Darren Till says he has the “same old niggles” as he bids to become Britain’s second UFC world champion when he meets Tyron Woodley in the early hours of Sunday morning UK time in Dallas.

The Liverpudlian also played down fears over his ability to achieve a 12lb weight cut in two days.

“The fact is I am just better than Woodley,” Till, 25, told BBC Sport.

“I feel like I can finish him off but if it’s 10 seconds or five rounds, I will be ready for any outcome.”

Till is fighting two battles – Woodley

Till drew criticism last time out when he came in overweight before victory over Stephen Thompson in his home city.

The 6ft 1in southpaw, who weighed 182lb on Wednesday, must make 170lb to meet the welterweight limit by Friday and insisted he is “not stepping in any heavier than 170”, but Woodley says his rival is “fighting two battles”.

American Woodley, 36, told BBC Sport. “I’m only fighting one battle, I’m going to make weight, the amount of focus he’s putting on that, he should be focusing on me.

“His coaches are telling him I’m slowing down. His gameplan is based on me slowing down. What’s going to happen when I get across the octagon on Saturday and I’m in his face? They lied to him.”

Woodley has not competed in more than a year while Till scored a points win in May despite losing the bout on 22 of the 25 media scorecards.

But with 17 wins and a draw to his name, Till goes into the bout at UFC 228 in Dallas knowing he can emulate Michael Bisping in bringing a world title back to the British Isles.

A run of four wins in a row has developed his reputation and a back story which includes him being stabbed twice before leaving the country at the age of 19 has only fuelled interest in him throughout the sport.

Some commentators believe Till is being pushed by the UFC and its president Dana White with a view to him becoming the face of the organisation.

“The UFC have no choice. It’s Tyron Woodley’s choice – he’s the one getting in there,” said Till.

“Dana White can’t fight for him. Whether people say I’m getting a push, it doesn’t matter. A fight is a fight.

“Fifteen years I’ve worked hard for a big historical moment in my life. I don’t care about losing or getting knocked out. I’m not fearful to talk about my fears. I am confident to face everything head on.

“I’ve got the same old broken bones, broken hands – the stuff every fighter has but doesn’t have the bottle to talk about. Every fighter goes into a fight 90% or 80% and if he goes in 100% he hasn’t trained right. Every day I’m punching hard, my hands are hurting. Nothing is keeping me out of that fight, it never will.”

Analysis – ‘This will be a back-and-forth tussle’

Former UFC world-title challenger Dan Hardy, who will be part of BBC Radio 5 live’s team in Dallas:

I am beside myself with excitement for this.

Size, speed, aggression, power, I think Darren Till has everything.

I think the British contenders we have now will have a far more rounded game than in the past as MMA is more accessible. I really genuinely think Till has a chance to take this belt and hold it for a long while, which is most important as a champion.

I think what will surprise Woodley is the pressure he will be under from Till, who will be the more aggressive, forcing Woodley to work and making what will definitely be his hardest fight to date.

But you also look at Till’s record and it’s hard to find anyone that looks remotely like Woodley in terms of style. Till does expose himself to danger and I think that will make this very back and forth.

Washington, DC – It is becoming a near-daily occurence. Leaks from inside US President Donald Trump‘s White House have both riled and undermined its current occupant and his administration.

But a Wednesday opinion piece in The New York Times, penned anonymously by a senior administration official who is highly critical of Trump, has taken leaking to a new level.

Leaks are nothing new at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. US President Richard Nixon’s Justice Department took The New York Times and Washington Post to court over the Pentagon papers, leaked documents showing the US had doubts about its military intervention in Vietnam. 

Former president George W Bush‘s White House was rocked by scandal after the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame was leaked to the media following her husband’s criticisms of the administration’s justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. 

Still, the latest op-ed is unprecedented, something the Times noted in its pre-amble to the piece. It follows 20 months of constant revelations that continue to surprise.

Here are the top six leaks from the Trump White House:

1) Michael Flynn meets the Russians

Less than a month into his presidency, Trump was forced to fire his national security adviser Michael Flynn.

The whole controversy started after leaks to the media that Flynn had spoken with the Russian ambassador during the transition time between the election and the inauguration, an interaction that raised questions about the Trump team’s improper contact with foreign governments.

For weeks, Trump and White House officials denied Flynn had ever spoken with the Russian government. Vice President Mike Pence even made a TV appearance on CBS denying it.

But the leaks didn’t stop and eventually the White House was forced to admit Flynn had spoken with the Russians, a move Trump eventually praised during a press conference on February 16, 2017. Trump complained publicly about the number of leaks around the story saying “it’s an illegal process and the press should be ashamed of themselves”. 

Flynn later pled guilty to lying to the FBI in the investigation into whether or not the Russians interfered in the 2016 US election.

2) Trump calls Africa a ‘shithole’

It was an off-handed remark heard around the world. In a closed-door White House meeting in January with both Republican and Democratic lawmakers on immigration, Trump sparked a furious reaction from world leaders after a leaked quote made it out of the discussion. 

Trump allegedly asked aloud, “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” According to people present, Trump was referring to Africa, El Salvador and Haiti. He reportedly asked why the US wasn’t allowing more people from countries such as Norway, according to the Washington Post account of the meeting.

Democratic Senator Dick Durbin, who was present, confirmed the remarks for reporters saying Trump said them “repeatedly”.

Others denied it, but it didn’t matter.

