaa often returned to her tent empty-handed, but the rare times she brought back a few kilos of flour felt like “a festival”, she recalled.

“One time, I got five kilos [11 pounds] of flour. I cried with joy returning to my children, who hadn’t tasted bread for days,” she added.

Sanaa divided the five kilos over two weeks, sometimes mixing it with ground lentils or pasta dough. “We wanted to recite a spell over the flour so it would multiply,” she said with dark humour.

A heavy silence followed as Sanaa adjusted the plastic tarp over her tent against the strong wind, then said:

“We witnessed humiliation beyond measure? All this for what? For a loaf of bread!” she added with tearful eyes. “If we were animals, perhaps they would have felt more pity for us.”

Despite the hardships she has endured and continues to face, Sanaa has not lost hope or her prayers for Gaza’s future.

“Two years are enough. Each year has been harder than the previous one, and we are still in this spiral,” she added. “We want proper tents to shelter us in winter, a gas cylinder to cook instead of burning wood, we want life and reconstruction.”

“Our basic rights have become distant wishes at year’s end.”

The only survivor

Sanaa’s husband was one of the more than 71,250 Palestinians killed by Israel during the war.

Twenty-year-old Batoul Abu Shawish can count her father, mother, two brothers and two sisters – her whole immediate family – among that number.

Batoul comes into the new year wishing for only one thing: to be with her family.

Her heartbreaking loss came just a month before the end of the year, on November 22.

Despite the ceasefire, an Israeli bomb struck the home her family had fled to in central Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp.

“I was sitting with my two sisters. My brothers were in their room, my father had just returned from outside, and my mother was preparing food in the kitchen,” she recalled, eyes vacant, describing the day.

“In an instant, everything turned to darkness and thick dust. I didn’t realise what was happening around me, not even that it was bombing, due to the shock,” Batoul added, as she stood next to the ruins of her destroyed home.

She was trapped under the debris of the destroyed home for about an hour, unable to move, calling for help from anyone nearby.

“I couldn’t believe what was happening. I wished I were dead, unaware, trying to escape the thought of what had happened to my family,” Batoul said.

“I called for them one by one, and there was no sound. My mother, father, siblings, no one.”

After being rescued, she was found to have severe injuries to her hand and was immediately transferred to hospital.

“I was placed on a stretcher above extracted bodies, covered in sheets. I panicked and asked my uncle who was with me: ‘Who are these people?’ He said they were from the house next to ours,” she recalled.

As soon as Batoul arrived at the hospital, she was rushed into emergency surgery on her hand before she could learn about what had happened to her family.

“I kept asking everyone, ‘Where is my mom? Where is my dad?’ They told me they were fine, just injured in other departments.”

“I didn’t believe them,” Batoul added, “but I was also afraid to call them liars.”

The following day, her uncles broke the news to Batoul that she had lost her mother and siblings. Her father, they told her, was still in critical condition in the intensive care unit.

“They gathered around me, and they were all crying. I understood on my own,” she said.

“I broke down, crying in disbelief, then said goodbye to them one by one before the funeral.”

Batoul’s father later succumbed to his injuries three days after the incident, leaving her alone to face her grief.

“I used to go to the ICU every day and whisper in my father’s ear, asking him to wake up again, for me and for himself, but he was completely unconscious,” Batoul said as she scrolled through photos of her father on her mobile phone.

“When he died, it felt as if the world had gone completely dark before my eyes.”

‘Where is the ceasefire?’

Israel said that it conducted the strikes in Nuseirat in response to an alleged gunman crossing into Israel-held territory in Gaza, although it is unclear why civilian homes in Nuseirat were therefore targeted.

According to Gaza’s Government Media Office and the Ministry of Health, around 2,613 Palestinian families were completely wiped out during the war on the Gaza Strip up until the announcement of the ceasefire in October 2025.

Those families had all of their members killed, and their names erased from the civil registry.

The same figures indicate that approximately 5,943 families were left with only a single surviving member after the rest were killed, an agonising reflection of the scale of social and human loss caused by the war.

These figures may change as documentation continues and bodies are recovered from beneath the rubble.

For Batoul, her family was anything but ordinary; they were known for their deep bond and love for one another.

“My father was deeply attached to my mother and never hid his love for her in front of anyone, and that reflected on all of us.”

“My mother was my closest friend, and my siblings loved each other beyond words. Our home was full of pleasant surprises and warmth,” she added.

“Even during the war, we used to sit together, hold family gatherings, and help one another endure so much of what we were going through.”

The understandable grief that has overtaken Batoul leaves no room for wishes for a new year or talk of a near future, at least for now.

One question, however, weighs heavily on her: why was her peaceful family targeted, especially during a ceasefire?

“Where is the ceasefire they talk about? It’s just a lie,” she said.

“My family and I survived bombardment, two years of war. An apartment next to our home in eastern Nuseirat was hit, and we fled together to here. We lived through hunger, food shortages, and fear together. Then we thought we had survived, that the war was over.”

“But sadly, they’re gone, and they left me alone.”

Batoul holds onto one wish from the depths of her heart: to join her family as soon as possible.

At the same time, she carries an inner resignation that perhaps it is her fate to live this way, like so many others in Gaza who have lost their families.

“If life is written for me, I will try to fulfil my mother’s dream that I be outstanding in my field and generous to others,” said Batoul, a second-year university student studying multimedia, who is currently living with her uncle and his family.

“Life without family,” she said, “is living with an amputated heart, in darkness for the rest of your life, and there are so many like that now in Gaza.”

Conor McDermott-Mostowy would like to compete at the Milano Cortina Winter Olympic Games. And he certainly has the talent, desire and ambition to do so.

What he lacks is the money.

“You could definitely reach six figures,” David McFarland, McDermott-Mostowy’s agent, said of what the speedskater needs annually to live and train while chasing his Olympic dream.

In the last year, finding that money has been increasingly difficult because McDermott-Mostowy is gay. Since President Trump returned to the White House in January, bringing with him an agenda that is hostile to diversity, equity and inclusion, sponsors who once embraced LGBTQ+ athletes and initiatives have turned away from the likes of McDermott-Mostowy, with devastating effect.

“There’s definitely been a noticeable shift,” said McFarland, who for decades has represented straight and gay athletes in a number of sports, from the NFL and NBA to professional soccer. “Many brands and speaking opportunities that previously highlighted LGBTQ athletes are now being pulled back or completely going away.”

