It’s Friday night and that means you could be minutes away from becoming a multi-millionaire. Below you’ll find the winning numbers for tonight’s Euromillions and Thunderball draws. The Euromillions jackpot for Friday, August 7 is worth a life-changing £94m.

The Euromillions draw occurs every Tuesday and Friday, with tickets priced at £2.50. This includes automatic entry into the UK Millionaire Maker draw, which creates new UK millionaires every week.

The maximum jackpot can climb to €190m (roughly £167m).

The Thunderball game also took place this evening at 8pm. The winner of this draw pockets £500,000 if they match five numbers along with the crucial Thunderball number.

How many numbers do you need to win?

Those who have got two numbers or one number and two lucky stars or better, are the winner. Players must match all five main numbers and two lucky star numbers to claim the jackpot.

In May 2022 Joe and Jess Thwaite, from Gloucester, became the UK’s biggest-ever Euromillions winners after netting £184m with a lucky dip ticket. Their record did not last long, though, after another UK winner came forward in July 2022 to claim a jackpot of £195m.

However they have not gone public. Prior to Mr and Mrs Thwaite’s win the previous record was held by an anonymous winner who scooped £170m in October 2019. On June 4, 2021, a ticketholder in the UK scooped the £111m jackpot in the Friday-night draw, matching all seven numbers to become the country’s ninth-biggest lottery winner ever at that stage.

In June 2019 a single ticketholder in the UK won £123m in the Tuesday night Euromillions draw. It was the third-biggest Euromillions jackpot in the UK since the draw launched in 2004. It meant they instantly became as rich as Fifty Shades of Grey author E. L. James (£127m) and Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page (£125m).

June 2023 was a lucrative month for UK players with a ticketholder bagging a £117.1m jackpot on June 2 while another winner scooped the £55m jackpot on June 20. Euromillions is played in nine European countries.

The winning numbers for both draws can be found below:

Mohammed Al Masri, 25, has been jailed for eight years after tricking a young mum into getting into a taxi and raping her after a night out in Manchester

A predator who “posed as a good Samaritan” before tricking a young mum into getting into a taxi and raping her after a night out in Manchester has been jailed.

Mohammed Al Masri, 25, told the “vulnerable lone woman” he would take her home in an Uber, but instead took her back to his HMO where he subjected her to a terrifying attack in December last year.

Officers arrested him moments after the attack as the victim had managed to send her live location to her boyfriend via WhatsApp, who then alerted the police.

On Friday, a judge sentenced Al Masri to eight years in prison at Manchester’s Minshull Street Crown Court and ruled him to be a dangerous offender, the Manchester Evening News reports.

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The victim, in her 20s, had been out drinking with a friend in Manchester city centre on December 21 last year, the court was told.

At the end of the night, they “went their separate ways” and the woman tried to get a taxi, Lewis Hazeldine, prosecuting, said.

“She was followed by the defendant and an associate,” Mr Hazeldine said. The men “offered to get her an Uber home”, and she saw them type her postcode into the Uber app and was therefore “satisfied they were taking her home”, the prosecutor said.

But as soon as she got into the car, she began “to feel unsafe” and the effects of alcohol, saying her “head was starting to spin”, he added.

The Uber driver told police she “fell asleep on the defendant’s shoulder” and later “with her head in his lap”. She had the “presence of mind” to share her live location with her boyfriend, the court heard.

Rather than take her home, the men took her to the house of multiple occupancy (HMO) in Abbey Hey, Gorton, where Al Masri was living. The victim was so intoxicated, she had to be “lifted and carried out of the taxi by the two men” and was taken to the defendant’s bedroom, Mr Hazeldine said.

Victim ‘jumped into arms’ of female officers after terrifying attack

Al Masri told the woman “she was safe” that her boyfriend was “on his way to collect her”.

After falling asleep on the bed, the woman became aware that Al Masri was raping her. She said the other man was in the room, at the end of the bed, and believes he was recording the attack on his mobile phone.

After seeing her live location, the woman’s boyfriend rang 999 and officers rushed to the address on Gordon Street, Abbey Hey, in the early hours of December 22. She was “extremely distressed” and “jumped into the arms” of the female officers who responded, the court heard.

