The old family adage that the apple rarely falls far from the tree feels especially apt when it comes to Tiphaine Auzière and her mother, France’s First Lady Brigitte Macron. In both appearance and temperament, the parallels are hard to miss.

Sharp, articulate and politically engaged, Tiphaine has not only campaigned on behalf of her stepfather, French President Emmanuel Macron, but has also pursued elected office in her own right. Like her mother, she has built a public identity defined by independence and determination.

Brigitte Macron, 73, has never been viewed as someone content to fade into the background. Much the same can be said of her youngest daughter, 42, a seasoned lawyer and loyal defender of both her mother and her stepfather — who is only six years older than she is.

Their resemblance is also unmistakable. Mother and daughter share blonde hair, a youthful look, a slim frame and the same broad, distinctive smile that has made the Macron family instantly recognisable in France’s public life.

This week, however, the extent of those similarities appeared even more pronounced. Once again, events have suggested that family history may be circling back on itself.

For as Brigitte is 24 years older than Emmanuel (he was a 15-year-old schoolboy when he met 40-year-old teacher Brigitte Trogneux and soon after they began dating), Tiphaine has tumbled headlong into a love affair with a kitesurfer 20 years her junior.

The identity of the young man following in presidential footsteps? Twenty-something Antoine Lecomte, who quite apart from being something of a high-flyer in the world of kitesurfing, studied at an elite business school and recently launched his own company manufacturing top-of-the-range kites for surfers from the desirable French seaside town of Le Touquet.

In Le Touquet-Paris-Plage, to give the fashionable resort its official name, Antoine, was – perhaps unsurprisingly – looking très content when the Daily Mail caught up with him this week after he returned to shore from an energetic five-hour training session on the water.

Wearing a full wetsuit, covered in sand and brandishing a sail, the 22-year-old grinned as he admitted: ‘I can appreciate why people are interested because our relationship is very similar to that of her mother, Brigitte, and President Macron.’

But it was only after checking in with Tiphaine that he agreed to chat further, stressing: ‘It’s not a summer fling. It’s love, it’s serious. We have plans for the future.

‘I know a lot of people in Le Touquet and they are all happy for us,’ he added.

‘They say if we are happy then they are happy. Age means nothing when you are in love.

‘Tiphaine may be 20 years older but she is fun, exciting and full of joie de vivre.’

There was most definitely a distinct joie de vivre about the couple’s decision to go public with their blossoming romance on Instagram earlier this week.

They each shared the same video compilation, captioned with Gallic insouciance by Antoine ‘48h in ’Dam with Madam’.

The series of clips show Antoine, who is originally from Lille but moved to Le Touquet after spending summer holidays there as a child, and Tiphaine in the Dutch city of Amsterdam where they spent a loved-up long weekend last month.

The opening image is of the attractive couple cheek to cheek in a shopping centre, before the reel rolls through road-trip images in his white VW Campervan. Tiphaine reclines on the bed while Antoine is at the wheel.

Then they are seen checking into the exclusive Faralda Hotel, which is built into a 50-metre-high dockside crane.

Rooms start at £900 for the night and the three suites – named Free Spirit, Secret and Mystique – are available to book by ‘request and invitation only’. There was more cosy footage of the couple strolling around Amsterdam, visiting galleries.

If the age gap has raised any eyebrows, it’s not fazing either mother-of-two Tiphaine, who separated from former partner, gastroenterologist and hepatologist Antoine Choteau in January 2025, or Antoine, who tells the Daily Mail he has had two previous relationships.

The dashing young businessman (he was out testing sails for his fledgling company, Mission Kiteboarding, when the Daily Mail spoke to him), admits he didn’t actually know who Tiphaine was when she came to him for efoil surfing lessons at the beginning of the summer.

An efoil is an electrically powered hydrofoil surfboard that allows the surfer to glide smoothly across the top of the water and Antoine is manager of Le Touquet’s efoil surf school, a business he oversees from a kiosk overlooking an estuary where Tiphaine posted a photograph of herself in a wetsuit, unzipped to reveal her back, in June this year.

‘La future James Bond girl,’ quipped one follower. If the striking Tiphaine is a Bond girl, then Antoine is certainly channelling James Bond in video footage from last summer that shows him, in a suit, riding his board across the water to a nearby restaurant, carrying a silver platter of seafood to a waiting diner.

