Latest news with #hope
Yahoo
a day ago
- General
- Yahoo
13-Year-Old with Brain and Spinal Cancer Faces New Health Struggle 2 Months After Becoming Honorary Secret Service Agent
DJ Daniel, a 13-year-old honorary U.S. Secret Service agent living with brain and spinal cancer, has three new tumors DJ's father Theodis Daniel shared the health update at a May 19 swearing-in ceremony, two months after President Donald Trump made DJ an honorary agent 'It's rough — there isn't a class that can teach you how to deal with it,' Theodis said about his son's latest diagnosisAs a small child, Devarjaye 'DJ' Daniel was given months to live. In 2018, the Texas native was diagnosed with brain and spinal cancer, with doctors giving him five months to live, according to the United States Secret Service. Five months turned into five years. Now, after seven years and more than 13 brain surgeries, DJ is still standing. But a new diagnosis has shaken his family and supporters. When the teen — who wants to be a police officer — was sworn in as an honorary agent of the U.S. Secret Service in March, his father Theodis Daniel said DJ's family is hopeful about his future, thanks in part to a research study he is participating in. 'He's beating the odds," Theodis said at the time. But two months later, the proud parent shared that the odds have changed. During a swearing-in ceremony at Williamson County Sheriff's Office (WCSO) in Texas, Theodis told FOX 7 Austin that the teen is 'just winging it day by day' in the face of new health hardships. 'He does have three new tumors,' the father told the Texas outlet at the May 19 ceremony. 'It's rough — there isn't a class that can teach you how to deal with it. You're hearing that your child has a nasty disease.' But DJ, whose desire to become a law enforcement officer stemmed from his family's experiences during Hurricane Harvey, has already achieved his goal, according to FOX 7. He has been sworn in by more than 1,300 agencies, including multiple on May 19. And his family remains hopeful. Amid DJ's health struggles, Theodis told FOX 7, 'We're just going around showing people, 'Hey, you do care for one another. Let's give compassion and let's try to join and help each other get through things.' ' Perhaps the crowning jewel of DJ's honorary law enforcement titles is U.S. Secret Service agent. President Donald Trump bestowed him with the honor on March 4 in a joint address to Congress. 'Tonight, DJ, we're going to do you the biggest honor of them all. I am asking our new Secret Service director, Sean Curran, to officially make you an agent of the United States Secret Service,' Trump, 78, told the teen, whose eyes widened upon hearing the news. Never miss a story — sign up for to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human-interest stories. The following day, DJ also visited the president in the Oval Office. And, after his father shared his latest health update in Texas, the White House released a statement of support for the teen. 'We're lifting up Agent DJ Daniel in prayer after his dad, Theodis, shared that DJ is now facing three new tumors,' an X post from the White House said. 'DJ is one of the strongest, bravest young men—and has now been sworn into 1,351 law enforcement agencies across the country," the post continued. "Agent Daniel, you're a true legend. 🇺🇸.' Read the original article on People
Yahoo
2 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Mum begs to know missing daughter's whereabouts
A mother's spirits have dimmed as she admits her missing daughter may not be found alive, as a police investigation drags into a third week. Pheobe Bishop was last seen near Bundaberg airport in southern Queensland about 8.30am on May 15 after booking a trip to Western Australia to see her boyfriend. There has been no sign of the 17-year-old in more than a fortnight and her mother Kylie Johnson is facing the reality that she may not find her daughter alive. "I still hold hope that Pheobe will come home, but I have to consider the possibility that she also won't," she said in a video statement released by Queensland Police. "If the worst-case scenario has happened, I at least need to know where she's resting." The family's lives have been changed for the worse since Pheobe disappeared, Ms Johnson said. "This is a pain no person or family should ever have to experience," she said. The teen has been described as a "beautiful, loving and kind person" with every day that passes without knowing her whereabouts weighing heavily on the family. Ms Johnson begged for anyone with even the smallest amount of information to contact police, as she believes her daughter would not just disappear and someone knows something. "I know that this investigation isn't over ... it will not be over for me until we find Pheobe," she said. Police are continuing to search the Gin Gin area, a town near Bundaberg, which is now the focus of the investigation. "Investigations are ongoing and police are continuing to run out several lines of inquiry," police said in a statement on Saturday. Officers had earlier focused on combing through Good Night Scrub National Park with homicide detectives, volunteers, cadaver dogs and divers