Al Masri accepted he had had sex with the woman but told police it was consensual and that she had initiated it.

Al Masri, of no fixed address, denied one count of rape but following a trial was last month found guilty by a jury, on a majority of 10-2.

‘I remember thinking: I am going to die’

In a statement read to court on Friday, the victim said: “It should have been a night I remember for all the right reasons. However, now, it is a night I never want to think about.

“I will never forget the fear that I felt when this man took me to his house. I had no idea who he was. I had no idea where I was. I genuinely questioned if I would leave this place with my life.

“There were so many thoughts running through my mind when I arrived at his house. However, this man tried to reassure me and tell me that I was going to be safe and my boyfriend was coming. This was all a sick lie.

“I don’t remember much of what happened in the room. I don’t want to remember. I do, however, remember how I felt. I remember not being able to move my body because I was so frozen with fear. I remember thinking: ‘I am going to die.’”

The victim added: “The next thing I remember is the police entering the room and I have never felt relief like it. I knew I was going to live. This was not the end of what happened to me. I feel like this was only the beginning.

“After it all happened, I felt like I was a zombie. I could not speak to anybody. I was numb. I was emotionless. I felt nothing. I couldn’t interact with my children and felt like I was unable to be a real mum.”

Keith Harrison, defending Al Masri, said he was a “political refugee from the Assad regime” in Syria and that he had been granted five years leave to remain, which expires in 2029. He said he was “not a person who is work shy” and that he had worked both in Syria and in the UK. He said he had no previous convictions and described the offence as a “one-off”.

‘Al Masri posed as a good Samaritan but his motives were far more sinister’

Judge Recorder Alexandra Simmonds said there were “elements of abduction” as the woman was “deceived her into thinking she was being taken home”.

She said the victim was “in a vulnerable state” and was “in no condition to make any free and informed decision about sexual activity”.

The victim also had to suffer the “degradation and humiliation” of the presence of the second man, the judge added.

In addition to his sentence, Al Masri was made subject to notification requirements for life, a 10-year sexual harm prevention order (SHPO) and a restraining order. He may be deported but that would be a “matter for immigration, not this court”, his barrister said.

In a statement issued following the hearing, Anna Mackenzie, from the Crown Prosecution Service, said: “Mohammed Al Masri posed as a ‘good Samaritan’ when he offered to help the woman get a taxi home after a night out, but his motives were far more sinister.

“The way he targeted a lone woman who he believed would be vulnerable through alcohol was both calculating and insidious. Al Masri’s vile actions have had a lasting impact on the woman. I truly hope today’s sentence will help her move forward knowing that without her bravery and support, this dangerous man would still be in our community.”

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been called out for vastly underestimating ingredient costs while presenting a recipe on his new cooking show, which is centered on healthy, affordable meals.

Kennedy, the latest Trump Cabinet member to promote the administration’s agenda via a YouTube series, was recently joined by chef Andrew Gruel on the premiere episode of The Real Food Show.

The two made wild Alaskan salmon cakes with a white bean, apple and arugula salad for what they claimed was $4.91 per serving or $19.64 for a family of four.

Towards the end of the episode, a receipt showed how much each ingredient cost to use in the recipe. For example, the amount of avocado mayo in the recipe cost 40 cents. But as Maryland-based Washington Post columnist Monica Hesse pointed out in a new article, no one can walk into the grocery store and buy 40 cents’ worth of mayo.

Hesse calculated that the true cost of all the ingredients if she only had pantry staples in her kitchen, such as oil and seasonings, would be $73.46, or $18 per person, at her nearest chain grocery store.

While Hesse said the health secretary’s math is “a perfectly standard practice in pricing out a recipe, and RFK Jr. has suggested we do what feels entirely reasonable to a financially flush shopper: Buy the $14 jar of avocado mayo, use one scoop to make salmon patties, save the rest for other recipes.”

She also acknowledged “that kind of practical thinking is not helpful to a parent who has $20 in cash to get them to tomorrow’s paycheck.

“Safeway does not let you walk in, scoop some mayo out of a jar and pay one dollar at the cash register. You have to buy the whole thing.”

The cost of groceries went up 2.7 percent in June from the year before, according to the Consumer Price Index, which the government uses to track the cost of goods and services over time.

