Strictly Come Dancing fave Johannes Radebe has opened up about transitioning from being one of the show’s resident professionals to its new host.

Later this week, Johannes will take over as one of Strictly’s three new presenters, alongside TV personality Emma Willis and comedian Josh Widdicombe.

Ahead of the new season, all three of them took part in a Q&A with members of the press, including HuffPost UK, where the South African performer was asked if it was a difficult decision to step away from being a pro in favour of hosting.

He revealed that he did feel a twinge of envy when the new crop of pros’ training got underway, admitting: “Darling, it hit me three weeks ago when the professionals went into the rehearsals for the season.

“And I’m experiencing FOMO as I’m speaking to you, yes – especially now that the celebs have all been announced, I’m like, ‘oh my goodness’.”

He then admitted that, in particular, he would have “loved to dance” with EastEnders star Lacey Turner, who is part of the cast of Strictly 2026.

“She has said she’s wanted to do the show for a long time, and it just so happens that when I’m not doing it, she is,” he lamented, before joking: “I’ll be able to rest my bunions and my back, but I’ll definitely miss that part of the show.”

“I’m honestly excited, as you can imagine,” he added. “It doesn’t feel like I’m going anywhere, I’m still part of the family.”

This year’s Strictly has seen several members of the show’s resident dance troupe bidding farewell. As well as Johannes taking over as co-host, Karen Hauer (who had been the show’s longest-serving pro), Gorka Márquez, Nadiya Bychkova, Luba Mushtuk and Michelle Tsiakkas all parted ways with Strictly in the lead-up to this year’s season.

A number of new faces are being welcomed into the ballroom, including Ukrainian Latin champion Aleksandra Isaeva, four-time Italian Latin champion Cristian Priori, South African youth Latin champion Lethabo Monametsi, two-time Canadian Latin champion Mark Karmalita and British national ballroom dancing champion and eight-time world dance champion Maddie Ingoldsby.

Strictly Come Dancing returns to our screens on Saturday 19 September.

President Donald Trump revived two of his strangest grievances on Thursday ― electric power and sharks ― as he recounted a conversation with the owner of a boat company.

“I said, ‘Let me ask you a question: If you get a little leak and the water starts coming in your boat and you’re in electric, do you get electrocuted or not?’” Trump said. “He said, ‘You know, nobody’s ever asked me that question.’”

That led Trump to pose a how’d-you-rather situation.

“So, if I’m in an electric boat and I see I’m going down and the water’s pouring in, so I know I’m gonna be electrocuted, but five yards away there are sharks, do I take the electrocution or do I go swimming with the sharks?” Trump asked. “And you know what my answer was? I’ll take the electrocution. OK? I’ll take the electro.”

As Trump noted, he enjoyed “driving the press crazy” by frequently telling versions of the same story in 2023 and 2024, when he was running for president.

It also seems he still hasn’t learned much about boats, given that the risk of electrocution isn’t limited to electric-powered vessels. Many gas-powered watercraft have batteries for onboard appliances, which can lead to injuries and even death from electric shock drowning. As the Boat Owners Association of the United States noted, electrocution is commonly caused by “faulty wiring and equipment on boats or docks.”

If nothing else, Trump’s tale fits two common themes of his: He hates nearly everything involving renewable energy ― from electric cars to wind turbines ― and really, really, really does not like sharks.

In 2011, then-porn star Stormy Daniels told In Touch Weekly that he was “obsessed” with the sea creatures, and not in a good way.

“Terrified of sharks,” she said. “He was like, ‘I donate to all these charities and I would never donate to any charity that helps sharks. I hope all the sharks die.’”

Daniels claimed to have had an affair with Trump, which the former president has denied. But he did inadvertently back her claim about sharks.

“I’m not a big fan of sharks,” he admitted in 2020. “I have people calling me up, ‘Sir, we have a fund to save the shark, it’s called Save The Shark.’ I say, ‘No, thank you, I have other things I can contribute to.’”