On the subject of his new amour, Antoine says: ‘She came for some efoil lessons at the beginning of the summer, we got on and she came back a few times and then we met up at a party I was invited to.

‘But I had no idea she was Brigitte Macron’s daughter until later; it doesn’t bother me, we get on really well and that is the most important thing, we make each other happy.’

Antoine confessed he has been ‘reading all about us’ since news of the relationship went public at the start of the week but insisted that discovering Tiphaine’s background didn’t ‘change anything between us’.

He added: ‘Like I said it’s very serious, it’s not a summer relationship we have a lot of plans together. We are going to Asia in a few weeks on business.

‘She [Tiphaine] is a lawyer, and I have to develop my factory in Sri Lanka so she will help me, and we will go together. I’m hoping the business will get stronger.’

He sounds like a young man who knows what he wants, a trait that makes him more than a little like his new girlfriend’s stepfather.

Emmanuel Macron first met his wife in 1992 when he was a teenage pupil at the Providence Catholic school in Amiens, north of Paris, where she taught drama.She was a married mother-of-three and he was in the same class as her eldest daughter Laurence – who is now a cardiologist. The pair went on to rewrite a play together, which they later admitted was the period when they fell in love. At the time, Emmanuel was just 16.

In an interview with Paris Match, Brigitte confided: ‘I could feel I was falling, he was too…’ before adding: ‘At 17, Emmanuel told me, “Whatever you do, I will marry you!” Love took everything in its passage and led me to divorce. It was impossible to resist him.’

She acknowledged how difficult the situation must have been for her children, saying: ‘You can imagine what they were hearing. But I didn’t want to miss out on my life.’

She did not divorce her first husband until 2006, marrying her former student a year later, by which time he was a civil servant in his late twenties.

He asked his soon-to-be stepchildren for their permission.

The location of the wedding? Le Touquet, at the same town hall where Brigitte married her first husband, Andre-Louis Auziere. She was 54; her groom, 29. A videotape of Macron’s speech at their wedding reception shows him paying tribute to Tiphaine and her siblings, brother Sebastien and sister Laurence.

‘I want to thank you for accepting us and loving us as we are. Especially I want to thank Brigitte’s children,’ he said. ‘If there’s anyone for whom this would not have been simple, it’s them.’

Curiously, Brigitte’s children do not appear to have been troubled by the relationship, indeed Tiphaine has long spoken of her admiration for her mother and stepfather, who have long had a holiday home in Le Touquet (they recently sold one and are thought to have bought another).

‘If I have to give a vision of love, it’s Emmanuel and Mummy,’ said Tiphaine, speaking in a 2018 documentary. ‘When they are together, it is almost as if the world doesn’t exist.’

She returned to the subject of her mother’s second marriage in 2024, saying: ‘A family break-up can be both a heartbreak and an opportunity. Mixing families together can be enriching.

‘I have an adored mother and stepfather.’ She’s campaigned for her stepfather, who she once described as ‘exceptional, brilliant. He’s someone with a long-term vision of society.’

Tiphaine, who works in Paris but lives near to Le Touquet, has also been fiercely protective of her mother amid the numerous barbs and attacks thrown her way, about her age, her relationship with her husband and even preposterous claims that she was born a man.

‘I find it abhorrent in France in the 21st century such attacks [happen], which would not be carried out against a male politician or a male companion of a female politician. There’s a lot of jealousy,’ said Tiphaine after a volley of abuse in 2017.

She was also her mother’s staunch defender when online conspiracy theorists faced a French court last year, telling the court: ‘She’s not elected, she has not sought anything, and she is permanently subjected to these attacks. I – as a daughter, a woman and a mother – would not wish her life on anyone.’

Antoine is understood to have already met Tiphaine’s daughters Élise, 12, and Aurèle, ten, and a meeting with Brigitte is rumoured to be on the cards.

Meanwhile, their fledgling relationship has the blessing of Antoine’s parents too.

‘My parents know. They haven’t met Tiphaine yet but they are happy. We expect a lot of attention now but Tiphaine is not my first girlfriend, I’ve had two relationships before,’ says Antoine.

