Bruce Willis’s wife hits back at criticism over latest decision

Bruce Willis’s wife Emma Heming Willis has hit back at trolls who criticised her decision to move the actor out of their family home as his condition progresses.

Emma, 47, announced this week that the 70-year-old Die Hard actor, who has frontotemporal dementia (FTD), would have wanted their daughters’ lives to be unaffected by adjustments in their living space.

“Too often, caregivers are judged quickly and unfairly by those who haven’t lived this journey or stood on the front lines of it,” she said on Instagram after receiving flak online.

Model and entrepreneur Emma, who described the choice as the “hardest decision”, added that she expected judgement and criticism, but shared the update as “it creates connection and validation for those actually navigating the realities of caregiving every day”.

“That’s who I share for and so I can build a deeper connection with a community that understands this journey,” she said.

Emma added that those who criticise often “don’t have the experience to back it up”, which she said strips their viewpoint of effect.

“The truth is, the opinions are so loud and they’re so noisy, but if they don’t have any experience of this, they don’t get a say.”

Willis is now living with a full-time care team in a one-storey home as his condition develops and his needs become more complex and intensive.

According to the NHS, frontotemporal dementia, which Willis was diagnosed with in February 2023, affects behaviour and language, and gets worse over time.

“He would want them to be in a home that was more tailored to their needs, not his needs,” she told Diane Sawyer in the ABC special Emma & Bruce Willis: The Unexpected Journey.

Emma married the Pulp Fiction actor in 2009 and the couple have two daughters, 13-year-old Mabel and 11-year-old Evelyn.

Emma said she has tried to ensure continuity for the family by taking their daughters to have breakfast and dinner with their dad.

“When we go over, either we’re outside, or we’re watching a movie,” she explained. “It’s just really about being able to be there, and connect with Bruce.”

“It is a house that is filled with love, and warmth, and care, and laughter. And it’s been beautiful to see that, to see how many of Bruce’s friends continue to show up for him, and they bring in life, and fun.”

Providing an update on the star’s health, she added: “Bruce is still very mobile. Bruce is in really great health overall. It’s just his brain that is failing him.”

She explained that his language abilities are “going”, but the family have “learned to adapt”.

She has written a new book about her experience titled The Unexpected Journey: Finding Strength, Hope, and Yourself on the Caregiving Path.

“We have a way of communicating with him, which is just a… different way.”

Willis has maintained a strong relationship with his ex-wife Demi Moore, with whom he shares three children: Rumer, Scout, and Tallulah. The family have described the condition as a “cruel disease” with no cure.

Earlier this year, Rumer, 37, opened up about the challenges of not being able to converse with her father as she once used to.

In a Father’s Day post, she wrote: “Today is hard, I feel a deep ache in my chest to talk to you and tell you everything I’m doing and what’s going on in my life. To hug you and ask you about life and your stories and struggles and successes.

“I wish I asked you more questions while you could still tell me about it all.”

Pierce Brosnan: ‘A seventysomething Bond? They know where to find me’

Thirty years ago, Pierce Brosnan announced himself as 007 with a dizzying jump from a vast, vertiginous concrete dam in one of the best openings to one of the best Bonds, GoldenEye. The 72-year-old makes a slightly more relaxed entrance today, but he’s every bit as unruffled as the suave super spy. A sharply cut navy blue suit. A lustrous, swooping grey mane. He strolls into the room with the composure of a man who knows exactly how to occupy a space without crowding it.

Back in 1995, he was joining a franchise born of the international success of a famous series of novels. So too now, as he arrives on our screens in The Thursday Murder Club, adapted from the first of Richard Osman’s bestselling blue-rinse detective stories. They’re a crime-fiction phenomenon: four OAP sleuths, astronomical sales and, inevitably, grumblings about their cosy, middle-class view of Britain. Too sanitised by half, some have said. That, Brosnan responds, “is a lot of hogwash”.

The first novel, published in 2020, is set in an upmarket retirement village in the fictional Kentish town of Fairhaven. Four of its residents have formed a “murder club” that meets once a week to delve into unsolved cases from the past. Then someone is killed on their doorstep, and they turn their attention to solving the clues right under their noses.