The condemnation was swift with opponents calling Trump’s remarks “racist”, forcing Trump to clarify that while he used “tough” language during the meeting, he never said the word “shithole”.

3) Fire and Fury

There have been and will continue to be many books written about the Trump administration. But the biggest bombshell so far came in January when author Michael Wolff’s  Fire and Fury hit the shelves a year into the Trump presidency. For months leading up to its publication, Wolff was given extraordinary access to the White House and the book included both on-the-record and leaked conversations with some of the president’s top lieutenants.

Overall, Fire and Fury paints a White House in constant chaos with backstabbing and factional fighting that was not only witnessed but reportedly encouraged by Trump.

The president called it “a phony book” and “full of lies”. One passage includes a conversation with former top adviser Steve Bannon who called a June 2016 meeting between Donald Trump junior and Russians with ties to the Kremlin “treasonous”. Bannon later apologised publicly for his comments.

4) Trump talks with Mexico and Australia

In August, 2017, the Washington Post leaked two separate conversations between Trump and the leaders of Mexico and Australia. Rather than deny the conversations ever took place, White House officials attacked the Post for publishing them. The transcripts reveal the president’s early attempts to change the US trading relationship with Mexico and deeply concerned about his public image on an assortment of other issues.

During the conversation with former Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto, Trump addressed his biggest campaign promise to build a wall along the US-Mexican border and make the Mexicans pay for it.

Pena Nieto told Trump his country would never pay for the wall.  

“You cannot say that to the press,” Trump told him. “The press is going to go with that and I cannot live with that.” 

In a conversation with former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, Trump railed against a deal the US made under his predecessor, Barack Obama, to allow some refugees held by Australia into the United States.

“This shows me to be a dope,” Trump told Turnbull in a tense exchange. “I am the world’s greatest person that does not want to let people into the country.” He later told Turnbull their conversation was “the most unpleasant call all day”.

5) Comey and Trump – dueling leaks

In May, 2017, Trump fired FBI director James Comey whose agents were investigating the president’s campaign over improper, and potentially illegal, contact with the Russian government during the 2016 election.

As Trump faced a furious backlash over the firing and charges of obstructing justice, he threatened to leak “tapes” of his conversations with Comey. Within days, a story leaked that, while Comey was still FBI director, Trump had asked him to let go of an investigation into Michael Flynn’s contact with the Russians.

James Comey better hope that there are no “tapes” of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 12, 2017

A month later, during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Comey revealed that, in fact, he was the one who leaked a de-classified memo of the conversation to the press after Trump’s threat of “tapes”. Comey said he did it because he hoped it would prompt the appointment of a special counsel to look into the mounting accusations that Trump campaign officials colluded with Moscow.

That’s exactly what happened.

Less than a week later, former FBI director Robert Mueller was appointed to the job. His investigation has netted four Trump campaign officials and led to the indictments of more than two dozen Russian citizens.

The White House later admitted, contrary to Trump’s assertions, there were no “tapes” of the Comey conversations.

6) Trump reveals Kim Jong-un meeting

One of the most overlooked themes in this particular administration is that often the leaks are not only coming from inside the White House, but inside the Oval Office itself. Unlike previous administrations, the president seems eager to be the first person to reveal any big news, often via Twitter, no matter how sensitive.

Case in point, the stunning revelation that Trump would meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. In March, a South Korean delegation came to the White House to brief officials about a meeting with the North Korean government, with which the US has no formal diplomatic relations. What many journalists didn’t know at the time was they brought a message from Kim to Trump.

The highly anticipated meeting between Kim Jong Un and myself will take place in Singapore on June 12th. We will both try to make it a very special moment for World Peace!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 10, 2018

In a surprise appearance that afternoon, Trump popped his head in to the briefing room, an unorthodox move even for him. He told a handful of confused journalists there would be a big announcement by the South Koreans later that day.

Sure enough, that evening, the South Korean delegation emerged from the West Wing and told the world about the request for a historic meeting with Kim.

On June 12th, Trump became the first sitting US president to meet a North Korean leader when he shook hands with Kim in Singapore.

Burt Reynolds, the macho movie star who had a string of blockbuster hits in the ’70s and ’80s followed by an Oscar-nominated comeback in 1997’s Boogie Nights, died Thursday at the age of 82. In 2005, EW’s Chris Nashawaty spoke to the actor about the rise, fall, and rise again of his career in Hollywood.

Ask most actors why they got into the business and they’ll talk about a calling, a seductive siren song that drew them to the stage. But the sound of Burt Reynolds‘ calling was more like a pop, a rip, and a bloodcurdling scream.

As a freshman at Florida State, Reynolds was a star tailback. Football was more than a game for him. It was how he related to his tough-love father and a passport to a world beyond the panhandle, an open-ended ticket out of his hardscrabble roots and into a life of ease, fame, and women. But in the first game of his sophomore season, while returning a punt, Reynolds heard a horrible sound come from his knee as he took off with the ball. As he crumpled to the ground, an opposing player pile-drove into his leg and finished the gruesome job. When the 19-year-old looked down, his knee joint resembled a Swiss Army knife opened at an unnatural angle. His football career — and, as far as he was concerned, his life — was over. “It tore me apart,” Reynolds recalls 50 years later. “My dad probably took it harder than I did. He was crushed.”