deployed. The national park search has since been abandoned after several items of interest were seized for forensic examination. Police also received information that some other evidence may have been removed from the area. Meanwhile, two of Pheobe's housemates, James Wood and Tanika Kristan Bromley, have been charged with unrelated weapons offences. Police allegedly found a shortened firearm, two replica handguns and ammunition during a search of a grey Hyundai ix35 and a Gin Gin home. The home - where Pheobe lived with the pair - and the car, which was thought to have been used to take the teen to the airport, were declared crime scenes in the disappearance investigation. Wood, 34, was charged with one count each of unlawful possession of weapons (short firearm) and authority to possess explosives. Bromley, 33, was also charged with possessing/acquiring restricted items, unlawful possession of weapons and two counts of authority required to possess explosives. Bromley was granted bail at Bundaberg Magistrates Court on Tuesday while Wood has been issued a notice to appear on June 13. Police have said the weapons charges were unrelated to Pheobe's disappearance and there was no suggestion Bromley or Wood were involved. Police are still appealing for information - particularly regarding the movements of the grey Hyundai between May 15 and May 18 in the Gin Gin area - to come forward. Pheobe is about 180cm tall with a pale complexion, long dyed red hair and hazel eyes. She was last seen wearing a green tank top and grey sweatpants, and carrying luggage.
NHK
3 days ago
- General
- NHK
Chasing Hope in Africa
Pediatrician Kumon Kazuko runs a facility in Africa supporting the minds and bodies of children with special needs. This is the story of a Japanese doctor who has been a symbol of hope for 23 years.
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Walk on the wild side: Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs on their epic hiking movie The Salt Path
'I have played a lot of powerful, well-dressed women in my career,' says Gillian Anderson. They flash before your eyes: Margaret Thatcher (The Crown), Eleanor Roosevelt (The First Lady), Emily Maitlis (the Prince Andrew/Newsnight drama Scoop) – as well as the formidable sex therapist in the Netflix hit Sex Education, a role that led to her being inundated with dildos from over-enthusiastic fans. 'These are all women in control of themselves and their environment. Any time I have an opportunity to steer against that, particularly lately, it's of interest to me.' There is steering in another direction, and then there is the screeching handbrake turn represented by her role in The Salt Path, adapted from Raynor Winn's 2018 memoir of homelessness and hope along the coastline of England's south-west. Playing Winn, Anderson is shown making a single teabag stretch for several cuppas, withdrawing the final £1.38 from her bank account, and warming her blistered feet by a pub fire. A typical day begins with her peeing in the undergrowth. It's a far cry from Agent Scully in The X-Files. Winn's response to a double catastrophe in her life in 2013 was to embark on the lengthy South West Coast Path walk with her husband, Moth. The film's opening scene shows the couple's tent being flooded during a King Lear-level storm. A flashback then reveals how they ended up in this sorry, soggy state. A bad investment left them saddled with crippling debts and the couple lost the farm in Wales where they had brought up their now-adult children. While cowering in the hallway from bailiffs, Winn took inspiration from a cherished book glimpsed among their partly packed belongings: Five Hundred Mile Walkies, in which Mark Wallington recounts the trek he and his dog took around the south-west. He must have miscalculated the journey, however. It is in fact 630 miles, including many steep ascents and descents. And as if penury and homelessness were not challenging enough, Moth had recently been diagnosed with a rare brain disease, corticobasal syndrome, and advised by doctors to rest. Stairs, he was told, would be particularly problematic. Twelve years and those 630 miles later, Moth Winn is, miraculously, still alive. He is played in the film by Jason Isaacs, who sits beside his screen wife today in a London hotel room. Their contrasting body language is instantly revealing. The 56-year-old Anderson, friendly but with a casually authoritative aura, is perched side-saddle in her chair, one leg crossed away from me, so that she seems almost to be looking back over her shoulder in my direction as she speaks. Isaacs, 61, leans forward, elbows on knees, keen to get stuck in. It is as if they are still playing their parts from The Salt Path: Raynor Winn, with her patina of reserve and caution, and Moth, eager to make sure everyone else is comfortable, a people-pleaser even when the people aren't worth pleasing, as some of those they meet on their travels manifestly are not. A passerby berates them for wild camping, beating their tent with his stick. In a scene that hasn't made it from page to screen, Winn is humiliated by a woman who spots her scrambling on the ground for dropped coins and assumes she is drunk. Despite those flashes of conflict, Winn had doubts about how her story would work on screen. 