Of course, it’s the whiff of well-heeled privilege that gets some people’s goat. “I think that’s a little ill directed,” Brosnan sighs, in his elegant Irish burr. “I mean, it’s entertainment, and you want to be dazzled. You want to transport people, and you want them to come away with a wonderful sense of ‘I want to be there when I’m old. I want to grow old like this.’”

Osman based it on the retirement village where his mother Brenda lives, observing on visits that “as an Agatha Christie fan, this would be an amazing place for a murder”. The film doubles down and makes it even more upscale, with pretty Aldbury in Hertfordshire standing in for Fairhaven, and the stately Elizabethan manor of Englefield House in Berkshire doubling as Osman’s retirement village, Coopers Chase.

The star power on screen, too, shows just how certain the producers are that audiences will want to see Osman’s story brought to life. The murder club members are played by Helen Mirren (as former spy Elizabeth Best); Ben Kingsley (as retired psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif); Celia Imrie (as ex-nurse Joyce Meadowcroft); and Brosnan (as former union leader Ron Ritchie, a West Ham fanatic).

The film also locks on to a trend for golden oldie drama that has produced some big hits over the past decade and a half, from TV’s Last Tango in Halifax to the 2011 film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Brosnan is very comfortable with his own advancing age. “I have become [an OAP],” he says. “One grows into one’s years, and that is a gift in itself. It’s wonderful at the age of 72 to have had a career and to still find employment.” He had a “glorious summer” making the movie, he tells me.

He also got a huge kick out of playing “Red Ron” (although he’s shaved off the beard that he grew for the part). “Ron and I are joined at the hip in some respects,” he argues. “He has gone out into the trenches fighting for the cause. As an actor, I’ve gone out and done the same in the world of environmental activism. I know what it’s like to go up against ‘the man’, to protest, to be part of the endeavour to do well by your fellow man, your environment, whether it be oceans or old-growth trees.”

When I press for more on this, Brosnan tells me to google him, and calls out millennials like me and the Gen Z cohort that has followed. He’s backed up by every news report of eightysomethings being arrested in Gaza demonstrations.

“This generation is not protesting enough. It seems to have kind of lost a voice for speaking out against what is happening, whether it be in politics or the environment, or life. But the restrictions now are quite severe. You can feel the manacle of power. But nevertheless, I think, if one keeps hope and faith alive, that the pendulum will swing back to an equilibrium of dignity and compassion for each other.”

Underpinning this belief in fighting for a better world is a steely core. Brosnan made it without privilege smoothing a path for him. Acting liberated him from a childhood filled with adversity. Born in Drogheda on the east coast of Ireland, 30 miles up from Dublin, he spent the majority of his early years with his grandparents in nearby Navan, after his father abandoned the family when he was still an infant. His mother left for England as an economic migrant to build a new life as a nurse, then remarried and brought her son to join her just before his teenage years.

Life in Navan was “fairly solitary”, he later recalled, but his roots remain important to him; his experience of London was of being bullied at school and learning to hold his own, yet there was a price to pay. “I left school at 15 feeling fairly useless and not really up to scratch in my education,” he told The Independent in 2006.

He thought of becoming a commercial artist (“I love art; I’m a painter,” he tells me), but acting offered another way forward. And his resilience served him well as he struggled through the ranks in regional theatre, then film and TV bit parts: “Last Victim” in Hammer House of Horror, for instance, and “First Irishman” in The Long Good Friday, where he memorably cruises one of Bob Hoskins’s underlings at a swimming pool before stabbing him in the ribs. Electing to try his hand in the USA, he used his dreamboat looks and debonair manner to win the title role (well, sort of, it’s complicated) in 94 episodes of the high-concept detective series Remington Steele between 1982 and 1987.

The show put him in the running to play Bond, but he couldn’t escape his contract in order to take over from Roger Moore in 1986. That time, Timothy Dalton stepped in, but when the franchise rebooted in 1995 after a tedious six-year legal dispute, its producers took advantage of Dalton’s contract having lapsed to install the younger man. It paid off.