‘People are not bothered about us and the age gap, they treat us normally but we laugh a lot together and we help each other, and enjoy time together, she is in Paris now but we will see each other soon.’

It is only when we venture to ask him what in particular he finds so attractive about his blonde-haired older lover that Antoine demurs.

With a gentlemanly flourish, he smiles. ‘Now you are asking too much, I cannot tell you everything about us but I will tell you we are happy and in love.

‘I cannot say anything else because she asked me not to say too much.’

The troubling part of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s newly unveiled Racial Equity Plan is its pledge to tackle racial “disparities” while appearing to misread what drives them — and to lean toward a deeply divisive remedy: race-based favoritism.

The more reassuring part, judging from both the proposal itself and Mamdani’s political track record, is that there is little evidence he will be able to turn those sweeping promises into reality.

At the heart of the debate is a basic American ideal: the country was built around equal opportunity, not guaranteed equal results. Expecting identical outcomes across groups, despite major differences in individual choices, circumstances and effort, reflects the kind of utopian thinking often associated with socialist politics.

That mindset can lead policymakers toward measures that are unfair, legally questionable and unlikely to solve the very inequities they claim to address.

It is worth remembering that the great civil rights victories in the United States were rooted in the fight for equal rights under the law — first for Black Americans and other racial minorities, and later for women — not in a demand that government engineer equal outcomes.

Equal opportunity was, is and always should be the ideal.

The Mamdani plan’s main mistake is that it assumes racial disparities are chiefly the result of “historical harm” — never mind that slavery ended 160 years and the civil-rights reforms rolled back most official racist policies more than 60 years ago.

Indeed, the plan sees “systemic racism” sewn into the fabric of the city’s history, governance and policies.

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And then hints of addressing disparities by giving minorities an edge, in one form or another.

Fortunately, except in a few places, the report offers little meat on the bones for achieving that. It largely calls for studies, recommendations, data, etc. — as opposed to actual, immediate, concrete changes.

Unfortunately, where there is meat, it’s rancid. When it comes to “racial equity” goals set by the city’s Administration for Children’s Services, for example, Naomi Schaefer Riley fumes that “reducing racial inequity trumps reducing abuse and neglect” of kids “every time.”

ACS’s emphasis on race-based approaches “will only put more children, of all races, in grave danger.”

The plan also aims to expand race-based contracting, which is unconstitutional and undermines fair, unbiased competitive bidding. The government shouldn’t combat “racial disparities” by discriminating in favor supposedly “harmed” racial groups.

Thank goodness Mamdani is generally more interested in symbols than results, as is clear from his promises for government-run grocery stores, free buses, universal child care and more.

Equity hustlers like him, who traffic in the fiction of equal outcomes, are mainly looking to profit politically from the resentments their false claims and hollow promises stoke.

Let’s hope that’s the worst of the damage his plan causes.

Jim Thornton has been dismissed from Wheel of Fortune after photos surfaced that allegedly showed him viewing a chatroom labeled “pedophilia” on his laptop during a flight.

Sony Pictures Television confirmed the move in a statement Friday afternoon, four days after the 61-year-old longtime announcer was suspended from the hit game show.

“Following a thorough investigation, Jim Thornton’s employment with Wheel of Fortune has been terminated, effective immediately,” a company representative told the Daily Mail.

The decision came the same day the Daily Mail published images it said were taken by another passenger aboard an American Airlines flight in May, purportedly showing Thornton accessing the site while on the plane.

A zoomed-in image of the laptop screen appeared to show troubling chat messages, including one user referring to a restaurant as “a nice hangout for kids” and describing a “couple of cute boys and a hot little girl.”

Another unsettling message reads, ‘All-you-can-eat Boyffet.’ There is also a message referencing ‘CP’ which the passenger who took the photos believed to be short for ‘child pornography.’

From the timestamps on the photos – which show Thornton wearing a Wheel of Fortune jacket – it appears he was in the chatroom for at least 57 minutes.

Thornton’s lawyer, Allison Hart, told TMZ that the voice actor clicked on the site by mistake. 

The Daily Mail has reached out to Thornton for comment but has yet to hear back. 

Hours after he was fired, Thornton’s Facebook account was no longer publicly accessible. The account was active earlier that day and featured behind-the-scenes photos and videos of Thornton on the popular game show set.