“And these aren’t just symbolic partnerships,” he added. “They’re vital income opportunities that help athletes fund training, fund their competition and their livelihoods.”

The impact is being felt across a wide range of sports where sponsorship dollars often make the difference between winning and not being able to compete. But it’s especially acute in individual sports where the athletes are the brand and their unique traits — their size, appearance, achievements and even their gender preferences — become the things that attract or repel fans and financial backers.

“What’s most frustrating is that these decisions are rarely about performance,” McFarland said. “They’re about perceptions in the LGBTQ community. And that kind of fear-driven retreat harms everyone involved because, beyond the human costs, it’s also very short-sighted. The LGBTQ community and its allies represent a multitrillion-dollar global market with immense buying power.”

Travis Shumake, the only openly gay driver on the NHRA circuit, ran a career-high five events in 2022 and said he once had deals with major brands such as Mission Foods, Procter & Gamble and Kroger while using a rainbow-colored parachute to slow his dragster.

Kroger is the only one whose support has yet to shrink and as a result, Shumake had to keep his car in its trailer for the final eight months of the year.

And when he did race, his parachute was black.

Travis Shumake competes at the NHRA Nationals at Las Vegas Motor Speedway in November 2024.

(Marc Sanchez / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

“It was looking very optimistic and bright,” said Shumake, who spends about $60,000 for an engine and as much as $25,000 for each run down the dragstrip. “Being the only LGBTQ driver would have been very profitable. I ended last season with plans to run six to eight races. Great conversations were happening with big, big companies. And now it’s, I did one race, completely based on funding.”

“When you’re asking for a $100,000 check,” he added, “it’s very tough for these brands to take that risk for a weekend when there could be a large backlash because of my sexual identity.”

A sponsorship manager for a Fortune 500 company that had previously backed Shumake said he was not authorized to discuss the decision to end its relationship with the driver.

Daniel T. Durbin, director of the Institute of Sports, Media and Society at the USC Annenberg school, said there could be several reasons for that. A shrinking economy has tightened sponsorship budgets, for example. But there’s no doubt the messaging from the White House has had a chilling effect.

“It certainly makes the atmosphere around the issue more difficult because advertising and promotion tied to social change has come under fire by the Trump administration,” Durbin said.

In addition, corporate sponsors that once rallied behind diversity, whether out of conviction or convenience, saw the election results partly as a repudiation of that.

“We may be pissing off 50% of the population if we go down this path. Do we really want to do that with our brand?” Durbin said of the conversations corporations are having.

Backing away from causes such as LGBTQ+ rights doesn’t necessarily mean those corporations were once progressive and are now hypocritical. For many, the only color of the rainbow they care about is green.

“You’re trying to give people a philosophy who don’t have a philosophy,” Durbin said. “And even if they believe in causes, they’re not going to self-destruct their company by taking up a cause they believe in. They’re going to take it up in part because they think it’s positive for the bottom line.

“That’s the way it works.”

As a result, others have had to step up to try to help fill the funding gap. The Out Athlete Fund, a 501(c)(3) organization, was recently created to provide financial assistance and other support to LGBTQ+ athletes. McDermott-Mostowy was the first to get a check, after a November event in West Hollywood raised more than $15,000.

“We’re here to help cover their costs because a lot of other people aren’t doing it,” said Cyd Zeigler, a founding board member of the group and co-founder of OutSports, a sports-news website focused on LGBTQ+ issues.

That kind of retrenching, from deep-pocketed corporate sponsors to individuals giving their spare change, is threatening to derail the careers of athletes such as McDermott-Mostowy, who relies on his family and a modest U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee stipend for most of his living and training expenses. And since he’ll turn 27 before the Milano Cortina Olympic Games open in February, he may not be able to wait for the pendulum to swing back to have another chance at being an Olympian.

“I’m 99% sure I qualify for [food] stamps,” said McDermott-Mostowy, who medaled in the 1,500- and 500-meter events in October’s national championships, making him a strong contender for the U.S. heading into the Olympic long track trials Jan. 2-5 in Milwaukee. “What really saves us every year is when we travel. Almost all of our expenses are paid when we’re coming [with] the team.

“If I didn’t make the World Cup one year, I would be ruined.”

McDermott-Mostowy’s past success and his Olympic potential are what he pitches to sponsors, not that he’s gay. But that’s what makes him stand out; if he qualifies for Milano Cortina, he would be one of the few gay athletes on the U.S. team.

“I have always been very open about my sexuality. So that wasn’t really a debate,” he said.

“I have definitely heard from my agent that, behind closed doors, a lot of people are like ‘Oh, we’d love to support queer athletes. But it’s just not a good time to be having that as our public face.’”

The debate isn’t a new one, although it has evolved over the years. Figure skater Amber Glenn, who last year became the first out queer woman to win the U.S. championship, remembers gender preferences being a big topic of discussion ahead of the 2014 Games in Russia, where public support for LGBTQ+ expression is banned.

“At that point I wasn’t out, but I was thinking, ‘What would I do? What would I say?’” Glenn said. “Moving forward I hope that we can make it where people can compete as who they are and not have to worry about anything.

“Figure skating is unique. We have more acceptance and more of a community in the queer space. That’s not the case for all sports. We’re definitely making progress, but we still have a long way to go.”

Conor McDermott-Mostowy hopes to be competing for the U.S. in speedskating at the Milano Cortina Olympic Games in February.

(Dean Mouhtaropoulos / Getty Images)

In the meantime, athletes such as McDermott-Mostowy and Shumake may have to find ways to re-present themselves to find new sources of support.

“It’s not like I’m going back in the closet,” said Shumake, who has decided to rent out his dragster to straight drivers next year rather than leave it parked and face bankruptcy. “It’s just that maybe it’s not the main storyline at the moment. I’m trying a bunch of different ways to tell the story, to rebrand.”

“It’s been weird to watch,” added Shumake, who once billed himself as the fastest gay guy on Earth. “I know it will swing back. I also fear, did I make the right choices when I had a partnership with Grindr and I had rainbow parachutes? Like did I come on too strong?

“I’ve chosen to go the gay race car driver route and it’s just a little bit of a slowdown. I don’t think I need to blame myself. It’s just a fear people are having at the moment.”

A fear that’s proving costly to the athletes who can least afford to pay.

CARTHAGE, Tenn. — Albert Gore Jr. was 21 that summer of 1969 when he confronted Vietnam, the draft and an early test of his manhood.