Sixty percent of Americans said they are struggling with the rising cost of living, according to a new report by the McKinsey Institute for Economic Mobility and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

Of those respondents, nearly 90 percent cited groceries and food as their top cost concern.

Trump’s agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, was mocked earlier this year for suggesting that Americans eat “a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, corn tortilla and one other thing” as a low-cost meal.

“Private jets and tax breaks for them and their rich friends, and one piece of broccoli *AND* a tortilla for you!” Chasten Glezman Buttigieg, the husband of former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, wrote on X at the time.

The Trump administration’s meal suggestions are in line with new dietary guidelines that advise Americans to eat more protein and vegetables and less whole grains.

Shania Twain has suffered a rare career flop with the release of her latest album.

The country music legend, 60, released her seventh studio album Little Miss Twain late last month, with the disc becoming the lowest-charting release of her career.

It debuted at a dismal No. 131 on the Billboard 200 with just 12,000 copies sold.

It’s a dramatic drop from her last studio album, 2023’s Queen of Me, which debuted at No. 10.

Prior to that, Twain reached No. 1 on the charts with 2002’s Up! and 2017’s Now. 

Throughout the course of her career, Twain has sold more than 100 million records worldwide, making her one of the best-selling artists of all time.  

The album, titled Little Miss Twain, debuted at No. 131 on the Billboard 200 with just 12,000 copies sold

In interviews to promote the project, the singer admitted that Little Miss Twain is far more personal and less commercial than her previous work. 

Speaking to Billboard Canada, Twain said that the album focuses a lot on her childhood and contains, ‘a lot of things that I wouldn’t normally write about as a commercial songwriter’.

She also admitted that she was nervous to release the record due to its deeply personal subject matter. 

‘I’m full of anxiety and excitement at the response but even if you find one lyric that speaks to you or makes you feel something I’ll be happy,’ she wrote on Instagram.

‘The emotional journey on this album was a true rollercoaster and there were moments where I felt like I was sitting with my younger self while my mother looked over me. It was very painful at times, but telling some of these stories out loud was also incredibly healing, and then there was the fun and laughter,’ she continued.

‘Thank you for going into the next chapter with me – it’s not easy to evolve as an artist and keep your people with you but you’ve been loyal and supportive through it all.’

It comes as Twain has faced criticism from both age and body-shamers in recent months after wearing a string of scantily-clad outfits while opening for Harry Styles in London.

The sex symbol has also admitted to dealing with her own insecurities and struggling with her changing appearance.

It comes as Twain has faced criticism from both age and body-shamers in recent months over her racy wardrobe

Twain sparked an online firestorm after delivering a lingerie-clad performance while on tour with Harry Styles in June

The Come On Over hitmaker wore another lingerie-style outfit for a promotional appearance last month

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‘I go from being this young, stunning figure, beautiful skin, everything’s in the right place to a time in my life where I couldn’t look in the mirror because all I could see were imperfections and not wanting to be that curvy thing,’ she told People magazine in July.   

Over the years, the singer has learned to accept menopause and let go of trying to control her changing body.

‘It is well-being first, always, to becoming an older woman and now looking in the mirror, no problem. I’m like, I just have to get over this because every day that goes by, I’m getting older; the dips and bulges and the sags are just getting more and more prominent,’ she asserted.

‘I’m not trying to be 30. I’m not trying to be 25, and I won’t be ever again. That’s my own fault for not looking in the mirror when I was younger, and shame on me. I encourage everybody: enjoy yourself the way you are right now and love it,’ she explained.

‘Vanity is not worth torture. I’m just learning every phase that I go through, and I adapt.’

Throughout the course of her career, Twain has sold more than 100 million records worldwide, making her one of the best-selling artists of all time. (Pictured in 1999)

Twain has dealt with trolling over her raunchy outfits while on tour with 32-year-old Styles.

Most recently, she sparked an online firestorm after a TikTok clip from her June 26 performance at London’s Wembley Stadium went viral.  

She was singing her 1999 hit Man! I Feel Like a Woman! while wearing a revealing black lace dress and executing low crouches. At one point during the provocative number, she almost suffered a wardrobe malfunction. 

TikTok users were quick to criticise the ensemble, with some branding it ‘tacky’ while another said that Twain was ‘too talented and beautiful for this’ and needed a new stylist.