'It's about two people and a path,' she tells me from the home she and Moth now share in Cornwall. 'I couldn't grasp how that could be a film.' But Marianne Elliott, the acclaimed stage director of War Horse, Angels in America, and Company, makes her screen directing debut here and tells me she always saw The Salt Path as inherently cinematic. 'Ray and Moth hardly talk on their walk,' she says. 'They are carrying their trauma on their back, but then they slowly calm down and start to look up and engage with the majestic landscapes. And they are changed by it. It felt like nature was playing with them, like a wild beast – sometimes giving them beauty and wonder, and sometimes battering them cruelly. They were reformed by the elements, if you like.' Playwright and screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz, who adapted The Salt Path for the screen, says she saw nature as the key to unlocking the film version. 'Any reservations were about the walking,' she says. 'You know: how do we make walking dynamic for that amount of time? It felt like we needed almost to take the weather and the landscape as a character. It needed to be a film with a lot of silence. It's not some chatty, walky comedy.' Watching Isaacs trudging across English landscapes, however magnificent, feels incongruous after all those scenes of him suffering existential despair in luxurious five-star surroundings in the Thailand-set third season of The White Lotus. I assume he will be heartily sick of talking about the series by now, but it is he who brings up the similarity between the characters he plays. 'They're both men who lose everything. And they react in very different ways, which is a measure of who they are.' His character in The White Lotus was prone to suicidal ideations. So, too, was the apparently upbeat Moth. 'He laughs all the time, even when he's describing the toll his disease has taken on him. But he felt suicidal on the walk. He and Ray were crippled with shame, and the future was this abyss for them. They hid that from one another. They constantly made each other laugh. Acting is a game of pretend, and that's what they were both doing.' What were Anderson's first impressions of Raynor? 'I was surprised at how guarded she was,' she says. 'Of course, it must be strange: you've got two relatively famous actors who are going to play you showing up at your house. But it was interesting to encounter a certain steeliness. It was informative for me to see that.' 'You can be quite steely,' Isaacs says. 'You've got that in you.' 'Oh, definitely,' she agrees. 'I know that about myself.' Having been surprised when her memoir was optioned, Winn says she was even more taken aback by the casting. 'I remember thinking, 'How is that going to work? How will someone so perfect and glamorous capture me in that raw state?'' Things got even more confusing when she told Moth the news. 'He thought I meant Pamela Anderson.' During the first meeting between the four of them, the Winns explained to the actors the details of how they packed, knowing that they couldn't take more than what could be carried on their backs. 'Then they put the tent up for us right there in the living room,' Isaacs says. 'I'm not sure if I'd … ever … camped … before,' says Anderson, stringing the words out as though anticipating derision. 'You'd never pitched a tent?' asks Isaacs in mild disbelief. 'Not as far as I can remember,' she says. 'I might have pitched one for my kids in the back garden.' Isaacs says he is 'all about climbing things, jumping off things, swimming through things. Canyons and stuff. I like extreme physical experiences. Even at my advanced age, I see something and I think, 'That'd be fun to climb up. Or slide down.' I'm still a 12-year-old boy trapped in a 100-year-old body.' As a child, he went wild camping with his family in Wales. 'We'd get woken by farmers. Or livestock.' Once, they parked in heavy fog on a small hill and pitched their tent. 'You couldn't see your hand in front of you. We woke up to find we'd camped on a roundabout.' Anderson gasps and claps her hands: 'That's such a good story!' The Salt Path began life as a diary that Winn kept on the walk, and which she later wrote up as a gift for Moth – and, more urgently, as a way of preserving the experience for him as his memory began to fade. That diary spawned a Big Issue article and then a book, nominated for the Costa prize in 2018. The judges called it 'an absolutely brilliant story that needs to be told about the human capacity to endure and keep putting one foot in front of another'. The picture will doubtless reignite interest in the South West Coast Path, and attract more walkers after a recent downturn. To anyone tempted to wonder whether walking is having 'a moment', what with the film of The Salt Path following David Nicholls's novel You Are Here (about a friendship that blooms on a 200-mile coast-to-coast hike across the north of England), it is as well to remember that what the Winns did was born out desperation. They found beauty and a kind of salvation, and the walk even seemed to help Moth to defy his doctors' prognosis, but it was often a ghastly, hardscrabble journey. 