He had just graduated from Harvard, where he joined in anti-war protests that had split college campuses across the country. He had spent his summers on the family farm outside of this small town, and he knew that many of the local boys were heading off to the Army.

Over the next two months Gore would struggle with a decision:

Should he follow his ideals and defy the draft, or join the tens of thousands of other young men gone to war?

On a more personal level, should he refuse to go and risk hurting his father’s next reelection bid to the U.S. Senate, where Albert Gore Sr. was one of the nation’s leading critics of the war? Evading the draft might make his father look unpatriotic.

His search for an answer would take him from the family farm in Tennessee to the doorstep of a Harvard instructor on Cape Cod, Mass. It would plunge him into a series of long, wrenching debates that failed to ease his dilemma.

Finally, it delivered him, about to be drafted, to the federal building in Newark, N.J., where surprised Army recruiters listened as he told them who he was and what he intended to do–sign up.

Those crucial months in 1969 offer insights into the man who would become vice president of the United States–and who now aspires to the presidency.

What emerges is a portrait of a young man discovering the cruel contradictions between his beliefs and sense of duty, between loyalty to family and commitment to a cause. His deliberations show the slow and painstaking approach that has become a trademark of his decision-making style as a political leader.

Gore’s anguish over the decision also provides a glimpse into his unsettled place in the world of privilege; he would not exploit his special advantages but would not fully reject them either.

Unsettled Place Amid Privilege

Many young men with famous names or elite educations–and many without them–were able to avoid the war in Vietnam if not always active duty. In 1969, 21.8 million men from the ages of 18 to 26 were eligible for the draft. About 283,000 were inducted into the armed services that year.

Rather than seek an out, Gore went voluntarily. He became Spc. 5 Gore in Vietnam, where he was stationed with the 20th Engineers Brigade headquarters near Saigon. In some ways, he was one of the guys, playing poker and drinking, smoking cigarettes and sometimes marijuana with his buddies.

But in other ways, he was apart from the fray. He served as a news reporter and not a combat soldier. His reporting duties took him to potentially dangerous spots. But like some other servicemen in support specialties, he was never in actual combat, his fellow soldiers say.

Several of his colleagues remember they were assigned to make sure this son of a prominent politician was never injured in the war. After five months, he returned home at his own request when his job was being phased out.

Nevertheless, Gore the politician over the years sometimes has been inclined to describe his Vietnam days as though he was in the thick of the war.

On the campaign trail today, while he suggests no combat heroics, he nonetheless mentions his service in Vietnam proudly. Addressing 4,000 veterans last month at the national American Legion convention in Anaheim, he spoke of the curse of that war and how “few respected our service, much less welcomed us home.”

But Gore also said, “Some of the greatest times of my whole life were times spent with my buddies in the Army.”

Gore declined to be interviewed for this article.

In the 2000 presidential campaign, the Vietnam draft experience continues to be a benchmark for Gore’s generation of national leaders. The old themes of the war surface so often that it is clear they never left.

John McCain, the son and grandson of Navy admirals, is a Republican senator from Arizona. But he is better known as a war hero; his book about his 5 1/2 years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, issued in conjunction with his campaign, is a bestseller.

McCain’s main rival for the Republican nomination, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, missed Vietnam by serving in the Texas Air National Guard–a slot critics say he received through connections from his father, then a U.S. congressman.

Gore’s opponent in the Democratic contest, former Sen. Bill Bradley of New Jersey, served in the Air Force Reserve from 1967 to 1978 and saw no active duty.

Harvard Brimming With Anti-War Fervor

Gore, the youngest of these candidates, was still in college when public support for the war began to sour. Harvard, like many campuses, was a caldron of anti-war fervor.

John Tyson, one of Gore’s Harvard friends, said he and Gore both signed anti-war petitions in the dining hall, attended rallies and talked for hours about what they saw as the misguided pursuit of an unwinnable conflict.

“He was against the war,” Tyson recalled, “but he wasn’t one of those guys who considered himself a revolutionary, who was against America.” He became “enraged,” Tyson recalled, when some protesters talked about securing some dynamite.

Gore, viewing Vietnam as more than a local conflict, worried about whether it would become a flash point for nuclear war. “He had scope,” Tyson said. He added that Gore “listened to his father. He emulated him.”

In the summer before his senior year, Gore helped his father write his landmark speech against the war at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

The senator noted that 25,000 U.S. soldiers–less than half the final death count–had died in Southeast Asia. “What harvest do we reap from their gallant sacrifice?” he asked.

Outside, anti-war protesters clashed with police in what became a major turning point for the peace movement at home.

Martin Peretz, who taught Gore in a seminar on the political culture of post-World War II America, said “very, very few” of Gore’s classmates went into the service. Many sought other ways to stay out of the service.

So few made the journey from Harvard to Vietnam that when one of Gore’s friends, freshman Denmark Groover III, interrupted his studies to join the military, many of his classmates ridiculed him.

Gore wrote his girlfriend, Tipper Aitcheson, that, while he admired his friend’s “courage and rashness,” he did not know whether his own views would allow him to follow Groover’s example.

“It’s wrong, we’re wrong,” he wrote, according to letters published last week in Talk magazine. “A lot of people won’t admit it and never will, but we’re wrong.”

By the time Gore graduated in June 1969, anti-war sentiment drove a hundred angry students to walk out of the commencement ceremony. Others tore up their diplomas; half of the senior class raised clenched fists.

When Gore left school, his student deferment expired. He was staring straight into the draft. Like others opposed to the war, his options were stark. He could apply for conscientious-objector status. He could try to land a spot in a reserve or National Guard unit, although the waiting lists were long. He could flee to Canada or end up in jail.

Many of the sons of Carthage were already in Vietnam. One of them, James H. Wilson, had been killed earlier that year, on Gore’s 21st birthday.

“I don’t want to spend any more time over here than I have to,” Wilson had written in his last letter home. In all, eight young men from Carthage and surrounding Smith County–whose population then was 15,000–died over there.

“This is a small rural county, and there always seemed to be a load of them going, five or six or seven at a time,” said Edward S. Blair, a boyhood chum of Gore’s.

“A lady ran the local draft board, she was the supervisor, and she would send notices out. Then a group of boys would catch the bus at the Trailways station near the old river bridge and go to Nashville for their exams.