But Twain said that she refuses to let external comments or societal standards affect her.

‘My body is not shameable. That courage comes with time and maturity. Body shaming is nothing that’s going to affect me,’ she said. 

With a location in Harrogate and Helmsley, the flower fields are a peaceful place to enjoy nature.

The flower field grows a range of plants throughout the year and changes with the seasons.

As well as pick-your-own flowers, the Flower Belt has a café and bar to have some drinks while watching the field.

What is the Flower Belt like?

The Flower Belt’s website reads: “Nestled in the rolling countryside of Ryedale, North Yorkshire, The Flower Belt is a pick-your-own flower and pumpkin farm offering visitors a unique, hands-on experience with nature.

“Owned and run by the Wainwright family who have farmed this land since 1962, the farm celebrates a deep-rooted passion for growing beautiful, seasonal produce.

“From vibrant tulip fields in spring to wildflowers and towering sunflowers in summer, and a pumpkin patch in autumn, The Flower Belt offers a changing landscape throughout the year.”

Visitors are able to simply take a walk through the fields or handpick flowers to create their own bouquet.

Described as an “unforgettable” experience, you will be able to enjoy views of the North York Moors.

After walking through the fields, you can stop off at the Honey Tap to enjoy a coffee, tea or hot chocolate.

In the afternoon, the café serves pizzas from simple margheritas to a pizza topped with prosciutto, ricotta, sun-dried tomatoes, and pesto.

On a hot day, you can grab an ice cream or a sweet treat ranging from brownies and rocky road to a slice of cake.

What do visitors think of the Flower Belt?

Reviewers on Tripadvisor have praised the area for being “lovely” and “superb”.

One reviewer said: “Stumbled across the Flower Belt on the way to Helmsley and it was a lovely surprise!

“Beautiful site and very quiet when we went (late September) – and I thought good value (£7 to pick a jar of wildflowers).

“It was a lovely way to spend an afternoon.

“Unfortunately, pizza wasn’t being served (otherwise we would have stayed longer) but we would come back again.”

Another reviewer said: “A stunning location, particularly on a beautiful summers evening.

“Food was lovely, locally brewed ale was spot on, the views were spectacular.

“Really look forward to returning at some point in the not too distant future.

“Congratulations to all involved!”

Would you ever visit the Flower Belt? Let us know in the comments.

I don’t know if Simon & Schuster, the illustrious publishers, are really going to continue with their current plan to launch the memoirs of Jason Arday, who this week resigned in circumstances both hilarious and tragic from his position as a professor at Cambridge.

That was the position at least, last night, but it seems incredible. Apart from anything else, it would be cruel to Mr Arday.

The guy is – as he said when he resigned – only human. Those who claim to have his interests at heart should spare him further ridicule.

Yesterday, it emerged journalists from the Atlantic magazine had apparently uncovered his proposal to publishers for the book, in which he makes yet more bonkers claims: about the extraordinary diseases he has suffered and recovered from; the acts of heroism he has committed; the many global accolades he has received but for which, curiously, no evidence can be found.

Perhaps all this stuff is true. Maybe there will be further volumes, in which he explains how he secretly won a Victoria Cross while in the SAS, found a cure for cancer and was offered the throne of Patagonia.

At the heart of this story is a shameful piece of racism – not by the people who tried to expose the fantasies and plagiarism of Mr Arday, but by those who promoted him. Whatever the sins and deceptions of the young man from south London, they are completely eclipsed by the fundamental fraud of the academics who used and abused him for their own selfish ends.

Oh we all know what’s going to happen now, don’t we? All those responsible at the University of Cambridge will run for the hills, desperately trying to cover their backsides as they go.

They will say they didn’t know, that they were fooled, that they were taken in by his charm. They will present him as a chancer, a charlatan, someone who brilliantly preyed on their good intentions.

‘But we meant well!’ the Cambridge dons will say, wringing their hands. It is crucial that we don’t allow them to get away with this defence.

Let us suppose it’s true that at the time of his appointment as a Cambridge professor, in early 2023, the then-37-year-old Arday genuinely managed to pull the wool over the eyes of the Board of Electors. Let’s suppose that they somehow managed to remain oblivious to his plagiarism, his spelling mistakes and the many oddities in his background story.