Trump even got in a dig at sharks on Thursday as he described speed restrictions for boats that he plans to reverse via executive action.

“They didn’t want to hurt something in the water,” he said. “They didn’t want to hurt sharks. It’s unbelievable.”

Critics also found Trump’s comments unbelievable:

Most style guides recommend against putting an apostrophe in front of “flu”, even though it’s a shortened word. Now, the University of Oxford’s guide says, the contraction is accepted “in its own right”.

After all, the word has been clipped from its original form (influenza) since the mid-1900s, decades after its origin. It’s gone by “the flu” since at least 1839 (spelled “the Flue” at first), a century or so after it entered the English lexicon, says Merriam-Webster.

But its first definition had less to do with sniffles and tissues than you might think.

According to an etymology of the word published in Emerging Infectious Diseases, “influenza” originally had to do with the stars.

It comes from the Latin influentia, meaning “to flow into” or to influence.

“In medieval times, [an] intangible fluid given off by stars was believed to affect humans,” the journal entry reads.

“The Italian influenza referred to any disease outbreak thought to be influenced by stars.”

That meant that various diseases originally went by the name – it didn’t just refer to the chills-and-sore-muscles situation we call the flu nowadays.

In fact, the English word probably came from the phrase “influenza di catarro” (influenza of catarrh), which Italians used to describe a Europe-wide spread of the condition in 1743. (As it happens, accounts of what seems to be the flu were first clearly recorded in Italy and France in 1173).

Epidemics were often referred to as influenza in Medieval Italy, because it was thought that they were “influenced” by the stars.

Catarrh is the build-up of mucus and phlegm in the sinus, nose, and throat, so perhaps it’s no wonder it came to mean what we now call flu for English speakers.

In Italy, meanwhile, the word now refers to both influence and the flu.

I was not born into a body so much as positioned within one.

I was assigned female at birth. Assigned. The word has always fascinated me. Assigned as if gender were a slot on a bureaucratic spreadsheet, an administrative designation attached to skin before a child has spoken a single word about who they are. Assigned as if identity were a fixed destination rather than a lifelong process of becoming.

When I was five years old, I ran into the house and announced, “I want to be a boy.” Back then, my family called me Blue.

Blue rode a Huffy BMX bike through the neighborhood, chased birds across vacant lots, played football shirtless with the boys, and smeared toothpaste across my face while pretending to shave like my father.

I watched men move through the world and felt an undeniable pull toward them. It wasn’t because I wanted to imitate them. It was because I believed I was one of them.

Looking back, I realise the problem was not what I said. The problem was that I said it decades before most Americans had the language to hear it.

That was the early 1970s. Gender identity was not part of public conversation, school curriculum, pediatric care, or family life. No teacher ever discussed it. No counsellor pulled me aside. No book in the school library reflected anything remotely close to my experience. There were no role models and no roadmap.

My father fought my masculinity whenever he could. Dresses appeared. Expectations appeared. Rules appeared. Every attempt to force me into girlhood pushed me further away from myself. I remember being wrestled into dresses for family gatherings only to throw myself into the yard and roll through dog excrement rather than wear them. It sounds absurd now. It was not absurd then. It was resistance before I had language for resistance.

I searched elsewhere for recognition. Music became one refuge. David Bowie, Boy George, Tracy Chapman, and Annie Lennox challenged assumptions about gender long before I had words for my own experience. Films offered glimpses of lives that seemed to exist just beyond the boundaries of what I had been told was possible.

Sports became my camouflage. Football, swimming, and running helped me mask the breasts, waist, and broad hips that intensified my dysphoria and reminded me daily of a body I never experienced as my own. Athletics kept my body lean and offered relief from a struggle I could not yet name; movement allowed me to outrun the confusion waiting for me everywhere else.

As I moved through college and into adulthood, the gap between who I knew myself to be and who the world expected me to be widened. I became adept at performing a version of myself that others could understand while carrying a growing sense of dislocation.

