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We’ve got our first email… and it’s none other than Guy Hornsby:

Morning Daniel. I hope you’ve got your white whale South Africa shirt ready for their next game. As for England, helped by the weather, I’m not sure it’ll mean much. We can, should, and probably will win today. As gutted as I am for Carse, I think Overton’s variations will give us more options today. But Afghanistan are a serious team now and we can’t expect to win. We need to be ruthless and we need to play the situation, or we could fall flat on our faces. So much more needed from this team to get anywhere. Because we won’t stand a chance against SA if we don’t play better.”

All relatively friendly and got resolved soon after. Wasn’t like they were pointing them directly at us...

Neither Antonio Conte nor Ange Postecoglou were convinced by Spence but he’s showing his value now

By Ben McAleer for WhoScored

Red Djed Redemption. Return of the Djedi. The Walking Djed. Call it what you like but, in a season of few success stories at Tottenham, Djed Spence’s emergence as a key player is the feelgood story of the campaign. He even scored his first goal in the Premier League at the weekend.

“A kid who had the wildest dreams to play in the Premier League. A kid who had the wildest dreams to score in the Premier League. That dream came true. Never stop believing,” wrote Spence on Instagram after Tottenham’s 4-1 win against Ipswich at Portman Road. Given the first two years of his time at Spurs, that dream did not seem likely to come true this season.

Plus: short men’s players scoring headers; Young Boys v Old Boys; and failing to go up with great goal differences

• Mail us with your questions and answers

“Burnley’s 4-0 win over Sheffield Wednesday on Friday was the 12th consecutive Championship game in which they kept a clean sheet,” writes Graham Davidson. “Is this a record for a domestic men’s league?”

It’s now 1,090 minutes (plus added time, which is never included in such lists) since Burnley last conceded a league goal (Watford’s Kwadwo Baah scoring on 21 December). Since that match, which Burnley won 2-1, their record is eye-catching to say the least: P12 W6 D6 L0 F15 A0 Pts 24. We had a related question in 2009 when Manchester United and Edwin van der Sar were racking up clean sheets. That was for individual goalkeepers and, while James Trafford has been in goal throughout Burnley’s Fort Knox period, there are plenty of examples of teams putting together even longer runs in which they used more than one goalkeeper.

We used to have sex once a week on a Sunday, but since the menopause there has been no choice but to abstain. What can I do?

My wife and I are in our late 50s, have been married for 20 years and have two children. Our sex life dwindled for a while, then ground to a halt around three years ago. When we were younger, I was very much in love with her and willing to live with our very different levels of sexual need and adventurism. Sleeping together happened almost exclusively on Sunday nights in the dark. She has always found sex in any position other than missionary to be painful. She finds oral sex to orgasm “disgusting” and since the menopause hit there has been no alternative but to abstain. I have a healthy sex drive and want to have what I would regard as a normal sex life again. In addition, we have a very different sense of humour and have often argued. I am the one who has initiated talking about our problems and we have had couples counselling, but it was inconclusive (I believe because we never talked about the elephant in the room that is our sex life). I can’t see how we can become even slightly more compatible when we are so different. I ask myself how we survived for this length of time, but then feel guilty for wanting more, probably with someone else.

Couples counselling can help bring people together, but it can also help by being a path to separation. It seems as though that is secretly what you want, and in that case it would be only fair to tell your wife exactly how you are feeling. But also consider that your wife is experiencing menopause and needs your help and understanding. And experiencing pain during intercourse is something that should be investigated. Perhaps she would return to counselling or even agree to sex therapy, which could really help you both. There are many possible reasons why you have drifted apart but, like many other couples, you have simply tried to adapt and bury feelings that ideally should have been addressed some time ago. Being helped to truly understand each other better and appreciate each other’s current dilemma could be very beneficial to your relationship, so do your best to encourage her kindly to join you in seeking answers.

Pamela Stephenson Connolly is a US-based psychotherapist who specialises in treating sexual disorders.

If you would like advice from Pamela on sexual matters, send us a brief description of your concerns to private.lives@theguardian.com (please don’t send attachments). Each week, Pamela chooses one problem to answer, which will be published online. She regrets that she cannot enter into personal correspondence. Submissions are subject to our terms and conditions.