As Reynolds tells his story, he sits behind a desk in the study of his Hollywood Hills estate. In front of him is a plate of tiny orange slices. And on the far wall of the room is a large photograph of Reynolds dressed in a football uniform for his 1974 film The Longest Yard. In the photo, Reynolds is tanned, muscular, and at the height of his box office good looks. There’s a cocksure defiance in his stare. A rascally willingness to take on all comers.

Thirty years later, Reynolds favors his knee a bit and his face is a little tighter, but it still carries the same mischievous grin. He’s taken more hits than just about any actor of his generation, rising to the top of his profession, then falling to the bottom, picking himself up and dusting himself off. But at 69, Burt Reynolds is still running.

Reynolds lives exactly like you’d expect Burt Reynolds to live. His home is sprawling, airy, and appointed in white like a Grecian temple. Out front, a tinkling fountain and a Bentley stand as tokens that this is indeed the home of a movie star. In the back, a glistening swimming pool sits atop a cliff with a jewel-box view over downtown Los Angeles. It’s a long way from Riviera, Florida, a blue-collar fishing village where his father was the police chief.

Still, it’s Florida that the self-acknowledged good ol’ boy considers home. Thirty-six years ago, he bought eight acres of waterfront property in Jupiter, an upscale community of golf-happy CEOs and other retired jocks with troubled knees like Bobby Orr and Joe Namath. “As soon as a director said ‘It’s a wrap,’ I had one foot on the airplane back to Florida,” he says. “But I haven’t been home in nine months. I’ve done five pictures in a row. Two I think are going to be pretty good. One of them might go right to video.”

While he won’t say which the stinker is, the two films he’s bullish about are this summer’s Dukes of Hazzard (Aug. 5), in which he plays the Southern-fried blowhard Boss Hogg, and Adam Sandler and Chris Rock’s remake of The Longest Yard (May 27). Reynolds admits he has mixed feelings about seeing someone else tackle The Longest Yard, one of his most beloved movies. “I can’t describe it as a bad feeling, and I had a very good part in it. But it was a bit strange. I realize it ain’t Hamlet, but it’s Paul Crewe, and I created him!”

Actually, Reynolds has eight movies coming out this year. And for his fans, it must be starting to feel a lot like 1978 again. That was the year the actor was coming off Smokey and the Bandit and Semi-Tough and starred in such hits as The End (which he also directed) and Hooper. It was also the year that Reynolds was anointed the No. 1 movie star in the land — kicking off an unprecedented five-year run as the top draw in America. Something neither Tom Cruise nor Tom Hanks has been able to duplicate. He was dating America’s sweetheart, Sally Field. Women swooned at the sight of him. Men wanted to grab a beer with him. In 1978, it was impossible to be bigger than Burt Reynolds.

But then suddenly the movies got smaller. Or at least his did.

After his football injury, Reynolds was unable to walk for months. Realizing that his playing career was dead, he limped as far away from sports as he could: the drama department. “There were a lot of really good-looking ladies there,” he says, laughing his sly Bandit‘s laugh. “It was a weird feeling. I walked on stage having never been in anything before in my life, and I felt like I did when I walked on the football field. I wasn’t nervous. I was totally at home.”

Reynolds dropped out of college and moved to New York, where he shared a $44-a-month fleabag apartment in Hell’s Kitchen with another wannabe actor — a Texan named Rip Torn. One day, Torn told his roommate that he’d found him a job on TV. Only later did Reynolds find out that the job required him to be set on fire. Still, he took it and started to moonlight as a stuntman. Recalling a stunt he did on his early-’70s TV show called Dan August, Reynolds says, “I was supposed to run into a burning building and run out with a baby. It was so hot when I got in there that there was this melted piece of s— that was supposed to be the baby and there was no way out. The door was gone. So I jumped through the window and hurt my shoulder. It was stupid macho bulls—, but I did it because I wasn’t sure if I was good enough as an actor.”

A utility player with good looks, Reynolds landed a $125-a-week contract with Universal in 1958. There he became friends with another young actor, Clint Eastwood. “Universal had contracts with the Miss Universes. And I don’t care what Clint says, but he cut a swath through the Miss Universes.” Says Eastwood with a laugh, “Burt likes to tell stories.” Both young actors were soon cast on TV shows — Eastwood on Rawhide and Reynolds on Gunsmoke, playing blacksmith Quint Asper for three seasons.

Reynolds bounced around unmemorably on both big screen and small until landing his breakout film, 1972’s Deliverance. “That script changed my life,” he says. “It was the only movie in 40-something years that I knew was going to be big.” Reynolds played Lewis Medlock, the alpha male among a group of four friends who go on a canoeing trip on Georgia’s treacherous Cahulawassee River. These days, the movie’s title has become shorthand for backwoods hicks playing banjos and the sodomizing of poor Ned Beatty, but Deliverance also showcased Reynolds at his most magnetic. He came off like a macho daredevil, showing off both his inner stuntman and his chops as a serious dramatic actor.

“At the end of each day we’d paddle the canoes home,” says Beatty, “and one time we went over a little waterfall and we slam down and I go under and Burt goes flipping over me. He hurt his shoulder pretty bad. But two days later, I see him talking to [director] John Boorman and he’s telling him about the accident because he wants to do it in the film!” Adds costar Jon Voight, describing a scene in which he and Reynolds are driving off-road with Reynolds behind the wheel: “He just floored it and he could have hit anything. And he’s laughing the whole time! It’s a great scene in the film, but he seemed crazy to me.”