By my 20s, that dislocation became unbearable.

I attempted suicide twice.

It wasn’t because I lacked strength or ambition. I was building a career, earning advanced degrees, teaching students, and creating what looked from the outside like a successful life. However, success and survival are not the same thing. Outwardly, I was thriving. Internally, I was disappearing.

Then, during the 1990s, something began to shift. Language that had once existed only at the margins slowly entered public conversation. For the first time, the word “transgender” entered into public discourse and health care.

The word positioned and grounded experiences I had carried my entire life. What I had once understood only as confusion began to take shape as recognition. The word did not solve everything, but it gave me a framework for understanding myself. At 40 years old, after years of reflection, therapy, and struggle, I began medically transitioning. The day after receiving tenure, I started testosterone.

Shortly afterward came the first signs of liberation: a double mastectomy, hysterectomy, and oophorectomy. Six months later, I underwent a metoidioplasty and pelvic release. At 51, I underwent phalloplasty and scrotoplasty. I will inject testosterone every week for the rest of my life. The cumulative billed value of my transition-related healthcare exceeds $5.5 million.

I recognise that access to healthcare is a privilege. I paid co-pays and deductibles while insurance absorbed costs that would have been impossible for many people to shoulder. Every time I think about those numbers, I think about the countless transgender people denied the same opportunities that allowed me to survive.

But the greatest costs were never financial.

Transition cost me more than 90% of my family. Relationships that had defined entire chapters of my life disappeared. Phone calls stopped. Invitations stopped. Some relatives chose distance. Others chose silence. The losses accumulated slowly, then all at once. I grieve them still. Yet if the choice was between preserving those relationships and preserving my life, I would make the same decision again.

Over time, I came to understand that transition was never simply about altering a body. We are not operating on people so much as operating on histories. Surgery, language, community, and self-recognition become ways of rewriting narratives imposed upon us long before we could speak for ourselves. Surgery is about sculpting gender from within, not because we were broken, but because we knew how to wield a chisel. My body carries those histories. Some scars are faint. Others zigzag across flesh, thickened by time. They carry more history than any policy document ever could.

Several years after beginning my transition, I decided to amend my Louisiana birth certificate from female to male. The process became one of the most humiliating experiences of my life. Louisiana required me to appear before a court-approved physician whose role was to verify my transition. In his office, I was instructed to remove my clothing so he could inspect my body and confirm that I had undergone a mastectomy and metoidioplasty. Afterward came notarised letters from physicians, therapists, and surgeons, operative reports, legal filings, photographs, identification records, attorney fees, and court costs. Standing there, I understood that the state was not asking me to identify myself. It was auditing me.

My body became evidence. My scars became exhibits. My surgeries became supporting documentation. My therapist’s letters, physician affidavits, operative reports, photographs, and court filings became part of a bureaucratic ledger through which strangers evaluated whether I qualified for recognition.

Looking back, I realise Louisiana was never the beginning of the audit. It was simply the moment I recognised it. The audits had followed me for decades. Family members audited my masculinity. Schools audited my behaviour. Medical professionals audited my certainty. Insurance companies audited my eligibility for care. Courts audited my legitimacy. At every turn, institutions demanded proof that I was who I said I was. Diagnoses, evaluations, signatures, approvals, surgeries, and legal documents all became part of a system that repeatedly asked the same question: prove yourself.

In 2005, I became the first openly trans*+ academic in teacher education. Around the same time, I began noticing something else. There was almost no positive discussion of queer or transgender lives in teacher preparation programs. The absence I had experienced as a child was still present. It had simply become institutionalised. That realisation eventually led me to write my forthcoming book, We Refuse to Disappear: Resistance Amid Anti-Trans Policy.