“It would have gone down badly had he [Gore] not gone,” said Blair, now the U.S. marshal in Nashville.

But Gore was a product of two worlds: rural Tennessee and political Washington. If the norm for boys from the Volunteer State of Tennessee was to enlist, the standard was much different for the sons of lawmakers.

A report from that time by Congressional Quarterly showed that 234 sons of senators and congressmen had reached draft age during the Vietnam era. Half of them received deferments. Of the rest, only 28 went to Vietnam, 19 into combat.

The subject of privilege was all the more apparent in a hit song in 1969 by Creedence Clearwater Revival. Gore loved rock ‘n’ roll and memorized the lyrics of many songs, including “Fortunate Son.” He told friends the refrain haunted him:

It ain’t me, it ain’t me,

I ain’t no senator’s son, son.

It ain’t me, it ain’t me,

I ain’t no fortunate one, no.

But now was decision time, and Gore began to turn to those closest to him. Sometimes he seemed on the brink of a decision but then would suddenly reach out for more guidance.

A first stop was at the family farm.

Sen. Al Gore Sr., interviewed in a video for use in his son’s current presidential campaign, recalled the visit.

“He and I took a walk back on the farm. Then we came back in here and had lunch.” Suddenly, the father remembered, his son stood up and announced, “I believe I’ll take a walk. Alone.”

“So,” the senator recalled, “he walked to the bluff back of the farm and came in and his mother and I were seated in here, continuing to discuss the matter.

“We asked him and recommended to him to use his own judgment. His mother and I assured him we would support his decision whatever it was. But it was his decision. And I particularly asked him to not take into consideration any political matter as his decision might affect me. Whether he did take that into consideration, I don’t know. I hope not.”

After his solitary stroll, his son walked back into the house and blurted out, “I’ve made up my mind. I’m going. I’ll volunteer tomorrow.”

But he hesitated, and, joined by Tipper, next sought out his former instructor Peretz at his home on Cape Cod.

It was the weekend of the first moonwalk. When Gore wasn’t watching television, he asked Peretz how he could be true to himself without endangering his father’s anti-war position–or the life of someone he knew from Tennessee.

“ ‘My draft board is small,’ ” Peretz quoted Gore as saying. “ ‘If I don’t go, someone I played baseball with or went to church with or shoveled horseshit with will go in my place.’ ”

Peretz, now chairman of New Republic magazine, said he never advised students on how to handle the draft, and Gore left, still uncertain.

Soon after, he took a train to Newark, N.J., where he joined Harvard pal Tyson at a downtown diner. They ate lunch, then talked long enough to get hungry again.

Gore was eating one French fry at a time. Should he go or shouldn’t he?

Abruptly, Gore sprung to his feet, Tyson said. “He was ready.”

They hurried the few blocks to the nearby federal building and up to the Army recruiting station on the fourth floor.

Astonishment at Recruiting Office

Sgt. Dess Stokes ran the office, and he and his recruiters were astonished to see who walked in, he recalled. They all knew of Sen. Gore, especially Stokes, who had already done one tour in Vietnam and, like many soldiers, shared the senator’s opposition to the war.

In the recruiting station, Stokes handed Gore some paperwork and explained how volunteering for the draft, rather than waiting to be inducted, could keep him out of the infantry. Noting that Gore was a Harvard man, Stokes told him he could get into communications, maybe become an Army reporter.

Having reached the moment, Gore stepped away and telephoned his father. When he returned, he signed the papers. He was in the Army.

His two-year hitch was to run until August 1971, and his first assignment after basic training was in the Army media pool at Ft. Rucker, Ala. There he learned to write press releases and short newspaper stories.

Richard Abalos, who bunked with Gore at Ft. Rucker, had a tan 1962 Chevy four-door, and many in the unit would pile in and drive to Panama City, Fla., renting a dilapidated beach house for the weekend. They would play bridge and poker, barbecue steaks and drink cheap beer and wine, including one inexpensive label called Tickle Me Pink.

Gore has admitted that he smoked marijuana in the Army; there was plenty of pot to pass around. “It usually was on the beach in Florida,” said Guenter “Gus” Stanisic. “But hell, the MPs [military police] smoked. Just about everybody in the Army smoked.”

In April 1970, Gore was named Post Soldier of the Month, a citation awarded to soldiers who demonstrated leadership qualities. The honor came with a $50 savings bond.

A month later, in a ceremony at the National Cathedral in Washington, he married Tipper.

By summer, his father–who died last year–was being challenged for his Senate seat by Rep. William Brock, a Chattanooga Republican and supporter of the war.

Brock said that young Gore’s decision to enlist did not appear to help or hurt his father. “I didn’t see any change with what young Albert did,” Brock said.

But the Gore campaign tried its best to show that Sen. Gore, while against the war, was still a patriot. The team produced a television commercial in which the senator rode up on a white horse and told Al, dressed in Army fatigues, “Son, always love your country.”

When Gore received his orders for Vietnam, just five weeks before the November 1970 election, his father announced it publicly: “Like thousands of other Tennessee boys, he volunteered. . . . Like other fathers, I am proud.”

But the orders to Vietnam were delayed, and Gore would not ship out until Christmas. The family believed President Nixon postponed the orders to deny Sen. Gore any political boost from having a son in Vietnam on election day.

After three decades in Congress, Gore lost to Brock by 4% of the vote. And by the end of 1970, his son was in Vietnam.

Gore arrived in Vietnam nearly three years after the Tet Offensive, the so-called turning point in the war. By that time, the U.S. troop withdrawals ordered by Nixon had begun, and South Vietnamese forces were taking over a larger share of the fighting.

But U.S. forces were continuing their bombing campaign against North Vietnam and also conducting raids into Laos and Cambodia. Although both sides had reached a stalemate, the war would drag on several more years.

Though far from the action, young Gore was shaken by what he saw. “When and if I get home from Vietnam,” he wrote his friend Abalos, “I’m going to divinity school to atone for my sins.”

Other soldiers with long experience in Vietnam said that Gore was treated differently from his fellow enlistees. Two of them recalled that before Gore arrived Brig. Gen. Kenneth B. Cooper advised them that a senator’s son would be joining the outfit.

H. Alan Leo said soldiers were ordered to serve as Gore’s bodyguards, to keep him out of harm’s way. “It blew me away,” Leo said. “I was to make sure he didn’t get into a situation he could not get out of. They didn’t want him to get into trouble. So we went into the field after the fact [after combat actions], and that limited his exposure to any hazards.”