Thornton’s name and photos were also removed from the show’s social media channels.

Hart said that Thornton had ‘become active in suicide-prevention advocacy since losing a close family member to suicide two years ago, and he has spent time visiting chat rooms offering support to individuals suffering from suicidal ideation.’ 

Hart said that Thornton often visited a suicide prevention website named 988lifeline.org and its chat forum, chat.988lifeline.org. 

Thornton claims he was sent a link to a different chatroom, lifeline.chat, by an acquaintance from the suicide prevention group. The site is intended for people experiencing pedophilic thoughts. 

Thornton claims he left the chatroom after realizing what it was. 

His lawyer added that the website he visited is ‘not unlawful, there is no unlawful child pornography or other pedophilic content, and my client never viewed, downloaded or consumed any child pornography whether on that commercial flight in May or at any other time.’ 

Hart said that the announcer ‘did not engage in any illegal conduct, was not arrested, and has not been charged with any crime.’ 

The attorney claimed: ‘When questioned about the complaint made by a fellow passenger on the flight, law enforcement spoke to him for five minutes or less, immediately determined that no wrongdoing had occurred and told my client he was free to go.’ 

According to TMZ, another passenger allegedly complained about Thornton to a flight attendant back on the American Airlines plane back in May. 

The plane’s pilot arranged to have law enforcement waiting for Thornton once he reached the gate.

Thornton was questioned by the officers before he was allowed to go on his way. 

In a statement to the Daily Mail, American Airlines said: ‘On May 14, American Airlines Flight 1276 was met by law enforcement upon arrival at Los Angeles International Airport following concerns reported by a customer onboard.’

Thornton’s tenure with the show began in 2011, when he replaced former announcer Charlie O’Donnell after his death in November 2010 at 78. 

Thornton is rarely seen on the show, which is hosted by Vanna White and Ryan Seacrest.

However, TMZ noted that in 2023 he filled in for then-host Pat Sajak to host a round of the competition because a contestant was hoping to meet him.

Thornton had a brief stint as an announcer on The Price Is Right in 2004. 

He’s also done voice work in Disney-Pixar’s film Monsters, Inc and the video game adaptation of Wall-E. 

The live-action announcer is best known for appearing on the animated comedy The Cleveland Show and MTV’s Celebrity Deathmatch. 

A new study is raising fresh concerns about the risks of getting behind the wheel after consuming cannabis edibles, finding that drivers can be meaningfully impaired even when blood tests show THC levels well under the legal threshold.

Published in JAMA Network Open, the research points to a growing challenge for police and regulators in Canada and in parts of the United States where cannabis-related impaired driving laws rely heavily on blood THC measurements.

Until now, much of the research on cannabis and driving has focused on smoked or inhaled marijuana, which sends THC — tetrahydrocannabinol, the main intoxicating compound in cannabis — into the bloodstream more quickly and at higher short-term levels.

Edibles work differently. Because they are processed through the digestive system, their effects build more slowly and can disrupt driving ability even when measured THC concentrations in the blood appear comparatively low.

In the study, participants who took larger doses of edible THC had more trouble staying in their lane, reacted more slowly and showed wider swings in speed. Despite those signs of impairment, their blood THC levels remained below the legal cutoff commonly used to establish cannabis impairment during roadside enforcement.

To assess how oral cannabis impacts driving, researchers at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto conducted a trial with 40 healthy adult volunteers who regularly use cannabis.

Each participant attended four separate sessions in which they consumed soft-chew gummies containing either 0, 2, 10 or 20 milligrams of THC.

The researchers then tested the drivers using a driving simulator at two, five and 24 hours after consumption, tracking how well drivers stayed in their lane, how quickly they reacted to road events and how consistently they maintained their speed.

Blood samples and self-reported ratings of intoxication were also collected.

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The results showed driving impairment at two and five hours after consuming 10- and 20-milligram gummies. Compared with placebo, participants who consumed those doses had greater variability in lane position, while the 20-milligram dose was also linked to slower reaction times and less consistent speed control.

Participants also recognized their own limitations, reporting a lower willingness to drive and reduced confidence in their driving skills after taking the gummies.