Since they’d run out of Ian Fleming books to adapt, the Bond films had been slowly dying on the vine. Brosnan and GoldenEye breathed vivid new life into the franchise – much in the way that Casino Royale did with Daniel Craig – and the same will be needed again in the death-of-Bond era. Ricky Gervais joked in a tweet about taking on the role himself – a notion Brosnan toys with as worth exploring, especially since “you have to be tough as old boots to play the role, because not everyone is going to be happy with you”.

Brosnan starred in four outings, with Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), The World Is Not Enough (1999) and Die Another Day (2002) following GoldenEye, before he was ruthlessly replaced himself, at 52, by Craig. He seems to bear no grudges about this at all (“Daniel was a magnificent, brilliant James Bond, monumental James Bond”).

It wasn’t an endpoint for Brosnan, though. His self-aware performance in the 1999 remake of The Thomas Crown Affair, released in the months before his penultimate outing as Bond, has aged beautifully with its knowing twinkle. (He hasn’t seen it since the premiere, but really should.) It pointed the way to a classy post-007 career that has included well-regarded indies such as The Matador (2005) and The Ghost (2010), blockbusters like Mamma Mia (2008) and its 2018 sequel, and this year’s hit Guy Ritchie gangster series MobLand – even if the latter landed Brosnan with a viral roasting for his Kerry accent. He’d been intending to play the character as a south Londoner, he tells me, when he showed up for work, and bang – “On the day, [Guy] said, ‘No, go Irish.’” He had 20 minutes.

“My Irish accent is very soft and subtle, and the Kerry accent is a very strong accent,” he says, “so I called up my dialect coach, Brendan Gunn, who’s a great man, artist, lives in Belfast. And I said, give me a Kerry accent. And he said, well, check this guy out on YouTube.” It had an emotional resonance for him – “My old man, Tom Brosnan, who I never knew, he was from Kerry. So there was some kind of intuition, gut instinct, and I just leapt off straight into this Kerry accent.”

He was tempted to join The Thursday Murder Club, meanwhile, by an old pal, director Chris Columbus, who had first cast him in Mrs Doubtfire – on which he remembers his surreal first meeting with Robin Williams (“he had a Hawaiian shirt on and cargo pants, hairy arms, hairy legs and the head of Mrs Doubtfire”) – then later in Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief. It’s entirely possible that Columbus and Brosnan could be on the brink of another long-running franchise. Osman’s series reaches novel number five with the release of The Impossible Fortune in September.

I can’t help feeling, though, that he’s owed another Bond. I’d love to see an entry in the series that was like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, with a septuagenarian 007. Could he be the surprise package the franchise needs? “Well, that’s a good question,” he says. “Richard Osman was saying the same thing, ironically, this morning, and I don’t know Richard that well, but he waxed lyrical about my being an older Bond.” It sounds as if he likes the idea… “It’s very possible,” he says with a smile. “They know where to find me.”

‘The Thursday Murder Club’ is streaming on Netflix

Queen’s stance on Brexit and view of the EU unveiled in new book

Queen Elizabeth II was a Remainer who did not support Brexit but thought that EU bureaucracy was “ridiculous”, according to a new book.

The late Queen reportedly told a senior minister three months before the Brexit referendum that “we shouldn’t leave the EU”, adding: “It’s better to stick with the devil you know.”

The account, from a snippet of Valentine Low’s book Power and the Palace in The Times, was supported by a palace insider who said the late Queen saw the EU as part of the postwar settlement, marking an era of cooperation after two world wars.

While the late Queen was a Remainer, she did find herself irritated by Brussels bureaucracy once remarking “this is ridiculous” while reading the papers.

Former prime minister David Cameron said: “She was so careful never to express a political view, but you always sensed that, like most of her subjects, she thought that European cooperation was necessary and important, but the institutions of the EU sometimes can be infuriating.”

When Mr Cameron heard of the Queen’s views on Brexit, he chose not to use it in the Remain campaign. This same view was not held by the Leave campaign, after a story was placed in The Sun implying the Queen supported plans to leave the European Union.