Cooper, however, said Gore “didn’t get anything he shouldn’t have.”

Gore covered the 20th Engineers Brigade, based 30 miles northeast of Saigon, as it cleared jungle and built and repaired roads and bridges in the war zone.

In his most ambitious piece, he re-created a battle at a fire support base code-named Blue near the Cambodian border, which a group of Viet Cong had tried to overrun.

“On the night of February 22nd, there was no moon,” Gore wrote. “The men sacked out early as usual, soon after the movie was over–’Bloody Mama’ with Shelley Winters as the maniac murderess–the guards were posted as usual–the password was ‘four.’ ”

‘He Took Risks’ During Tour

Fire Support Base Blue was as close as Gore came to combat. Mike Roche, editor of the engineers’ Castle Courier newspaper, said it took courage to go to the fire base, even if the battle was over.

“He was tanned and he had the bleached-out fatigues and . . . he was doing war-related stories,” Roche said. “He took risks.”

Veterans said a standard tour in Vietnam was 12 months; Gore was out in five. Early releases were not uncommon at the time, though. The 20th Engineers was departing Vietnam, which meant the Army no longer needed a reporter assigned to the brigade.

Gore also was approaching the last months of his two-year commitment. In March, with less than three months in Vietnam, he requested an early release and was told the next day he could leave in May to return to school.

When he left Vietnam, Gore flew to Oakland, along with Army pal Bob Delabar. At the airport bar, they hoisted drinks and parted ways. “We both got smashed,” Delabar remembered. “And it wasn’t on beer.”

Gore enrolled in Vanderbilt University’s divinity school but stayed only a year and left to take a job in Nashville as a reporter for the Tennessean, where he worked for four years.

When the House seat from his dad’s old district opened up in 1976, Gore ran and won. He later was elected to his father’s old Senate seat. The Army and Vietnam came up in his campaigns; he often portrayed his experience as more dangerous than it truly was.

In 1988, running for president, he told Vanity Fair magazine, “I took my turn regularly on the perimeter in these little firebases out in the boonies. Something would move, we’d fire first and ask questions later.”

He told the Washington Post: “I was shot at. I spent most of my time in the field.”

“I carried an M-16 . . . ,” he told the Baltimore Sun. “I pulled my turn on the perimeter at night and walked through the elephant grass and I was fired upon.”

For the Weekly Standard, he described flights aboard combat helicopters. “I used to fly these things with the doors open, sitting on the ledge with our feet hanging down. If you flew low and fast, they wouldn’t have as much time to shoot you.”

Any location in Vietnam was potentially dangerous during the war. But eight men who served there with Gore said in separate interviews that he was never in the middle of a battle. Gore himself has toned down descriptions of his wartime activity during the current campaign; he now emphasizes that he was in Vietnam as a news reporter and not as a combat soldier.

As he runs for the presidency this time, old Army pals sometimes show up at political events. Abalos appeared at a Gore rally in San Antonio; Delabar sat in the front row at the American Legion convention in Anaheim.

His enduring ties to his Army buddies appear to reflect an inner connection between Gore the reluctant soldier and Gore the national politician and presidential candidate.

At the American Legion convention, he told the veterans, “There will always be the bond between who we were and who we are.”

Times researchers John Beckham and Edith Stanley and staff writer Elizabeth Shogren contributed to this story.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

How They Served All presidential contenders except for Elizabeth Hanford Dole were eligible for the draft during the Vietnam War. The following are their records, or lack of them, and the reasons:

Republicans

Gary Bauer: No military service; student deferment

Patrick J. Buchanan: None; student, medical deferments

Texas Gov. George W. Bush: Texas Air National Guard; no overseas duty

Dole: None; not subject to draft

Steve Forbes: New Jersey National Guard, 1970-76; no combat duty

Sen. Orrin G. Hatch of Utah: None; sole remaining heir deferment

Alan Keyes: None; student deferment, then high draft number

Sen. John McCain of Arizona: Navy pilot; prisoner of war in North Vietnam for 5 1/2 years

*

Democrats:

Former Sen. Bill Bradley: U.S. Air Force Reserve, 1967-78; no active duty

Vice President Al Gore: Army journalist, 1969-71; six months in Vietnam; no combat duty

*

Independent

Sen. Bob Smith of New Hampshire: Navy, 1965-67, including one year in Vietnam; Naval Reserve, 1962-65 and 1967-69; no combat duty

*

Sources: Time/CNN and Houston Chronicle

Mason Marchment scored two power-play goals, Kirill Marchenko had one, and the Columbus Blue Jackets beat the Kings 3-1 on Monday night.

Jet Greaves made 23 saves and Damon Severson had two assists as Columbus snapped a four-game road losing streak.

Andrei Kuzmenko scored and Anton Forsberg made 27 saves as the Kings were held to fewer than three goals for the sixth straight game.

Columbus was without defenseman Zach Werenski, who is day to day with a lower body injury sustained blocking a shot against the Ducks on Saturday. Werenski leads the Blue Jackets in goals, assists and points, and his 14 goals are tied with Washington’s Jakob Chychrun for most in the NHL by a defenseman.

However, newcomer Marchment made up for it, scoring twice in the first period, giving him three goals in two games since being acquired from Seattle on Friday. He opened the scoring 4:07 into the game with a wrist shot off Forsberg’s blocker, before making it 2-0 with 23.5 seconds remaining in the first period when Boone Jenner’s shot took a double deflection and went in off Marchment’s shoulder.

Kuzmenko got the Kings on the scoreboard with 1:19 remaining in the second, but Marchenko added a third power-play tally for the Blue Jackets with 5:46 remaining in the third. The three goals with the man-advantage were a season high, and it was the third time the Blue Jackets had multiple power-play goals.

The Kings were playing for the first time since trading third-line center Phillip Danault to Montreal on Friday, but newly promoted bottom six centers Alex Turcotte and Samuel Helenius struggled to make a consistent impact with frequent penalties creating a choppy game flow.

Up next for the Kings: vs. Seattle at Crypto.com Arena on Tuesday.