But Boorman didn’t cast Reynolds in such a starmaking role because he’d seen him in flicks like Navajo Joe or Shark. No, he told Reynolds it was because of The Tonight Show. Reynolds was a regular guest of Johnny Carson’s and often sat in as a guest host. And it was on Johnny’s couch that Reynolds says he always felt most at ease, self-deprecatingly cracking wise about Hollywood, dishing dirt about other celebrities, and fueling his image as a swizzle-shtick playboy. It was also on The Tonight Show that Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown propositioned Reynolds to pose as a male centerfold in her magazine. He had no clue of the backlash to come.

When I bring this up, it’s the only time Reynolds gets testy:

“I couldn’t make it through the interview without asking about Cosmo…”

“You could, but f— you…”

After a very long beat, he finally laughs.

“Whoever was my publicist at the time said, ‘Look, you’ve got Deliverance coming out, so it’s not like people won’t take you seriously.’ The thing was, Deliverance didn’t end up coming out until later. And by the time the movie came out, it hurt. It really hurt.”

The Burt Reynolds Cosmo centerfold is a pictorial time capsule of the swingin’ ’70s. Wearing nothing but a grin, Reynolds lies in the buff like a mustachioed odalisque. He’s smoking a Tiparillo and his chest is almost as hairy as the bearskin rug beneath him. You can almost hear Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass playing on the soundtrack. America went nuts.

Asked why it hurt his career, Reynolds says, “Because a lot of people don’t have a sense of humor. Women got it. But a lot of men, they got pissed off. I thought it was a great joke, but truly, most people didn’t get it.”

Reynolds says the playboy label stuck with him for years and may have been why he didn’t get an Oscar nomination for his performance in 1979’s Starting Over, especially since costars Candice Bergen and Jill Clayburgh were both nominated. “I don’t think they could buy me struggling with women the way the guy in that film does.”

Despite Reynolds‘ reputation for being a lothario and his string of high-profile romances with Dinah Shore, Sally Field, Chris Evert, and Loni Anderson, he insists that the press had it wrong. “When I was going with Sally, or whoever I was going with, I’m not the kind of person to have girls on the side or go to strip clubs. But I can play that! I can play the hell out of that! Because I find that guy funny. Sad, but funny.”

When asked what he’s learned about women over the years, Reynolds (whose current companion is producer/ philanthropist Kate Edelman Johnson) shoots back, “That I don’t know s—. The guy who tells me he does is arrogant and stupid.” His costar from the new Longest Yard, Chris Rock, disagrees. He says Burt knows plenty about the ladies. “Anybody who’s been married and divorced as many times as him has got great stories. You just sit there. Burt Reynolds on women — it should be a ride at Disney.”

If Reynolds suffered from too much gossip-column scrutiny on the way up, the downward spiral was even worse. In 1984, after riding the crest of Smokey, The Cannonball Run, and Sharky’s Machine, Reynolds was making City Heat with his old friend Eastwood. During a scene in which Reynolds was supposed to be hit across the face with a prop — a chair made out of balsa wood — he was hit with the real thing instead. His jaw was shattered. He could barely open his mouth or talk. He ate only liquid foods and milk shakes and lost 40 pounds. By the end of the shoot, he says he was down to 110 pounds and wearing eight or nine sweaters under his jacket so he wouldn’t look like a ghoul.

He popped painkillers and tried everything from hypnosis to Indian smokehouses to ease the pain. “I probably would’ve drank the urine of a goat if they thought it would help.” After the film, Reynolds took to his bed, and the tabloids ran headlines claiming that he had AIDS. “In the early days of the disease, they needed desperately some well-known heterosexual guy to have AIDS and they picked me,” he says. “They had doubles checking into four different hospitals and signing my name.”

Johnny Carson visited Reynolds at his bedside and invited his old friend onto The Tonight Show to douse the rumors. Reynolds describes that time as “the lowest point of my life.” Even with the AIDS rumors dispelled, his star seemed tarnished. “I’d been the number one star in the world and I was the only guy to go from number one to number 138.” But, he adds, “that’s when you reach down and find out whether you’ve got any balls.” Adds his close friend Dom DeLuise, “When he went on The Tonight Show barely able to stand and he said, ‘People think I’m dead, but I ain’t,’ that’s tough. When you’re depressed, you don’t want a camera in your face. But he’s a survivor.”

The film offers still came, but instead of Deliverance or Semi-Tough, they were for Rent-a-Cop or Switching Channels. Reynolds says that he made a conscious decision to work again, work harder, and work often. He planted himself in the lobby of the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills just to be seen by industry players and to jog their memories. “There are three stages of an actor’s career,” he says. “Young, Old, and ‘You look good!’ I was at the ‘You look good!’ stage.”

When Reynolds did get back to work, he found humbling himself for young, know-it-all directors hard to stomach. Playing porn father-figure Jack Horner in 1997’s Boogie Nights, Reynolds had problems with his line “Is that what you want? F— her in the a–.” So he told director P.T. Anderson: “‘Paul, I have a hard time with that.’… He said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll work on it.’ And when we got to that scene, I said again, ‘Paul, I have a hard time with this line.’ And he said, ‘Well, you read the script!’ That didn’t go over too well. We had some hard words.”