While researching it, I watched anti-trans legislation move from a political fringe project to a national movement. During the final years of the Obama administration, anti-trans bills remained relatively uncommon. Under President Trump, they steadily increased. Under President Biden, they exploded. Then, in 2025 alone, lawmakers introduced more than 1,000 anti-trans bills nationwide, with 126 becoming law. As of 2026, hundreds more are already (predictably) moving through state legislatures. What began as isolated legislative efforts has become a sustained campaign to regulate healthcare, athletics, names, pronouns, curriculum, bathrooms, and public existence itself.

I think often about Bidzii and Juno (pseudonyms), two young people whose family I encountered during my research. Bidzii, a transgender girl, lost access to gender-affirming medical care after Texas Senate Bill 14 prohibited such treatment for minors. Juno, her intersex sibling, watched Senate Bill 12 reshape what could be discussed, taught, or acknowledged in school.

Every evening, their family gathered around the kitchen table and studied maps of New Mexico. They compared rental prices, searched for healthcare providers, and researched school districts. They were not planning a vacation. They were planning survival.

At school, one teacher quietly refused to abandon them. When Bidzii submitted a worksheet asking what happens when your body begins changing and then is forced to stop, the teacher refused to erase the question. When students raised developmental questions that exceeded what state law comfortably allowed, the teacher refused to treat those questions as violations. When fear narrowed the classroom, the teacher refused to surrender curiosity. When the family needed support beyond what the school could legally provide, the teacher connected them to a community wellness circle outside district control.

These acts did not make headlines. They preserved humanity.

When I look at Bidzii and Juno, I do not simply see two young people caught in the crosshairs of legislation. I see a generation inheriting possibilities my generation fought to create. The language they have access to did not appear on its own.

We must honour the generations who came before us – the trans elders who forged the path we now walk with their bodies, their scars, their silence, and their courage. They paid dearly for the possibilities my generation inherited. Some underwent surgeries when procedures were still developing and carried the complications that followed. Some protested in small marches, wrote from the shadows, or survived through lives of stealth. Some were murdered, their deaths unreported and their names faded into obscurity. Some lost families. Some lost careers. Without them, there would have been no path for us to follow.

We became the next experiment. Not because we wanted to be, but because of those very few went undetected before us. We learned publicly, survived publicly, and challenged institutions that often had no framework for understanding us. The surgeries, scars, amended documents, and medical records became pathways future generations could follow.

Today, Bidzii and Juno face a familiar pattern. Their healthcare is questioned. Their identities are questioned. Their schools, teachers, and families are questioned. Different generation. Same demand for proof.

The audit never really ended.

Today, my driver’s license carries an X marker. So does my passport. Those documents reflect who I am far more honestly than the ones I carried for decades, yet they also create new vulnerabilities. In the current political climate, travelling internationally with those documents means accepting the possibility of additional scrutiny simply for existing outside a binary some governments find easier to administer than understand.

As a result, I remain here, but not passively. I remain as a teacher, a scholar, an advocate, and someone who refuses to disappear. The same systems that once audited my body now seek to regulate the lives of a new generation of young people. The difference is that I am no longer standing alone. I stand alongside educators, families, healthcare providers, librarians, journalists, faith leaders, and students themselves.

Coalitions are the realisation of refusals.

A teacher refuses to erase a student. A librarian refuses to remove a book. A counsellor refuses to abandon a child in crisis. A physician refuses to withdraw care. Parents refuse to stop fighting. Journalists refuse to let misinformation go unchallenged. Faith leaders refuse to close their doors. Students refuse disappearance itself. Together, those refusals become something larger than any individual act. They become protection. They become community. They become the conditions through which future generations can determine themselves.

I know this because I was once Blue. I know this because I survived. And I know this because every child deserves the right to become.

Trans people are often portrayed as controversies, threats, or political problems to be solved. We are none of those things. We are human beings. We are children who grow up. We are neighbours, teachers, parents, artists, nurses, scholars, and friends. And despite every attempt to erase us, we continue to exist.