How could his autism have been so bad, for instance, that he only learned to read and write at the age of 18, when it turns out he had secured two GCSEs two years earlier?

How did he manage to run 30 marathons in 35 days, despite sustaining a hairline fracture on day 21 that caused his leg to swell up to double its size? If he had really run 600 miles in six days – as he said – then why wasn’t he globally famous as a high-performance athlete?

And so on. Arday is obviously in some ways a warm-hearted and well-meaning fellow, but his life story is full of such obvious tripe that you would have thought the professors – with their inbuilt and seasoned bulls***-o-meters – would have detected it.

But let’s imagine that they fell for the whole thing, or even that they thought something was a bit rum, but turned a blind eye. In a way it doesn’t matter. Their real crime is far, far worse, and it is one that they cannot conceivably deny. At the time he was made a professor, Jason Arday had no real body of work to justify any such elevation.

He was responsible for no new discovery or piece of thought leadership. In fact, he had produced – in his astonishingly brief career – absolutely nothing of any notable academic interest or merit whatsoever.

And yet they decided to give him the highest scholarly accolade in our country: they made him a full professor at one of the greatest universities on earth, whose reputation for excellence is a crucial part of our global soft power.

Why did they do it?

The university was blatant and unashamed in explaining, in its Press release and in all the publicity that followed, that they were proud to have appointed ‘the youngest black professor in the history of the university’ – a superlative that they often repeated.

Jason Arday this week resigned from his position as a professor at Cambridge university, leaving his role at Jesus College

They gave him a ‘professorial chair in the sociology of education’; and the logic seemed to be that as a young black man who had experienced difficulties in becoming a university academic, he was going to become a leading expert in the discipline of how young black men have difficulties in becoming university academics.

It was surreal, a parody of how higher education is supposed to work, but Arday became a media star, a sensation. And the dons didn’t care.

They didn’t care about the students, paying through the nose to sit at the feet of a man with no real qualifications. They didn’t care about the taxpayers who so generously subsidised his salary.

They showed complete contempt for other academics who had worked hard and been turned down for such posts. Above all they were completely indifferent to the fate of poor Arday, who was only too likely – as they must have known – to be found out and humiliated.

They cared only about themselves and the virtue they could signal by saying they had at last got a young black professor at Cambridge.

It is a real scandal. These academics have done immense damage to their university and to the cause of higher education. In 1957 the US Supreme Court Judge Felix Frankfurter famously defined academic freedom, as ‘the right for a university to determine for itself, on academic grounds, who may teach, what may be taught, how it shall be taught and who may be admitted for study’.

Cambridge university has openly and exultantly trashed that principle. They did not make this appointment on academic grounds and there is no way they can claim that they did.

They did it on political grounds. They did it on racial grounds – and they boasted about it. You remember the brilliant satire Trading Places, in which two elderly American financiers take a bet with one other (one dollar), about whether they can transform a sidewalk hustler and small-time con man, played by Eddie Murphy, into a high-rolling Master of the Universe?

In their callousness and their cynicism, and their basic selfishness, the dons have behaved like Randolph and Mortimer Duke. It is frankly disgusting.

By ignoring the primacy of academic merit and by engaging in such transparent racial discrimination, Cambridge are actually legitimating some of the nasty and poisonous discourse we can increasingly hear in politics today.

Am I dreaming, or did the leader of the so-called Restore party just suggest that the King can’t be ‘white British’, because his father was born abroad? What is happening to us all?

But if the dons of Cambridge can do it, others will follow their example. There needs to be a full and independent inquiry into what happened and all those involved in the appointment of Jason Arday should get in ahead of the outcome and resign.

Roseanne star John Goodman was completely unrecognizable from the height of his fame when he surfaced on Instagram this week.

During the sitcom’s original run from 1988 to 1997, he won a devoted fanbase for his endearing and layered performance as family patriarch Dan Conner, the husband of the title character played by Roseanne Barr.

His portly figure was the subject of frequent jokes and occasional plot points, and he subsequently revealed that at his largest he weighed 400lb.

After Goodman gave up drinking in 2007, he embarked on a weight-loss process that by three years ago had seen him shed more than 200lb.