Thomas Skinner was said to be ‘suing’ the BBC over his early exit from Strictly and has claimed that the BBC ‘rigged’ the votes to orchestrate his elimination from the dance competition

Thomas Skinner has hit back at press attention of his rumoured feud with the BBC in furious statement made on Good Morning Britain. Ahead of the Strictly Come Dancing live final on 20 December, it was reported that Skinner was ‘suing’ the BBC as he believed they had ‘rigged’ the votes to ensure he would be eliminated first, which the BBC strongly denied. The broadcaster made clear that they had not received any legal paperwork and Skinner did not confirm that he was suing.

However, after refusing to appear in the live final, Skinner posted a statement to X where he said he “received an anonymous email claiming to be from a BBC exec with stats, saying I’d received far more votes than it appeared and it wasn’t right”. Following the statement, The Mirror exclusively revealed that Skinner’s voting figures may not be as high as he believes.

READ MORE: Thomas Skinner ‘dropped by agent’ after threatening to sue BBC over Strictly axeREAD MORE: Thomas Skinner’s true Strictly voting figures revealed leaving BBC fight in tatters

A source pointed to an independent exit poll of 125,000 viewers as “clear evidence of his unpopularity.” It showed how Skinner attracted just 1805 votes, which was the lowest of any contestant on the BBC programme. The source claimed: “The poll – which is larger than an exit poll for a general election – comprehensively shows that Skinner was the least popular contestant by a long way. There is no conspiracy. These are the cold, hard facts.”

Hitting back at the article in a statement shared on Good Morning Britain, Skinner said he was “struggling to understand” why his words on X were getting so much attention. He said: “I don’t hate the BBC – they gave me my big break on The Apprentice. I had discussions with my representatives on Wednesday evening which I believed to be private and confidential and I spoke openly with them in confidence.

“I was obviously gutted when I received the email on the evening I left the show, and at first I didn’t believe it was true. When I raised this in conversation, I was advised by the BBC to seek legal advice. I’ve had a difficult year with the press attention I didn’t seek, and I’m honestly struggling to understand why this continues to escalate. “

Similarly, when approached by The Mirror, Skinner said he did not believe the low voting figures were accurate but refused to reveal how he was able to verify the “anonymous email” his information came from.

He said: “Regarding the anonymous email and verification process, I don’t wish to comment further at this time or release anything publicly. As for the voting figures, I know for a fact that the information you have is not accurate. That said, it doesn’t materially matter to me now, and I’m not looking to contest this publicly.”

Despite “not looking to contest this publicly”, Skinner made a lengthy public statement on X where he insisted his elimination was “unfair” and that a BBC exec had told him that the broadcaster was angry over his friendship with JD Vance.

He wrote: “On the night I left the show, I received an anonymous email claiming to be from a BBC exec with stats, saying I’d received far more votes than it appeared and it wasn’t right. I’ve since had the email independently verified.”

“That same email mentioned the BBC was very angry an nervous simply because I had met JD Vance (USA VICE PRESIDENT). Let me be clear, I’m not a political bloke. Never have been. I just love my country and am patriotic. I’ve been made out by the press to be this political figure. If anyone was to get an opportunity like what I did, they would have taken it. I still think it is mad that a man like me who sells mattresses out of a van can call someone that senior in the world ’s politics a friend now.”

“I have asked to see the official voting figures to back up the ones I was sent in the email but was told they couldn’t be shown to me. And have never been shown in the history of the show. I have spoke about the email I had received to senior people and the BBC welfare team, who btw I genuinely respect. And they was the ones who advised me to get legal advice because of how unfair it all was. (This was not my idea).”

However, a BBC spokesperson said Skinner never shared the email he referenced. They told the Mirror: “”In response to Tom’s latest statement, the BBC said: “Strictly Come Dancing’s public vote is independently overseen and verified to ensure complete accuracy every week. Any claims to the contrary are entirely without foundation. Unfortunately, despite requests for it, Mr Skinner is yet to share the email he references with anyone from the BBC so we are unable to comment on it.”

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EUGENE, Ore. — Perhaps it was James Madison going for it twice on fourth down on its first drive of the game.

Or, maybe it was coach Bob Chesney calling for a wide receiver pass on the Dukes’ second series of the evening. Even 12th-ranked James Madison successfully pulling off a fake punt could have adequately explained what the scoreboard failed to convey.

It was clear that the fifth-ranked Oregon Ducks were in a different class than their visitors in a 51-34 win in a College Football Playoff first round matchup Saturday at Autzen Stadium. Oregon led 48-13 midway through the third quarter before the Dukes added three late touchdowns to make the final score appear closer than the game really was.

“I think the scoreboard itself, every time we got down there we kind of shot ourselves in the foot,” said Chesney, who takes over as UCLA’s head coach after the JMU loss. “If we did not do that, if we did not end with 13 penalties, is this a little bit of a different game? Maybe. But at the same point in time, that’s a tough offense to stop, and I think it’s tough for a lot of teams in the entire country to stop.”

With James Madison’s loss, Group of Five teams fell to 0-4 all-time in CFP games. No. 17 Tulane fell 41-10 to No. 6 Mississippi on Saturday, too, while Penn State beat Boise State 31-14 in last year’s Fiesta Bowl. Alabama topped Cincinnati 27-6 in a 2022 CFP semifinal at the Cotton Bowl.

Following their loss to Ole Miss, Green Wave head coach Jon Sumrall brushed aside any notion of his team not belonging among the last 12 standing.

“We’re our conference champion and the rules are what they were, and I think there should be access for at least one G5 team moving forward,” Sumrall said. “I do. I think you should have given the American champion an opportunity before the ACC champion this year because we beat the ACC champion. So Duke won the ACC Championship; we beat them.”

To Sumrall’s point, Tulane beat a pair of Power Four teams in Northwestern and Duke, but those schools combined to go 14-11 in 2025.

James Madison, meanwhile, lost to its only Power Four opponent this season, with Louisville beating it 28-14 in a game in which the Dukes mustered just 263 yards of total offense. Most of the season, James Madison ran with the ball with ease against its opponents, rushing for over 300 yards in a game five times and over 200 yards in a game nine times.

But on Saturday, the Dukes mostly abandoned the run after quickly falling behind, and instead often turned to Sun Belt player of the year and quarterback Alonza Barnett III, who attempted a career-high 48 passes in the contest. Even so, Barnett was confident his team belonged in the CFP over other Power Four schools.

“I believe people saw that we were meant to be on this level. When you look at the Power Four teams and whatever, the destiny is really — the ball is in your court. You control your own destiny,” Barnett said. “Most of those teams that didn’t make it, they controlled their own destiny, and we handled what we could handle and we didn’t give into outside noise.”