The Sun published a front page at the time which read “Queen Backs Brexit”, reporting on a lunch at Windsor in 2011 between deputy prime minister Nick Clegg and the late Queen, where she reportedly said she thought the EU was heading in the wrong direction.

She allegedly said: “I don’t understand Europe.” The story was denied by Mr Clegg, who accused former Conservative MP Michael Gove of leaking the story.

Buckingham Palace complained to IPSO, although it did not issue a strong denial for the story; Mr Low says that it was understood that any official denial would imply the Queen was a Remainer, and she could not vote as a state head above politics. Other members of the royal family, while able to vote, typically adhere to the same philosophy.

An ardent environmentalist, King Charles III’s politics have long attracted attention, particularly after reports in 2022 that he expressed his disdain for Conservative government plans to fly asylum seekers to Rwanda.

According to anonymous sources, the then-Prince was reported to have said he was “more than disappointed at the policy. He said he thinks the government’s whole approach is appalling. It was clear he was not impressed with the government’s direction of travel”.

Clarence House said in response to the leaked comments: “We would not comment on supposed anonymous private conversations with the Prince of Wales, except to restate that he remains politically neutral.”

Buckingham Palace has been approached for comment.

Prime Madeleine McCann suspect to be released from prison within weeks

German prosecutors have confirmed that their prime suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann will be released from prison within weeks.

Christian Brückner, 48, is currently serving a sentence in northern Germany for the rape of a 72-year-old American tourist in Portugal in 2005. He will be freed by 17 September at the latest, according to Hans Christian Wolters, the lead prosecutor investigating Madeleine’s disappearance.

Mr Wolters told the BBC that although prosecutors consider Brückner dangerous, the current legal situation means he must be released without delay.

Brückner has never been charged in relation to Madeleine’s disappearance and denies any involvement.

The then three-year-old vanished from her family’s holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, Algarve, on 3 May 2007. Her parents had been dining with friends nearby, checking on their children throughout the evening until Kate McCann discovered Madeleine was missing around 10pm local time.

The case became one of the most high-profile missing persons investigations in Europe. German prosecutors say they have evidence placing Brückner in the area at the time of Madeleine’s disappearance.

Brückner “is not just our number one suspect, he’s the only suspect,” Mr Wolters said. “There is no-one else. We have evidence which speaks against [Brückner], which indicates that he is responsible for the disappearance and the death of Madeleine McCann.

“We haven’t found anything in the last five years that exonerates [him]. We found evidence that strengthens our case. But in our view it’s not strong enough to make a guilty verdict likely, and that’s why so far we couldn’t charge him or apply for an arrest warrant.”

Differences between legal systems mean German authorities suspect Brückner of murder, while British police continue to treat the case as a missing person inquiry.

Mr Wolters, who has led German efforts since Brückner was identified as a suspect in 2020, said an expert assessment had concluded he remained a danger to society. “You have to expect [Brückner] to commit further crimes,” he said.

Prosecutors are now seeking restrictions to be imposed on Brückner after his release, including an ankle tag. The conditions will be decided at a private court hearing.

Brückner, who lived in the Algarve for many years, is a convicted sex offender with previous offences of child sexual abuse in 1994 and 2016. He is known to have been in the Praia da Luz area between 2000 and 2017, and investigators have linked his mobile phone data and a car sale to their case.

Make the most of London this summer with this stadium experience

Whether you’re experiencing London for the first time or you’re a family with kids keen to create unforgettable memories during the holidays, a visit to this world-famous stadium in North London is a must.

After 90 years at their beloved Highbury stadium, Arsenal’s ambitions outgrew their original home and in 2006, the club opened the Emirates. With a seating capacity of over 60,000, the Emirates stadium is one of the largest in England. The sheer scale of this field of dreams must be seen to believed — and thanks to its easy-to-reach location, you can hop on a bus or train and get there in no time.

Once there, Arsenal’s award-winning tours open the doors to parts of the stadium that are usually off-limits to the public. For sightseers who prefer to go at their own pace and for those with little ones who tire easily, the club’s self-guided audio-visual tour is a great option.