He had evidently slimmed down even further by this week, when Wizards of Waverly Place actor David DeLuise bumped into him at the supermarket.

DeLuise, whose parents Dom DeLuise and Carol Arthur were comic actors famed for their work in Mel Brooks‘s films, excitedly posted an Instagram selfie with Goodman that left viewers flabbergasted by the TV icon’s change in appearance.

The Daily Mail has contacted Goodman’s representative for comment. 

‘He was my childhood !!’ DeLuise gushed on Instagram with a heart emoji. ‘Legend ! I love that I get to say that to someone 😉 if you know you know.’

Goodman began to lose weight after he entered rehab in 2007, putting an end to decades of alcoholism during which he would drink on set.

‘It was 30 years of a disease that was taking its toll on everyone around me and it had got to the point where, every time I did it, it was becoming more and more debilitating. It was life or death,’ he told the Guardian five years later. ‘It was time to stop.’

By 2010, he had lost 100lb, having excised sugar from his diet and begun working out six days a week with Serena Williams’ trainer Mackie Shilstone, per People.

Being heavier, Goodman said, had been ‘a waste. It takes a lot of creative energy to sit on your a** and figure out what you’re going to eat next.’

Shilstone observed that the Big Lebowski star ‘remembers what it feels like to be extremely heavy and it’s something he doesn’t want again.’

The trainer-to-the-stars placed Goodman on a ‘Mediterranean-style eating plan’ and, where exercise was concerned, had him take a daily 10,000 to 12,000 steps with the assistance of a treadmill and an elliptical, he told the New York Post.

Goodman attributed his trimmer frame to ‘portion control,’ a radical departure from his past habit of ‘just shoving everything into my mouth,’ in AARP magazine.

Clockwise from bottom right, Goodman, Roseanne Barr, Michael Fishman, Sara Gilbert, Lecy Goranson and Laurie Metcalf on the original run of Roseanne

His portly figure was the subject of frequent jokes and occasional plot points and he subsequently revealed that at his largest he weighed 400lb

DeLuise, whose parents Dom Deluise and Carol Arthur were comic actors famed for their work in Mel Brooks’s films, has gushed of Goodman: ‘He was my childhood!’

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After Goodman gave up drinking in 2007, he began further improving his health with a weight-loss journey that by three years ago had seen him shed more than 200lb. Above, in July 2025

‘But I don’t want to be an example to anybody when the weight comes thundering back on – when I start eating Crisco out of the can with a spoon and a side of confectioner’s sugar,’ the Argo actor added wryly. 

He was able to avoid that eventuality so successfully that by 2023, Goodman announced he had rid himself of a staggering 200lb.

At that stage, his workouts consisted largely of such low-intensity activities as walking his dogs, inasmuch as the COVID-19 pandemic had caused his previous boxing regimen to lapse ‘because I’m lazy,’ he told Rolling Stone.

‘I haven’t been exercising, but I’m going to start a routine again this summer where I can get some stuff done. I’ve just let everything go just because I haven’t had the energy because of the jobs,’ the actor explained.

Goodman now has a string of projects in various states of completion, including episodes of the podcast drama Hindsight: The Day Before, on which he plays Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Supreme Court Justice behind the famous line that ‘free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.’

His upcoming projects include the film The Hollywood Hitman, in which he plays himself, and the horror movie Skeletons, starring Brie Larson and Willa Fitzgerald.

By October of this year, moviegoers in America will be able to see Goodman alongside Tom Cruise and Riz Ahmed in Digger, the oil industry satire by Birdman and The Revenant director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. 

The Senate on Friday confirmed Cameron Hamilton as head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, returning the former Navy SEAL to the embattled agency he led temporarily last year only to be fired after he publicly opposed eliminating it.

Hamilton was among a group of 74 nominations approved by the Senate, including President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Transportation Security Administration, David Cummins, and his choice for ambassador to Brazil, Daniel Perez.

Upon his swearing in, Hamilton will take over an agency whose future has been uncertain since Trump threatened to get rid of it days into his second term. Hamilton’s nomination signaled that Trump may be moving on from that idea, but his Republican administration is still promising drastic changes in how the government handles disasters.