Among Group of Five schools, James Madison did fare the best of any of them on offense in the CFP. The other three programs scored a combined 30 points in their respective playoff games, a total James Madison eclipsed against the nation’s eighth-ranked scoring defense.

But where the Dukes fell flat was slowing down the Ducks’ ninth-ranked scoring offense. Oregon ran the ball with ease, averaging more than 7.7 yards per attempt against James Madison’s run defense that entered the contest allowing the second-fewest yards per game in the country.

As has often been the case in matchups between Power Four and Group of Five teams, the greatest discrepancies existed in the trenches. To a man, James Madison could not adequately match up with Oregon, just as Tulane couldn’t with Ole Miss and many other Group of Five programs before them both failed to do.

“I think there were moments today where I feel like we could play with them,” Chesney said. “ And I think that today, the complimentary football, and us playing in the way we needed to just did not exist.”

Destin writes for the Associated Press.

When Wura Hope paints her nails, she paints her prosthesis too. Pink glows on her dark skin like fine art. But her right foot is pale, yellowish-tan, the generic colour of many imported prosthetics. It contrasts with her melanin-rich skin and does not offer the aesthetics she desires.

Wura is a model, fashion designer, and vendor of Ankara fabrics. She also interns at a bank. Sometimes, she doesn’t want the spotlight that comes with being an amputee. But with a prosthetic foot so different from the rest of her body, curious eyes are unavoidable. As a result, she fully covers up her leg.

The unease Wura feels today traces back to when she was 11. One of her daily chores was filling the water tank of the large generator her parents used at their home in Abuja, in Nigeria’s North Central. One day, the propeller caught her long dress and badly injured her right leg. An infection followed, and the leg was eventually amputated. 

The 28-year-old barely remembers life with two legs. She has lived with one for so long that she even forgets she has a physical challenge. 

“Like, I literally forget,” said Wura.

Every word she says seems to arrive with a smile. And when her lips spread, they show her teeth like fresh corn peeking through a half-opened husk. She’s grateful to be walking again after many years on crutches. 

Her current prosthesis is her third. The first, donated by an Indian charity in 2014, was heavy and rigid. The second caused blisters around her stump that took days to heal. The one she uses now is lighter and has a knee joint that makes walking easier. But it is far from perfect. In hot weather, the liner squeaks against her sweaty stump and sometimes threatens to slip off. When that happens, she has to find a restroom, take it off, clean it, let it dry for a few minutes, and put it back on.

“Sometimes in the market, I’ll be looking for somewhere private to clean my liner,” she told HumAngle. 

Moments like this remind Wura of her disability, turning long-distance walking into a nightmare. 

The struggle is not just Wura’s; it is a shared reality for many who wear devices designed for colder climates. Thirty-year-old Eva Chukwunelo knows it well. She finds her stump in a pool of sweat after walking just a few metres. But in March this year, she walked seamlessly from Washington Park to the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, a distance of more than two kilometres. Back home in Abuja, she would have stopped multiple times to pull off her prosthesis, drain the sweat from its liner, and wait for her stump to dry. 

In Abuja, March is one of the hottest months, but it is cold in New York, giving chills rather than sweat. Most advanced prosthetic devices come from temperate countries, where they may be designed with little consideration for Africa’s heat and humidity. 

Silicon liners, the technology used by both Wura and Eva, were invented in Iceland and initially called the Icelandic Roll-On Silicone Socket. Made from medical-grade silicone RTVs, they do not absorb sweat. As moisture gathers inside, it simply coats the stump, making every step increasingly uncomfortable. The material is soft and generally reliable, but it does not match Africa’s weather realities. 

“So I felt like if you’re wearing a silicone liner, you cannot do so well in a hot environment,” Eva said.

As for the skin covers, they are either too black or not black at all, wrote Eva in the Nov. 5 dispatch of The Amputee LifeStyle, the newsletter where she documents the lived experiences of amputees.

“Somewhere between ‘too white’ and ‘too black’, African amputees are left underrepresented,” she noted. “So yes, we walk again. But sometimes, we walk in discomfort.”

Eva was also born with two legs. As a child, she was always running, climbing trees, playing football, or dancing. Even after she was diagnosed with osteomyelitis, a severe bone infection, she stayed active in school and continued playing with friends. But her left foot soon developed ulcers, prompting concerns about activities that could expose her to germs. The leg began to decay right from between the big toe and the second. When gangrene—the death of body tissue due to lack of blood flow or severe bacterial infection—set in, the only option was amputation.

Eva was just 16. She imagined a future spent on crutches, or confined to a wheelchair, or, even worse, reduced to begging like the lepers who often took shelter under the flamboyant trees outside her parents’ house. She had never heard of prosthetics, a life-changing technology that dates as far back as ancient Egypt. But everything shifted the day her doctor invited a prosthetist into the room.

“The first time I walked again, it felt like a miracle,” she wrote in her newsletter.

Her first two prosthetic devices were heavy, rigid, and, in her words, ugly. They helped her walk, but she was never comfortable enough to let her live freely. Until she got her third device, which came with a silicon liner, she never felt confident leaving her left leg uncovered in public. The fourth was lighter. The fifth, lighter still and more advanced, each upgrade was a small step toward ease, though never quite the perfect match she longed for.

“I think the more money you have, the lighter it becomes,” Eva told HumAngle.

Africa’s difference is not just in climate and skin tones. Like Nigeria, most African countries trail far behind Europe in minimum wage and purchasing power. And for many amputees across the continent, this means the most advanced and most comfortable prosthetic devices are far beyond reach. 

On the day 18-year-old Adeola Olailo lost one of her legs in an accident in Ekiti State, South West Nigeria, she had hoped to hawk groundnuts after school. Selling groundnuts and fried pork was how she supported her parents, who struggled to make ends meet. And she was good at it. But when a car veered off the road and ploughed into the students walking home, Adeola lost a limb on the spot, and her family lost a vital source of income. It took repeated media reports and the state government’s intervention for her to receive a locally made prosthesis, one she has now outgrown.

For amputees like Adeola, a matching device must be affordable, too. She dreams of a waterproof leg that aligns with her height, matches her complexion, and lets her jump, walk without pain, run, and dance again, especially now that she is preparing for university. But a prosthesis that can do even a fraction of these may cost up to ₦5 million, an amount far beyond the reach of her household. And like most imports, when the naira slips, the price soars.