We are like gazelles crossing an open plain, vulnerable because we are visible yet moving forward anyway. We leap. We run. We build. We love. We remain. That is not weakness. That is trans joy. That is persistence.

Note: Trans*+ combines the historical inclusion signifier (*) with a superscript plus (+) to represent expansive, evolving, nonfixed, and unbounded gender identities that resist/ed essentialized and binary gender dichotomies.

sj Miller, Ph.D., is an award-winning scholar-activist, Learning Specialist 3 at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and part-time faculty at the University of Washington-Bothell. Their work centers gender identity justice, the pedagogy of refusal, and inclusive educational frameworks. Miller has authored eight books, over 50 peer-reviewed articles, and over 30 book chapters. Miller serves as senior associate editor of The International Journal of LGBT Youth and co-editor of the series Social Justice Across Contexts in Education. Miller has received numerous awards in the fight for gender identity justice including the 2019 Distinguished Contributions to Gender Equity Award from the American Education Research Association. Miller’s forthcoming book, “We Refuse to Disappear: Resistance Amid Anti-Trans Education Policy” with Harvard Ed Press is due out later this month. For more on sj see; www.sjmiller.info.

Note: This essay was updated to clarify some details of the author’s experience.

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US President Donald Trump’s former White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham tore into her old boss Friday night after he banned news outlets CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House in a move she said “didn’t surprise” her at all.

Grisham told CNN’s Brianna Keilar that during his first term, Trump “tasked” her with “getting the press corps off the White House grounds.”

“He had me looking at places that they could go that were off the White House grounds because he wanted everybody kicked out, not just the few that you guys are dealing with right now. I’m sure it’ll get bigger,” she said.

See Grisham’s comments below:

Grisham said would “push it off and stall him” when Trump made the request, but she predicted he would pursue the goal again when he came back into power.

“That’s something that I knew was going to happen, watching him and the way he’s just tearing down East Wings and doing whatever he wants,” she said. “He clearly feels very, very empowered right now. So it didn’t surprise me at all.”

The president announced his ban on Truth Social, accusing the three media outlets of being “FAKE NEWS!”

“They purposely write negative news. And they do that because they want to try and diminish the Republicans and a Republican administration,” he said at a press conference Friday.

Grisham said she had hoped there would be someone in the White House telling him not to pursue the media ban.

“But it seems like he has really surrounded himself with sycophants and doesn’t have the guardrails that we kind of had in Trump 1.0,” she said.

“And so I think everybody’s laughing and thinking it’s a great idea, but you know, as always, he’s missed it, the point,” she said before railing against his administration’s handling of the economy.

“People don’t care that the White House isn’t, or that the press can’t be on the White House grounds, because they’re suffering, and he’s not doing anything, but these silly projects and these silly little vanity, you know, issues that he’s doing,” Grisham continued. “And so once again, it’s just not good. It doesn’t look good. He’s so out of touch, and he’s melting down.

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Sleep and heart health seem to be linked, with one paper suggesting that 11 extra minutes of kip a night could lower your heart attack risk.

Obstructive sleep apnoea, meanwhile, is associated with higher blood pressure, and insomnia seems connected to worse cardiovascular outcomes too.

And according to a new paper published in the European Heart Journal, even the lighting setup you have while snoozing might be consequential.

This research involved over 11,000 participants who made their health data available to scientists through the UK Biobank.

Those involved in the research wore a light sensor wristband for a week to measure how bright their surroundings were at night.

And three years after that, researchers checked their hearts with an MRI scan.

Compared to those who were exposed to dark conditions at night, people whose environment was more than three lux bright (a dim light level that nonetheless seems to suppress sleep hormone melatonin) saw a thickening of the walls in their heart’s left ventricle.

It also looked like their hearts were less able to bend during a heartbeat, an early indicator of cardiovascular issues.

Study author Professor Qi said that this “shows that exposure to higher levels of light at nighttime is linked to cardiac remodelling. This is where the structure and function of the heart changes and we typically see it in response to chronic stress or injury to the heart.