Still, when Reynolds eventually received an Oscar nomination for the film — his first ever — he was overwhelmed by the warm reactions of his peers and those critics who’d never been particularly kind to him. It was as if the industry that had been kicking him for the past decade was welcoming him back as an elder statesman. The last of the old-time Hollywood pros. “It turns out I had some closet fans,” he says, still surprised. “My career has been like a heart-attack victim’s. I was down at the bottom of the cellar and came back to the top. Now, with The Longest Yard, this picture’s like the Deliverance of this period of my life. I’ll either come out of it looking like the old man of the century, or I’ll come out of it with a pop.”

As Reynolds says this, a smile spreads across his face. It’s as if he’s outlived his enemies and now gets to write the history books. He raises an orange slice to his lips and leans back in his chair. Because after more than 75 films, he’s a man who senses that things are finally going his way again. That he’s taken whatever hits the business can dish out, gotten back up, bad knee and all, and kept running toward something only he can see — and see clear as daylight.

Getting up to leave, I ask Reynolds if he’s ever thought of retiring. He pauses for a moment. “Yeah, I’m going to retire hopefully like Cary Grant did,” he says. Working. “I’ll be on stage telling a story, everyone’s going to applaud and laugh, and then I’ll drop like a rock.”

Burt Reynolds,  the popular star of films such as “Deliverance,” “The Longest Yard” and “Smokey and the Bandit,” died at 82.

His agent, Todd Eisner, confirmed his death to The Associated Press on Thursday. USA TODAY has reached out to Reynolds’ representatives for details.

With his devil-may-care attitude, a permanent twinkle in his eyes and his playful smile, the good-ole-boy Reynolds was the bankable major box office star of the 1970s and early ’80s — accumulating a string of box-office hits and unforgettable appearances on “The Tonight Show” couch with his “dear friend,” host Johnny Carson.

He earned his first and only Oscar nomination in 1998 for Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Boogie Nights.” He flaunted his sex appeal in 1972, posing rakishly on a bearskin rug as the first male nude (well, nearly) centerfold in Cosmopolitan magazine — a choice he later describes as “one of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever made.” 

Reynolds was well known for his personal dramas off the screen, his high-profile lost love with his “Smokey” co-star Sally Field and a messy divorce from actress Loni Anderson, a string of box office clunkers which tanked his career followed by well-chronicled financial problems.

Reynolds re-emerged last year for a personal project “The Last Movie Star” which looked into the life of a faded star filled with regret and longing, an exaggerated version of the actor content to living a mostly quiet life in Jupiter, Florida.

“I’ve been very, very lucky through ups and downs. When you crash and burn, you have to pick yourself up and go on and hope to make up for it,” Reynolds told USA TODAY in an interview in March. “Along the way, I’ve met some wonderful people. And you always run into some jerks. But that would be the same if you were working for the Ford Motor Co.

“It’s a tough business. Very tough. But I always tried to leave a good impression wherever we shot, and I didn’t leave any buildings burning or anything,” he added with a smile. “And I’ve had a good time through it all.” 

Reynolds was born February 11, 1936 in Lansing Michigan and moved to Riveria, Florida where his war hero father Milo was the chief of police. The young Reynolds and his tough father often clashed, even arresting his teenage son for fighting and locking him up.

“For two more days I sat in there. And for two more days he threw every drunk he could on top of me,” Reynolds recalled. “We never really made up. But I think he was proud of me at the end.”

This report is developing.

Contributing: Hannah Yasharoff and The Associated Press

More: Burt Reynolds has regrets, but he’s still standing and smiling as ‘The Last Movie Star’

 

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With the publication of an anonymous editorial brutally criticizing President Donald Trump, The New York Times set off a guessing game not only about who the author might be, but also why the storied newspaper would provide a platform for an unnamed source.

In the op-ed, the author, identified as “a senior official in the Trump administration,” details concerns about how “the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.”

Anonymous sources are commonly used in news stories, especially in national and international political reporting, but only after careful consideration. It’s a rare occurrence when an editorial is published anonymously.

“It’s so much against the traditional ethics of journalism … clearly it must reflect the Times thinks we’ve got a national crisis ,and unusual times call for unusual measures,” said Rem Rieder, a former USA TODAY media columnist who now teaches media ethics at Widener University in Chester, Pennsylvania. “That doesn’t necessarily mean it was the right thing to do.”

The Times took the “rare step” to publish the op-ed because “we believe publishing this essay anonymously is the only way to deliver an important perspective to our readers,” it said in a statement atop the essay.

The outlet declined to provide additional comment to USA TODAY on the piece.

More: Woodward book ‘Fear’ reflects chaos in White House, says Kelly called Trump an ‘idiot’

More: Mike Pence denies writing critical NYT essay about Trump amid ‘lodestar’ speculation

More: Whodunit? Social media users search for anonymous Trump official who penned scathing NYT essay

A primary reason in favor of the Times running the unnamed Trump administration official’s essay “was really to show the reasoning that somebody might have for working for an amoral boss,” said Kelly McBride, senior vice president at The Poynter Institute. “This is a window into how this individual thinks every day as (he or she) shows up for work.”

The author could not put their name to the essay for fear of losing their job and potential retribution, the Times’ deputy editorial page editor Jim Dao said on The Times’ podcast The Daily. The newsroom “grants anonymity to sources on stories when they feel that those people are in danger of physical danger, of losing their livelihood. Our rules aren’t all that different (for the editorial page),” he said.

Dao recalled the Times has run about four anonymous editorials in the past three years. In this instance, he said, “it was essentially a case of if this person would not be willing to use their real name because they perhaps wanted to remain in the administration to do what they were doing. …. Out of that conversation, we decided that the piece was important enough and strong enough to justify granting anonymity.”