Fans and families can take their time to soak in the atmosphere and stroll in the footsteps of footballing legends, imagining the roar of the crowd as you step into the players’ tunnel. Afterwards, feel the tension rise in the dugout and experience the best seats in the house in the directors’ box.

It’s a rare opportunity to glimpse the inner workings of a prestigious football club and explore normally restricted areas that also include the home and away dressing rooms, the media lounge and the exclusive members-only Diamond Club.

Available in seven languages on a state-of-the-art handheld device, the tour is narrated by Arsenal presenter David Frimpong, otherwise known as ‘Frimmy’, as well as featuring commentary from Arsenal legends Alex Scott and David Seaman.

As well as audio, the tour recreates the electric atmosphere of matchday using 360-degree augmented footage and includes brand new interactive elements. You can also take souvenir photos with iconic Arsenal trophies, including that of the UEFA Women’s Champions League.

The Arsenal Legend Stadium Tour is a more bespoke alternative to the self-guided tour, where visitors can explore the stadium for 90 minutes alongside an Arsenal hero. Tour guides include Nigel Winterburn and Perry Groves, as well as former women’s captain Faye White MBE.

During the tour, the Arsenal legend will share memories, anecdotes and behind-the-scenes stories from their time on the pitch, offering a unique insider’s perspective on life at the club. Expect plenty of humour, fascinating insights and a chance to hear back-room gossip straight from the legends themselves. There’s also a chance for a Q&A and photo opportunity with your Arsenal legend of choice.

Included with every tour ticket is entry into Arsenal’s interactive museum situated right next door to the stadium. Chart the club’s evolution from humble origins in Woolwich in 1886 to its modern powerhouse status with a global following of over 100 million fans.

The museum features two impressive video theatres, showing highlights from the club’s origins to the present day as well as twenty major displays of Arsenal’s proud history. Feast your eyes on silverware from the club’s most successful eras, Michael Thomas’s boots from Anfield 1989 and Jens Lehmann’s goalkeeper gloves worn for every league match of the unbeaten Invincibles season in 2003/4.

For lifelong Gooners, it’s a trip down memory lane. For families and tourists, it’s an eye-opening lesson in why football matters so much to the UK and is the perfect outing to experience London at its most authentic.

This content is brought to you by Living360, a digital lifestyle destination keeping you up to date with health and fitness, food and drink, homes and gardens, beauty, travel, finance trends and more.

​Eating these simple foods could cut your risk of death, study shows

Eating leafy greens and foods such as bananas may cut the risk of heart disease, irregular heartbeats and death by up to a quarter, a new study has shown.

Potassium-rich foods, such as salmon, broccoli and spinach, can help your body eliminate more salt from your system and reduce the likelihood of heart-related illnesses by 24 per cent.

In the study, researchers investigated whether removing excess sodium from the bloodstream, which is known to increase the risk of cardiovascular disease, could help lower that risk.

The study found that, overall, higher potassium levels in the blood were linked to a significantly reduced risk of heart events, hospital stays or death from any cause.

The study’s lead author, professor Henning Bundgaard from Copenhagen University hospital, said: “The human body evolved on a potassium-rich, sodium-poor diet – when we were born and raised on the savannah and eating [fruit and vegetables],” according to The Guardian.

“We [now] tend to go to [a] modern diet that is processed foods and, the more processed, we see more and more sodium in the food and less potassium, meaning that the ratio between the two has changed from 10:1 to 1:2 – a dramatic change.”

Potassium is vital for the functioning of the heart, he said, and a low intake can increase the risk of arrhythmias, heart failure and death.

The study trialled 1,200 patients with implantable defibrillators, assigning 600 of them to diets rich in potassium, and low in meat, which is rich in potassium, but also in sodium. The results were presented at Madrid’s European Society of Cardiology congress, the world’s largest heart conference.

Professor Bundgaard said: “With a broader view we can say that higher dietary intake of potassium may not only benefit patients with heart disease but probably all of us, so maybe we should all reduce sodium and increase potassium content in our food.”