The highest blood THC concentrations averaged 1.6 nanograms per milliliter after the 10-milligram dose and 3.4 nanograms per milliliter after the 20-milligram dose. Those levels were below the commonly used 5-ng/mL threshold, although THC limits vary by jurisdiction and some individual samples exceeded 5 ng/mL.

By comparison, participants in the team’s previous smoked-cannabis study showed similar levels of impairment while reaching an average peak blood THC concentration of 30.3 nanograms per milliliter, nearly 10 times higher than the 20-milligram edible group.

The study did have some limitations. Tests were conducted on virtual simulators rather than actual roads, meaning drivers faced no real physical risk during the experiments. It also focused on regular cannabis users, so it is unclear how occasional users might react to similar doses.

Additionally, minimal residual effects were detected after 24 hours. While maximum speed remained slightly higher among participants on the 10-milligram and 20-milligram doses, subjective feelings of intoxication had completely faded.

In an accompanying commentary, Dr. José Ignacio Nazif-Munoz of the Université de Sherbrooke noted that these biological differences pose a challenge for law enforcement.

Because edibles are absorbed slowly through the digestive system, standard blood tests may fail to identify unsafe drivers, leaving policymakers searching for more reliable roadside tools.

“The delayed absorption and prolonged duration of effects of edible cannabis distinguish it from smoked or inhaled cannabis, complicating the interpretation of biological measures,” he wrote.

The Trump administration used the promise of access to Nvidia’s powerful artificial intelligence chips as a diplomatic bargaining tool in efforts to help end a long-running conflict, according to a new report.

American negotiators reportedly pointed to potential access to Nvidia’s advanced AI hardware as they sought to encourage Armenia to proceed with a peace agreement with neighboring Azerbaijan, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Armenia and Azerbaijan have been locked for decades in a fierce dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh, a contested region that has repeatedly drawn the two South Caucasus nations into armed conflict.

Their leaders initialed a US-brokered peace agreement last August after White House involvement, and fresh reporting suggests that what officials described as “chip diplomacy” became a notable factor in the negotiations.

As part of that push, the US was able to leverage the prospect of 70,000 Nvidia AI processors for a proposed Armenian data center project called Firebird, valued at about $5 billion.

AI processor technology is becoming increasingly valuable as countries race to bolster their AI computer structures, offering the US powerful leverage on the global stage. 

‘For this administration, chip diplomacy is front and center,’ senior Nvidia executive Rev Lebaredian, who is of Armenian descent, told the Wall Street Journal. 

‘Our presence in Armenia and our investment in it is a big factor in creating the conditions by which peace can unfold.’ 

Amenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan thanked President Donald Trump for making the data center happen, as part of the deal gave his nation deeper economic and tech ties with the US. 

On a February visit to the country, Vice President JD Vance said the deal meant ‘new markets for American workers and for American businesses, but it also means greater prosperity for the people of Armenia.’ 

Washington has also used AI hardware as a benefit for deals with the UAE and Saudi Arabia. 

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The deals have become a part of Trump’s increasing ties with Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s CEO and eighth on the Forbes Rich List, who advises the President on artificial intelligence. 

Huang called the data center the start of their work to ‘connect this region to the global AI economy’ in a video message at the ribbon cutting. 

US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff has proposed building rail lines, pipelines and roads that connect Azerbaijan to its exclave of Nakhchivan, named the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity and set to begin construction next year. 

Trump has often bragged of having ended multiple wars during his second term in the White House. 

But his status as ‘the peace President’ has been tenuous as the fighting in Iran has now surpassed months. 

However, Trump has claimed to have ended at least ten wars during his second term after a mid-August ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon. 

Trump said on Truth Social at the time: ‘It has been my honor to solve nine wars across the world, and this will be my tenth, so let’s GET IT DONE!’

Trump insisted Friday that the US conflict with Iran is not a war, doubling down on his assertion that the deadly, more than six-month military campaign in Iran is ‘small potatoes.’

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump was asked about the war in Iran, and to respond to Vice President JD Vance’s claim, one day earlier, that the ongoing conflict is ‘not a war.’

‘I’ll tell you what,’ Trump said. ‘A lot of people call it a war. I call it a military conflict,  because it’s small potatoes,’ Trump said. 

At least 18 US service members have been killed in the war with Iran since it began in February 2026, according to data from the Department of Defense, and a much higher number – at least 767 US service members – have been injured.