 In June, the Times published an op-ed by an immigrant mother from El Salvador who chronicled the experience she and her 6-year-old son faced in an immigration detention center. Her name was withheld because she feared deportation and gang retaliation, Poynter Institute contributing editor David Beard pointed out at the time.

In the latest column, which quickly generated a national guessing game over its author after its publication online Wednesday, the official claimed to be among many Trump appointees who have “vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.”

The official reveals that early during Trump’s presidency, some in the Cabinet considered “invoking the 25th Amendment,” which would set in motion the potential removal of the president because he is unfit for office. “But no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis. So we will do what we can to steer the administration in the right direction until – one way or another – it’s over,” the official wrote.

Among those denying penning the op-ed were Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Rieder said he believes the Times seriously considered the official’s identity, as well as its message, because eventually the public will learn who the wrote the op-ed. “The credibility of the paper will really be hurt if it turns out it’s not really somebody at or close to the top,” he said.

Anonymous sources are not inherently bad, Rieder said. Bob Woodward, who along with Carl Bernstein relied on help from the anonymous source “Deep Throat” in their coverage of the Watergate break-in that brought down President Richard Nixon, has made the point that “actually a lot more bad information has come out attributed to named sources than to anonymous sources throughout the years,” Rieder said.

Ironically, excerpts of Woodward’s upcoming book, “Fear: Trump in the White House,” out Sept. 12, emerged this week to coincide with the Times’ op-ed to rock the White House. 

But news outlets, in using anonymous sources, run the potential risk that “you can be used because the person is not going to be held accountable,” Rieder said. “So they might be playing with the facts to push their own agenda.”

The anonymous editorial has historical precedent. Founding father Thomas Paine wrote his Common Sense pamphlets anonymously, while Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay used the pseudonym of “Publius” in writing what would be come The Federalist Papers, their essays about the under-consideration Constitution.

“It’s very Revolutionary war … and early American history,” McBride said.

What concerns her is what happens now. Suppose mainstream media outlets regularly began running “really compelling anonymous op-eds on the most contentious issues of the day,” McBride said. “How would that change our discourse, and what would that do for the ability to establish in a democracy a common set of facts, which we are already struggling with? That is what makes me a little queasy about the whole thing.”

In the days ahead, she said, we will learn whether the anonymous op-ed is “a one-off or if it’s a definitive change in how we do journalism.”

Follow USA TODAY reporter Mike Snider on Twitter: @MikeSnider.

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Nations League: Germany v France – past two World Cup winners meet – Live – BBC Sport

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Some people are trying to cash in on hunches over who authored the New York Times editorial ripping the president and his behavior in the White House. 

MyBookie, a gambling site based in the Caribbean island of Curacao, has a list of top Trump administration officials who are a focus of speculation regarding the anonymous opinion piece and is soliciting bets. 

The site lists 18 top Trump officials and also includes a “field” option, referring to potential candidates who are not listed. Vice President Mike Pence is listed as the official with the best odds, even though he has denied any involvement in the essay.

More: Mike Pence denies writing critical NYT essay about Trump amid ‘lodestar’ speculation

More: Whodunit? Social media users search for anonymous Trump official who penned scathing NYT essay

More: Mike Pence denies writing critical NYT essay about Trump amid ‘lodestar’ speculation

Pence has drawn attention because of the word “lodestar,” which appears in the opinion piece and means an inspiration, model or guide. Pence has used the somewhat uncommon word quite a few times in previous speeches and remarks over the years. 

Others who are listed with strong betting odds included Betsy DeVos, education secretary, Mike Pompeo, secretary of state, Steven Mnuchin, treasury secretary, and John Kelly, chief of staff. 

Those with the worst betting odds, but offering the highest rewards, included White House policy adviser Stephen Miller; Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law who also serves as a senior adviser to the president, and Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter who also advises the president on job creation. 

Along with gambling on the author of the piece, which has riled up Washington and the White House, the site also lists a number of other gambling options related to the president and his decisions. 

Gamblers can bet whether the president will charge the writer of the piece with treason or whether Trump will be impeached before the 2020 elections. 

The site gives even odds over whether Fox News host Sean Hannity might be appointed to a post within the White House and whether the president will pardon his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, who was recently convicted by a jury on bank and tax fraud charges. 

The website lists the wagers will end Monday. 

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First lady Melania Trump stepped into the White House’s war on its anonymous critics, condemning the unnamed writer of a New York Times op-ed on President Donald Trump’s fitness for office as “cowardly” in a statement to CNN.

“Unidentified sources have become the majority of the voices people hear about in today’s news,” Trump’s statement lamented. “People with no names are writing our nation’s history.”

The first lady has not been known to regularly weigh in on the Trump administration’s media coverage, certainly not in the open and vociferous way the president has since he took office.

But her spokeswoman, Stephanie Grisham, said she issued the first lady’s statement Thursday after CNN asked her if she had a response to the op-ed essay published late Wednesday, in which an anonymous “senior administration official” described himself or herself as “part of the resistance inside the Trump administration.”

“We were asked the question and she felt it important to respond,” Grisham told USA TODAY.

Trump’s statement opened with a genuflection to free speech and a free press, then shifted to a more rebuking tone.