'They were desperate and lonely and scared,' says Isaacs. 'They wanted to avoid towns because they got treated badly there and they had no money to buy food. They were happier by themselves away from people. They experienced both sides of human nature: tremendous compassion and generosity but also abuse and neglect. They were frightened of the police and of anyone who would come along and dehumanise them just because they were homeless. Though the book itself was a love letter to Moth, there's a marked lack of sentimentality when they speak about what happened. They got all kinds of different benefits from the walk but they still wanted a warm roof over their heads.' One thing that is impossible to capture on screen, he says, is their persistent hunger. 'It colours everything. We do our best to tell the story but that's a physical ache. They would stand at cafe windows watching people eat.' Anderson is nodding along. 'Ray talks in the book about pretending to eat, and how the fantasy of eating, the act of moving the mouth, does half the job,' she says. Winn tells me that living below the breadline has altered her for ever. 'It changes how you feel about material things,' she says. 'Having let go of everything we had, possessions don't concern me in the same way they did before. Anything that doesn't enrich your life just gets in the way. The stuff we gather can easily start to control us.' Winn says her life is much as it ever was, though Moth now tires more easily, and requires extensive physiotherapy. 'Except without the worry of paying the rent.' As the author of several bestselling books, does she allow herself the occasional luxury these days? 'I do,' she sighs. 'Sometimes it's nice to have the whole pasty instead of just half.' The Salt Path is in UK and Irish cinemas from 30 May.
CBS News
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- CBS News
This Philadelphia doctor's story of saving his own life is being made into a movie: "I almost died five times"
Penn Medicine doctor's story of saving his life is being made into a movie Penn Medicine doctor's story of saving his life is being made into a movie Penn Medicine doctor's story of saving his life is being made into a movie Saving lives, first his own, then others. It's the story of a doctor researcher at Penn Medicine that's now being made into a movie. A man on a mission, with science always running through his mind. Dr. David Fajgenbaum works out the equations on his windows at Penn Medicine. Focusing on immune cells is how he saved his life, with a new approach that's now saving others. It's a story that's headed to Hollywood. CBS News Philadelphia. "This is a story about living from someone who was dying, and it's a story about creating hope when it feels like there is no hope," he said. Fajgenbaum was filled with a more innocent kind of hope at Georgetown, where he was a quarterback. Then, at Penn Medicine, in his third year, he developed a rare disease called Castleman for which there was no treatment. "In the first three years after my diagnosis, I almost died five times," he said. "I knew that if I didn't find a treatment, that I wasn't gonna survive. And so that was just my only hope." Castleman puts the immune system in overdrive. Fajgenbaum figured an established transplant drug, which suppresses the immune system, might work, and it did. "Turning hope into action," he said. That's the theme of his book, "Chasing My Cure," A cure that came from an existing drug. CBS News Philadelphia. "It's so amazing to think that this drug was at my local CVS for all those years when I was in and out of the ICU, and no one knew to try it," said Fajgenbaum. "So I just keep thinking, how many more drugs that could treat more patients that are suffering from diseases?" Fajgenbaum and his team at Penn find new uses for existing medications, drug repurposing. "We've just uncovered time and time again that the solutions are out there. We just don't have anyone looking for these old solutions. Our medical system focuses on new drugs for profitable diseases. We want to focus on existing drugs for neglected diseases," Fajgenbaum said. He started a nonprofit called Every Cure, where they repurpose drugs with the help of artificial intelligence. Every Cure. "And over the last 11 years, we've identified and advanced 13 more repurposed treatments for diseases they weren't intended for," Fajgenbaum said. One is a vitamin derivative that can help some autistic children. "That's one of my favorite programs. We're advancing another one is with the numbing medicine, lidocaine," he said. That one is showing promise with breast cancer. His story and research has made headlines and now a movie is in the works. "The script is being written. I hear it's almost done, which is exciting. And then the next step is to identify the right lead actor," said Fajgenbaum. "My wife has ideas for people in mind. She would love Bradley Cooper to play me." Playing the real-life story of a lifesaver. As if he doesn't already have enough accolades, Fajgenbaum was also just recognized as one of Time's 100Health leaders.