Taiwo Akinsanya, founder of Dynalimb, a Nigerian company working to expand access to quality prosthetics, said there are still many barriers to creating truly Nigerian or African-centred devices. One of the biggest, he explained, is the education system that does not encourage home-grown innovation, often producing graduates who take pride in their ability to apply foreign products rather than pioneer new ones for local realities.

“We were taught in medical school to take the approach of what is currently being done in the current market and keep applying it to a number of patients,” he said.

Access and affordability, he added, are also limited by Nigeria’s heavy reliance on foreign manufacturers for key prosthetic components. 

“We were trying to develop a locally made prosthetic device here in Nigeria. We did it, and it worked. The major constraint we had was that the raw materials, such as steel, used to produce the metallic part of the prosthetic device, were imported, which made European products more affordable than we wanted to achieve here.”

Every imported part raises the overall cost, making locally assembled devices expensive and out of reach for many amputees. Meanwhile, Dynalimb’s mission was to make prosthetic devices accessible and affordable. They had to scrap the innovation.

Of the estimated 65 million amputees in the world, about five million live in Africa. Many are victims of diabetes, road traffic accidents, industrial mishaps, congenital conditions, and conflict-related injuries. Yet most struggle with prosthetic devices never designed with their bodies, climates, or lifestyles in mind. An even larger number have no access to prosthetics at all.

Amid numerous infrastructural constraints and inadequate government support, African innovators are working hard to adapt foreign inventions to local realities and, in some cases, to build African-centred devices from scratch. Earlier this year, South Africa’s Prosthetic Engineering Technologies launched silicone liners “engineered for the unique challenges of African terrain and climate”. The liners, according to the company, are locally manufactured to reduce costs and improve access. In Nigeria, Immortal Cosmetic Art is creating hyper-realistic prosthetic skin covers for people of colour, an innovation that has already been celebrated both locally and abroad. But the effects of these breakthroughs are yet to be felt at scale. And African amputees, tired of struggling in devices not made for them, want even more.

“My leg is black, but the prosthesis is not,” Adeola said about why she always wears knee-high socks. 

“I think it’s time we start designing prosthetics that understand Africa. Products that consider the climate, materials that can breathe, and sweat and heat. Products that match our tones, so people stop asking why your leg looks ‘imported’,” Eva wrote in her International Prosthetic and Orthotics Day newsletter.

Once, Wura received a dark prosthetic foot from a company that imported devices from China. When she painted the nails, it looked “very, very pretty.” It felt like it truly belonged to her. But the joy didn’t last.

“I don’t know what they sell to us here,” she told HumAngle. “I don’t think that foot lasted six months. I like it when the colour of my socket is dark. Because I’m a dark person, my foot should also be dark.”

Taiwo said there are no perfect prosthetics. An artificial limb, he said, will always be an artificial limb. But for amputees like Wura, Eva, and Adeola, progress begins with a limb that matches their skin and survives their weather.

Authorities in Gaza have warned that stormy weather could spur more war-damaged buildings to collapse and heavy rains are making it more difficult to recover bodies still under the rubble.

Authorities sounded the alarm on Monday, three days after two buildings collapsed in Gaza, killing at least 12 people, during winter rains that have also washed away and flooded the tents of displaced Palestinians and led to deaths from exposure.

A ceasefire has been in effect since October 10 after two years of Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinian people in Gaza, but humanitarian agencies said Israel is letting very little aid into the enclave, where nearly the entire population has been displaced.

Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abou Azzoum said despite a shortage of equipment and fuel and the weather conditions in the enclave, Palestinian Civil Defence teams retrieved the bodies of 20 people on Monday.

The bodies were recovered from a multistorey building bombed in December 2023 where about 60 people, including 30 children, were believed to be sheltering.

Gaza Civil Defence spokesman Mahmoud Basal called on the international community to provide mobile homes and caravans for displaced Palestinians rather than tents.

“If people are not protected today, we will witness more victims, more killing of people, children, women, entire families inside these buildings,” he said.

Father mourns children killed in building collapse

Mohammad Nassar and his family were living in a six-storey building that was badly damaged by Israeli strikes earlier in the war and collapsed in heavy rain on Friday.

His family had struggled to find alternative accommodation and had been flooded out while living in a tent during a previous bout of bad weather. Nassar went out to buy some necessities on Friday and returned to a scene of carnage as rescue workers struggled to pull bodies from the rubble.

“I saw my son’s hand sticking out from under the ground. It was the scene that affected me the most. My son under the ground and we are unable to get him out,” Nassar said. His son, 15, died as did a daughter, aged 18.

Exposure warning

The head of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees warned on Monday that more aid must be allowed into Gaza without delay to prevent putting more displaced families at serious risk.

“With heavy rain and cold brought in by Storm Byron [late last week], people in the Gaza Strip are freezing to death,” UNRWA Commissioner General Philippe Lazzarini posted on X.

“The waterlogged ruins where they are sheltering are collapsing, causing even more exposure to cold,” he added.

Lazzarini said UNRWA has supplies that have waited for months to enter Gaza that he said would cover the needs of hundreds of thousands of Gaza’s more than two million people.

UN and Palestinian officials said at least 300,000 new tents are urgently needed for the roughly 1.5 million people still displaced. Most existing shelters are worn out or made of thin plastic and cloth sheeting.

Gaza authorities, meanwhile, were still digging to recover about 9,000 bodies they estimated remain buried in rubble from Israeli bombing during the war, but the lack of machinery is slowing down the process, spokesman Ismail al-Thawabta said.

Azzoum reported that Civil Defence teams said they require a surge in heavy machinery to expedite the work.

“They are saying that they are still in need, initially, for 40 excavators and bulldozers in order to achieve some slight progress in the whole process on the ground,” Azzoum said, reporting from Gaza City.

Israel’s continuing ban on the entry of heavy machinery into the Gaza Strip is a violation of the ceasefire, he added.

Earlier on Sunday, Hamas said Israel’s continuing violations of the ceasefire risk jeopardising the agreement and progress towards the next stage of United States President Donald Trump’s plan to end the war.

Since the ceasefire began, Israel has continued to strike Gaza on a daily basis, carrying out nearly 800 attacks and killing nearly 400 people, according to authorities in Gaza, while blocking the free flow of humanitarian aid.

“There is no real sense of safety nor protection for families,” Azzoum said of the ongoing violations.