“The press should be fair, unbiased and responsible,” she chided. “Words are important, and accusations can lead to severe consequences. If a person is bold enough to accuse people of negative actions, they have a responsibility to publicly stand by their words and people have the right to be able to defend themselves.  

“To the writer of the op-ed – you are not protecting this country, you are sabotaging it with your cowardly actions.”

The statement was strong for Melania Trump, who is generally a low-key FLOTUS who rarely tweet-shouts at anybody compared to her husband.

Meanwhile, the president and his aides are furious about the op-ed, coming on the heels of a similarly critical new book about dysfunction in the Oval Office by famed Watergate journalist Bob Woodward.

In a Thursday tweet, the president has called the writer “gutless,” suggested the author does not exist and the Times made it up, demanded the Times turn over the writer for “national security” reasons. A day earlier, he posted a one-word tweet that simply asked, “Treason?” 

By contrast, the first lady’s statement was way less incendiary but still got her point across. Although Melania Trump watches CNN despite her husband’s hostility to the network, she is also known to agree with him in describing the administration’s press coverage as generally unfair. 

But this latest move by her again counters speculation, or wishful thinking, among Trump detractors who think she might herself be a critic of her husband who has chosen to express her dissent in subtle ways. For instance, her first major solo international tour will be in October in Africa, home to some of the countries he reportedly described in crude terms during a January meeting about immigration.

Meanwhile, the White House hunt for the identity of the anonymous inside critic has already begun, including even textual analysis of the essay for telltale signs of possible writers.

News outlets such as USA TODAY and CNN have already published lists of people who might be the author.

So far, Vice President Mike Pence and a number of cabinet members and other high-ranking officials have denied they are the person behind the essay. Among them, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Homeland Security director Kirstjen Nielsen.

 

 

  

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Alastair Cook will retire from international cricket following England’s fifth and final Test against India at The Oval.

The 33-year-old will end his career as England’s most capped player, their leading runscorer, and with his nation’s highest number of centuries and catches to his name.

His 12-year Test career started with a hundred on debut in 2006 and has since taken in the highs of stellar performances in Australia and India, and the lows of being whitewashed down under and the Kevin Pietersen fall-out that followed.

In a wide-ranging interview with BBC cricket correspondent Jonathan Agnew, former captain Cook discussed his decision to retire, his regrets over sacking his mentor Graham Gooch as England batting coach and why he felt the door should not have been completely closed on Pietersen.

You can hear the full interview on Test Match Special during the lunch interval on Friday, day one of the fifth Test between England and India.

On retiring: ‘Even if I had scored runs, I’m not sure I’d have carried on’

Although still relatively young at the age of 33, Cook will leave international cricket with 161 Test caps – only six men have played more Tests in the history of the game.

He bows out at the end of what has been the leanest year of his career – he averages just 18 with the bat in 2018 and has passed 50 only once since a double-century in the Boxing Day Test against Australia in Melbourne.

I feel quite calm and as if a weight has been lifted off my shoulders. It’s been nagging at me for the past six months or so and then there were a couple of moments where the decision made itself. Even if I had scored more runs in this series against India, I’m not sure I would have carried on playing.

There’s just something there that made retiring feel right. Like the captaincy, it is a big thing to give away. My heart is saying ‘go on, play a bit longer’, but my head is so clearly saying that I’m making the right decision.

Things do accentuate when you don’t score as many runs as you would like, but it just feels right at this moment in time.

Naturally, I’m sad that it will be my last game, because it’s been such an amazing journey over the past 12 years – not just for me, but for some of the people closest to me. My wife Alice’s dad said he’d been on about 10 trips abroad to watch me play and my dad would never have gone to somewhere like India if it wasn’t for me playing there. He went all around the country on the train. Stuff like that you really appreciate.

It’s not just me playing cricket, everyone that has been associated with me is the reason why I have been able to do it. Yes, I sacrificed a lot, but people sacrificed a lot to allow me to go and play.

The highs: ‘It taught me to never give up’

An under-pressure Cook made a century in the third Test against Pakistan in 2010, an innings he acknowledges saved his place in the England side.

In the winter that followed, Cook made 766 runs as England won an Ashes series in Australia for the first time in 24 years.

Named captain in 2012, Cook’s first tour as full-time skipper was to India. There, Cook piled on another 562 runs, leading to their first Test series win there in almost three decades.

From a purely selfish, batting point of view, I couldn’t bat any better than the 2010-11 Ashes and then in India in 2012. That was as good as I could play. To score a lot of runs and be man of the series in those two big away wins gives a real satisfaction. The pure emotion of winning the Ashes as captain in 2015, after what had happened before, was incredible.

Having a beer in the dressing room in Sydney in 2011 is a treasured memory. I’d scored some runs and we had done what we had set out to achieve. We talked and everyone had their favourite moment. I said to everyone that if they want to take anything from it, it was to never give up. Six months beforehand I had been one innings from getting dropped and there I was after getting more than 700 runs in a series.

The one thing I know I will miss is the dressing room experience. Experiencing so many things with a group of people has been absolutely amazing.

On captaincy: ‘I got better when I opened my ears & relaxed’

Cook presided over a record 59 Tests as England captain. As well as the win in India, he took England to two home Ashes series victories and a win in South Africa.

However, his record includes a 5-0 whitewash in Australia in 2013-14. He was often criticised for a style that was seen as formulaic or negative.

I suppose you could say I was always having to defend my style of captaincy. I did get a lot of criticism – some of it justified, other times as part of a tactic. I have no doubt when Shane Warne criticised me, that was a tactic because he was such good friends with Australia skipper Michael Clarke.