“It’s our body’s way of adapting to that stress, but ultimately it weakens the heart and can lead to heart failure.”

He suggested this could mean light pollution is “a new risk factor for cardiovascular disease”, and said we should start considering darker environments as a possible heart disease prevention strategy.

In an editorial related to the paper’s release, Professor Thomas Münzel, who was not involved in the study, said that clinicians working with patients who have heart issues should start asking them about their sleeping conditions.

Questions could include how dark their room is, how much screen time they get after bedtime, and whether they work the night shift (a factor already linked to increased heart disease risk).

“The advice is simple and inexpensive: blackout curtains, warm-coloured bedside lighting, and covering the small standby LEDs on household electronics,” he said.

And on a policy level, we should start to tackle light pollution, he added.

“Ultimately, this study is more than an interesting observation. It provides a crucial link between what satellites already show us, i.e., a planet glowing ever brighter at night, and the clinical reality unfolding inside our chests: hearts that are becoming stiffer, weaker, and less efficient.

“The relationship is biologically coherent, the effect sizes are clinically meaningful, and the dose-response is unambiguous: more light, worse outcomes. The takeaway is clear: darkness deserves recognition as a vital sign, as essential to cardiovascular health as blood pressure control and clean air.”

Donald Trump’s “historic and special” Greenland deal has already been met with mockery in Denmark.

He insisted its Arctic location was essential for defence against rivals like China and India – and expressed interest in the island’s mineral wealth.

Trump threatened to take it by force, even though the semi-autonomous territory belongs to the Kingdom of Denmark which is a Nato ally like the US.

But he suddenly announced on Friday evening that he had reached a new deal with Denmark and Greenland to give America “permanent control of security” on the Arctic island and resolve “all of our many US concerns”.

He claimed it would come at “no cost to the United States” and that America would be able to “do what is necessary” to “secure and defend the security of Greenland”.

The president said no US adversary would be able to maintain a military presence in Greenland or “make sensitive investments in Greenland without our express written approval”.

Trump wrote on TruthSocial: “This is a dream come true for the United States of America, one that is very important, historic, and special.

“At my direction, we worked with representatives of Denmark and Greenland to guarantee that the United States will FOREVER have the complete ability to do what is necessary in Greenland in order to secure and defend the security of Greenland, and the United States of America.”

Nato said the deal would stabilise the region, while Denmark’s prime minister Mette Frederiksen and Greenland’s prime minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen said the deal “strengthens our common security”.

The agreement is expected to be signed next week at the UN General Assembly but the details are yet to be released.

It’s currently unclear how the agreement is different from the US’s 1951 deal with Denmark which allowed America to send as many troops as it wants to Greenland.

No territory is expected to actually change hands.

So, unsurprisingly, Trump is already being mocked over his claim that this is a “dream come true”.

Danish newspaper Berlingske ran with the headline: “Don’t tell Trump that it’s the Kingdom of Denmark that has won.”

A Danish member of the European Parliament for the Liberal Alliance, Henrik Dahl, also suggested the deal had not really changed anything.

“A wise Danish politician once said that you can achieve almost anything if you are willing to let others take the credit,” he said.

“So let us give Donald Trump the credit for something very close to the status quo. From a Danish and Greenlandic perspective, it could hardly be much better.”

Meanwhile, US commentator for broadcaster TV2, Torsten Jansen, said: “Even though Trump is trying to blare it out as a victory, it is, as I see it, a spectacular defeat.”

“In terms of rights, they [the US] were already allowed quite a lot under the original agreement,” Mikkel Runge Olesen, a researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen.

He told the New York Times: “Is there anything here that one could not have achieved without this crisis?”

Danish commentator Sophie Plutz also told LBC: “It does sound like the Americans have accepted a re-packaging of old deals and agreements, but overall there’s not a lot of new stuff in here.”

Watch reactions from people in Denmark and Greenland here:

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