Hamilton will have to shepherd that overhaul while stabilizing an agency of more than 20,000 employees recovering from Kristi Noem’s chaotic tenure as Department of Homeland Security secretary, during which FEMA saw mass staff departures, disruptions to grant programs and delays of disaster aid.

While her successor, former Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin, has worked to reverse some of the upheaval, Democrats are accusing Trump of politicizing disaster relief. Trump has approved 80% of disaster requests from Republican governors but only about 60% from Democratic governors, a July analysis by The Associated Press found.

In his June hearing before a Senate committee, Hamilton pledged to advocate for FEMA and its workforce while promising to ensure FEMA is “objective, is fair and reasonable, follows the law, and is consistent in the approach to how we adjudicate and process claims and requests for disasters.”

He also maintained that the agency is burdened by bureaucracy and cannot be expected to respond to every disaster. “We would need to strike a new balance to encourage cost reasonableness and cost savings,” he said.

Hamilton was fired from a temporary role leading FEMA

Hamilton had limited emergency management experience before Trump named him FEMA’s temporary leader in January 2025. Formerly a critic of the agency, Hamilton has said he came to appreciate FEMA’s mission. His tenure proved short after he broke with Noem and other DHS officials over FEMA’s future.

“I do not believe it is in the best interest of the American people to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency,” Hamilton told a House panel in May 2025. He was fired the next day.

His stand drew admiration among some emergency management professionals.

“It tells you exactly who he is and how he will lead when the pressure is highest and the easy answer is the wrong one,” Pete Gaynor, FEMA administrator in Trump’s first term, said in a statement supporting Hamilton’s confirmation.

The National Emergency Management Association said it welcomes Hamilton as the FEMA administrator.

Still, some FEMA staffers have remained wary of Hamilton’s role in controversial decisions last year like canceling a multibillion-dollar resilience grant program.

FEMA has been an agency under siege

Hamilton will take over in the middle of a busy summer disaster season that has already brought destructive wildfires and dangerous flooding and as FEMA manages more than 1,000 open disaster declarations. He will be FEMA’s first permanent administrator in Trump’s second term, overseeing an agency eager for stability.

More than 4,300 employees separated from FEMA in the 2025 budget year, more than 1,500 through voluntary reductions, resulting in a “loss of institutional knowledge and experienced personnel,” according to a Government Accountability Office report.

Since replacing Noem in March, Mullin has rehired for some eliminated positions and rescinded a rule that any expense greater than $100,000 needed to be approved by the secretary’s office — a requirement that backlogged billions of dollars in disaster aid.

But DHS has also introduced policies stirring up new controversy. Twenty-five states and the District of Columbia sued the Trump administration last month over new election security requirements in FEMA counterterrorism grants to states.

The Trump administration and lawmakers are advocating for sweeping changes to federal disaster response. At a meeting of governors last weekend, Mullin called FEMA “bloated.”

“The biggest reform you’re going to see is more responsibility is going to go back to your states,” Mullin said, with “FEMA there for worst of the worst, not every storm.”

In May, a Trump-appointed FEMA Review Council recommended major changes to how the federal government supports states, tribes and territories during disasters. That could speed assistance but might reduce how much and how often FEMA helps. Many of the suggested changes require congressional action.

Gaynor told the AP he expects that Hamilton will work quickly to make changes within his authority. “I think his biggest priority in general is making the whole recovery system simpler for disaster survivors, for states and locals to navigate, to make it less of mystery, and cut out red tape,” Gaynor said.

Senate approves 74 nominations, including for airport security

Other nominees confirmed included Cummins as head of the Transportation Security Administration, an agency also facing persistent challenges, particularly after this year’s record partial government shutdown left TSA employees working for weeks without pay. The funding lapse prompted thousands of officers to call out of work and about 1,100 to quit.

Cummins is a former senior vice president at the government contractor Serco, which runs air traffic control towers at 60 American airports. He is taking over as the Trump administration seeks to expand private airport screening and cut thousands of TSA jobs.

The Senate also confirmed Perez, a close friend of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and a former speaker of Florida’s House of Representatives, to be the next U.S. ambassador to Brazil.

Perez has been central to an ongoing diplomatic dispute between the Trump administration and the government of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Earlier this week, the State Department said the Brazilian government’s refusal to accept Perez’s appointment was a main reason for its decision to revoke the visa of Brazil’s ambassador to the United States. International diplomatic protocols demand that host countries approve any foreign ambassadors before they can take their posts.