I grew into the captaincy. The first two years were done very much in my way and that was because that was how I had gone about my batting. I was very stubborn in believing I knew what was right for my game, so that is what I did with the captaincy. I didn’t listen to anyone.

Experience taught me it is such a big job and there are so many things to learn, so I opened my ears and relaxed into it. I definitely got better and so, looking back, I wonder why I didn’t listen to more people. Just because you’re made England captain, it doesn’t mean that you suddenly know everything about captaincy.

It is the most amazing job to do because every day you get tested. I absolutely loved it. There were some real tough moments, but I look back with fondness on a job where you get so much out of it.

On KP: ‘I said we should have given him time off’

After the Ashes whitewash of 2013-14, England discarded batsman Kevin Pietersen. In the aftermath, a struggling Cook came in for heavy criticism, especially after England lost a home series to Sri Lanka and went 1-0 down to India.

Though England recovered to beat India, Cook would later be sacked as one-day captain before their poor World Cup campaign in 2015.

In the aftermath of that, there was a renewed campaign for Pietersen to reinstated by England, one that was only extinguished when Andrew Strauss took over as director of cricket.

It was the toughest time of my career and there’s no doubt that it affected my batting. The day when Straussy came out and said Kevin wasn’t going to play for us anymore, that was a massive weight off my shoulders.

I was involved in the original decision, but the England captain doesn’t have the final say on hiring and firing. I agreed with it, but I said ‘why don’t we give him some time off, we can go away and maybe KP can come back later on’.

Paul Downton, Strauss’ predecessor, wanted clarity and a clean break, because people would always be asking when is Pietersen coming back. You had to back his decision because that’s what his job was.

The fallout was pretty nasty and I don’t think the ECB handled it well or appreciated how social media worked back then. I bore a lot of the brunt of it, but I suppose that’s what being captain is.

I would refute anyone saying that I was the one that chucked Pietersen down the stairs, but I was involved in the decision and I believed it was right at that time. What could have happened a year later, I don’t know.

Looking back, I can safely say all the decisions I made were done for the best of the England cricket team at that time. On that one, there were a lot of other people, way above my head, also involved in it. I felt like I was being left alone as the captain.

I haven’t spoken to Pietersen since that day, but I think time is a great healer. We spent a lot of time together and created some amazing memories. As two blokes, if you take cricket out of it, we have never fallen out. Since then, the internet has fallen out for us. He will have a different opinion, I’m sure.

On Gooch sacking: ‘That was a major regret’

Cook’s hero was former Essex and England batsman Graham Gooch, who mentored the left-hander as he followed a similar career path.

Following the Ashes whitewash, England not only parted company with Pietersen and coach Andy Flower but also Gooch, who was their batting coach. Later, Cook would also move away from having Gooch as his personal batting guru.

I used to watch Graham play and once queued for his autograph. There was my hero – Goochie, Essex and England. If you fast-forward 12 years, he was there at eight in the morning, throwing at me for an hour. After what he achieved in the game, to then be prepared to put the hours into me and be there for me through the good and bad times, just trying to make me a better player, went above and beyond.

We were doing extra sessions all the time. I will always be in debt for that because without that extra bit I would never have become the player I did.

Telling him that he was no longer going to be the batting coach wasn’t great from me, even if I believed it was the right decision. Andy Flower had just left and, because he and Graham were so close, if we still had the same sort of message coming through, I didn’t think we’d move forward.

I thought we needed a fresh start. Even though I thought it was right, I don’t think I should have been the one to tell Goochie that we didn’t want him as coach – that will be a major regret.

It was over a phone call because we kept trying to meet up but couldn’t. It was sad and I should never have allowed it to happen that way. Now, I probably wouldn’t have done, but it’s the sort of thing that happens when you’re growing up as a captain. It’s possibly not the captain’s job, but I can only blame myself for doing it.

On the personal batting side, after 10 years of constantly doing something, it was time for a change. He actually threw the idea into my brain. He asked how I thought we were going and if it was time for a change of voice. On that side, I have no regrets.

Our relationship is fine now and he’s still an absolute legend. We have seen each other less over the past two or three years, but I’m sure that when I have settled back down into playing for Essex we’ll be spending a lot more time together and it will be back to the old days.

On the future: ‘I would love to stay involved in cricket’

Cook has signed a three-year contract to play for Essex that begins in the summer of 2019. Away from the game, his wife is expecting their third child. Throughout his career, his escape from cricket has been to work on his father-in-law’s farm.

What am I going to do? All these questions have been thrown at me. I have never done any media or coaching while I have played – it has all been fully focused on trying to score runs. I will have a look at that stuff when I have a bit of a break over the winter.

For these next six months, I am looking forward to not picking up a cricket bat and not worrying what fitness scores I’m going to get. I’ll get away – that is something which our family needs to do.

Am I happiest on the farm or out in the middle? I am a cricketer, but the farm is a very special place and I absolutely love being in the countryside and getting away from the bubble. I like to think I’m a farmer, but there’s so much experience that goes into that. I would love to stay involved in cricket as much as I would like to stay on the farm. It suits my personality.

For the final Test, I’ll try to score some runs and everything else can take care of itself. I am determined to enjoy this week, focus on the ball when I’m batting and catch everything I can at slip. I will enjoy the privilege of playing for England one last time.