In April, a study published in the American Journal of Physiology-Renal Physiology found that eating more potassium can also lower blood pressure.

Anita Layton, one of the study’s authors, said: “Our research suggests that adding more potassium-rich foods to your diet such as bananas or broccoli might have a greater positive impact on your blood pressure than just cutting sodium.”

AI stethoscope to help doctors pick up heart conditions within seconds

Stethoscopes powered by artificial intelligence (AI) could help medics detect three different heart conditions in seconds, according to researchers.

The technology is able to analyse subtle difference in heartbeats and blood flow which human ears cannot pick up, all while performing a rapid test to record the electrical activity in the heart at the same time.

Using AI in this way could be a “real game-changer”, experts suggest, and would allow patients with heart failure, heart valve disease and abnormal heart rhythms, also known as atrial fibrillation, to be treated sooner.

The stethoscope, invented in 1816, allows doctors to listen to the internal sounds of a patient’s body.

Its chest piece – the part of the tool which is placed on the body – includes a “bell”, a small cup-shape used to hear low-frequency sounds from the heart.

The new AI stethoscope has been “upgraded for the 21st century”, and replaces this chest piece with a device around the size of a playing card.

This is placed on a patient’s chest to take an ECG (electrocardiogram) – which records electrical signals from the heart – with a microphone recording the sound of blood flowing through the heart.

This information is then sent to the cloud and analysed by AI trained on data from tens of thousands of people.

A test result flagging if a patient is at risk of heart failure or not is then sent to a smartphone.

Another algorithm is able to detect atrial fibrillation, which often has no symptoms but can increase the risk of strokes.

Dr Sonya Babu-Narayan, clinical director at the British Heart Foundation (BHF) and consultant cardiologist, said: “This is an elegant example of how the humble stethoscope, invented more than 200 years ago, can be upgraded for the 21st century.

“We need innovations like these, providing early detection of heart failure, because so often this condition is only diagnosed at an advanced stage when patients attend hospital as an emergency.

“Given an earlier diagnosis, people can access the treatment they need to help them live well for longer.”

The study by Imperial College London and Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust involved more than 200 GP surgeries in London.

The AI stethoscope was trialled on those with certain symptoms – breathlessness, fatigue or swelling of the lower legs or feet, which are all signs of heart failure.

Some 12,725 patients from 96 surgeries were examined with the AI stethoscope and were then compared to patients from 109 GP surgeries where the technology was not used.

Researchers found those examined with the device were 2.33 times more likely to be diagnosed with heart failure in the next 12 months.

Meanwhile, the stethoscope was 3.45 times more likely to pick up cases of atrial fibrillation, and 1.92 times more likely to diagnose heart valve disease, when one of more of the heart’s four valves do not work properly.

Dr Mihir Kelshiker, a member of the research team from Imperial College London and Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, said: “Most people with heart failure are only diagnosed when they arrive in A&E seriously ill.

“This trial shows that AI-enabled stethoscopes could change that – giving GPs a quick, simple tool to spot problems earlier, so patients can get the right treatment sooner.”

Dr Patrik Bachtiger, of Imperial College London’s National Heart and Lung Institute and Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, added: “The design of the stethoscope has been unchanged for 200 years – until now.

“So it is incredible that a smart stethoscope can be used for a 15-second examination, and then AI can quickly deliver a test result indicating whether someone has heart failure, atrial fibrillation or heart valve disease.”

The findings of the trial, known as Tricorder, are being presented at the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) Congress in Madrid.

Researchers are now planning to roll out the stethoscopes to GP practices in Wales, south London and Sussex.

Professor Mike Lewis, scientific director for innovation at the NIHR, which supported the study, said: “This tool could be a real game-changer for patients, bringing innovation directly into the hands of GPs.

“The AI stethoscope gives local clinicians the ability to spot problems earlier, diagnose patients in the community, and address some of the big killers in society.”

Professor Nicholas Peters, senior investigator from Imperial College London and consultant cardiologist at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, added: “Our study shows that three heart conditions can now be identified in one sitting.

“Importantly, this technology is already available to some patients and being widely used in GP surgeries.”