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Associated Press writers Rio Yamat in Las Vegas; Josh Funk in Omaha, Neb.; and Matthew Lee in Washington contributed to this report.

Professor Jason Arday claimed to have locked-in syndrome and testicular cancer in a book proposal for his memoir, it has emerged.

The anecdotes appeared in a 2024 proposal for Great and Unfortunate Things, which is due to be published next week, but not in the final version.

There are also other inconsistencies between the two versions of events in terms of dates and characters, US magazine The Atlantic reported.

In the proposal, Professor Arday, 41, recounted being struck by a car as a teenager and spending several months in a coma – whereas in the memoir he described simply finishing school and taking his exams at that time.

The proposal said he had locked-in syndrome during the coma, and witnessed doctors telling his parents that he would never recover and should be taken off life support ‘as an act of mercy’.

The proposal said: ‘As I will describe to readers in the book, these months afforded me another profoundly different way of perceiving the world.’

It added he awoke ‘miraculously’ from the coma, and spent a year ‘relearning everything—how to walk, to talk’.

The proposal also referred to a bout of testicular cancer, rather than the two brain tumours described in the final version of the memoir.

The anecdotes appeared in a 2024 proposal for Great and Unfortunate Things, which is due to be published next week, but not in the final version (pictured: Professor Jason Arday)

It comes after Cambridge launched an investigation following allegations of plagiarism by Professor Arday, who quit this week as Cambridge’s youngest black professor over the ‘personal cost’ of the furore.

His other surprising claims have included being unable to write until the age of 18, running 30 marathons in 35 days, and raising £5million for charities.

His book proposal, which surfaced this week, lays out many of the same events as his memoir but sometimes with slightly different dates and details.

In an anecdote about a group of boys beating him up, they were four years older in the proposal than in the book.

A suicide attempt was described in the proposal as happening before the pandemic – whereas in the memoir it happened during.

In addition, the book proposal recounts how Professor Arday was given a prophecy in 2005 while working in Brazil by a ‘shaman woman’, who was ‘an elder in the small town where I had been assigned, who was well-known in the area for predicting people’s futures’.

The woman told him he would suffer in his life but also go on to do great things.

The proposal said: ‘Every event she described has since come to pass.’

There are also other inconsistencies between the two versions of events in terms of dates and characters, US magazine The Atlantic reported. Pictured: Great And Unfortunate Things,  which is due for release on Tuesday

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In the final memoir, the anecdote is retained but instead it happens in 2006, and the woman is a local aid worker, described as ‘a woman in her thirties with dark hair and eyes and a gentle, steady way about her’.

Professor Arday, the son of Ghanaian immigrants, was appointed to Cambridge in 2023 after applying for a vacant professorship in the faculty of education.

However, soon after, academics raised concerns with him and his bosses about plagiarism regarding his past work.

When Times Higher Education magazine began investigating the academic’s record, Professor Arday made a complaint to the police, resulting in officers calling the journalist involved.

On Thursday, Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police commissioner, admitted the force ‘dropped the ball’ when it spent four months investigating the journalist.

Cambridge, Professor Arday and his publisher Simon & Schuster have been contacted for comment.

He said earlier this week of his resignation that the ‘personal cost’ of the row had ‘become too great’ and ‘it is simply the decision of someone who has reached the limits of what any person should reasonably be expected to endure’.

He added: ‘Sadly, the years since my appointment have also been marked by an unrelenting level of public scrutiny and personal attack. While criticism is an inevitable part of academic life, what I have experienced has gone far beyond scholarly disagreement. The relentless accusations, speculation and public commentary have taken a profound toll on me and on those I love.’

The Palace cinema in Malton became Roxies on Wednesday evening while the filming took place.

A spokesperson for The Palace said: “We were approached by a location scout for a production filming in the area.

“They were looking for a nightclub entrance and thought our doorway and stairs were ideal.

“The art department transformed the front sensitively and quickly, filmed on Wednesday night and then put it back to normal the next day

“It was an exciting experience for the staff and it’s amazing to think we might be able to show a film on our screens that we feature in.”