The Nigerian-American author returns with an astute and moving exploration of female experience

‘Novels had always felt to me truer than what was real,” declares a character in Dream Count, the highly anticipated new novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It is a statement echoed in the accompanying author’s note, which contends that the “point of art is to look at our world and be moved by it, and then to engage in a series of attempts at clearly seeing that world, interpreting it, questioning it”. Since the publication of her extraordinarily assured debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, in 2003, Adichie’s fiction has performed this task of seeing, interpreting and questioning to huge acclaim, garnering her major awards as well as a public profile far beyond most writers, whose work hasn’t been sampled by Beyoncé.

In keeping with her superstar status, Dream Count is billed as “a publishing event 10 years in the making” and is perhaps the surest bet so far for this year’s Women’s prize. However, its publication is also accompanied by difficult personal circumstances: Adichie’s father died in June 2020, followed in March 2021, less than a year later, by the death of her mother, after which, as she writes in the author’s note, her “life’s cover was ripped off”. Having already written about her father’s death in her extended essay Notes on Grief, Dream Count, Adichie asserts, is “really about my mother”. Composed of the interlocking stories of four women, Chiamaka (“Chia”), Zikora, Omelogor and Kadiatou, it is also quintessential Adichie: ambitious, astute and powered by an accumulation of feather-light sentences that build to devastating weight.

An anniversary edition of the 2013 martial arts animation is light on bombast, funny and mischievous

Here is a 10th-anniversary extended edition, with 20 added minutes, of the 18th theatrical outing for Dragon Ball, which was credited with revitalising the franchise. With original series creator Akira Toriyama apparently taking a stronger hand during production, this 2013 film hit the sweet spot where daffy character comedy powered up OTT anime smackdown, in the process laying the groundwork for the brand’s next phase, Dragon Ball Super.

“Such over-the-top naming. It ends up sounding tawdry,” comments a lackey to intergalactic god of destruction Beerus (Kōichi Yamadera) when the pair hear of a “Super Saiyan God” on the loose. Despite being a nap-centric sphynx cat in harem pants, Beerus is impatient for a worthy foe, so he decides to call in on any nearby Saiyans (a race of super-strong aliens) who might point him in the right direction. After wiping the floor with series hero Goku (Masako Nozawa) with just two blows, the apocalyptic kitty turns his hunt towards Earth with Armoggiedon on the cards.

Despite losing his studio contents in the recent Spanish floods, Ricardo Cases has a new solo exhibition that demonstrates his eye for an arresting image

The massacre in Bucha, the mass graves in Izium – it is as if these atrocities never happened. Now the truth is being taken out and shot

Orders and statements from the new US president come at us daily now, with unremitting speed, and international politics is reduced to an endless series of justifications and denials of unfounded accusations.

It’s hard to believe, but Ukrainian activists have had to write explainers for a global audience, reminding them who the true dictator is, that it was not Ukraine that started the war with Russia and that we are actually just trying to defend what is ours. And, you know, to survive a little bit.

When my rheumatoid arthritis became more aggressive, I clung to the idea of still being a ‘walking person’. Letting go of that gave me more freedom than I could have imagined

It started like any normal day – or normal for us, at least. My partner, Stewart, helped me out of bed and on to the wheeled office chair I kept next to it. Then I propelled myself to the top of the stairs before leaning precariously on my crutches as I made my way down, slowly and dangerously, with lots of swearing at the pain (I find it helps). Then, on the way out to the car, I missed my footing and fell.

Not for the first time, Stewart was caught between concern and frustration. Wasn’t it time, he asked, for me to consider using a wheelchair? Once again, I rejected the suggestion.

Rise comes from very low base and remains far below the 2.1 births per woman needed to stabilise population

South Korea’s birthrate rose last year for the first time in nine years, as a surge in marriages raised hopes that the country may be lifting itself out of its demographic crisis.

Preliminary data released by the government body Statistics Korea on Wednesday showed that the number of babies born per 1,000 people in 2024 stood at 4.7, the first rise since 2014.

Gardai went on board after Stena Line ferry from Fishguard docked at Rosslare Europort

A woman has died following an incident on a ferry that docked at Co Wexford in Ireland on Tuesday.

One man was arrested after the death of the woman on board the passenger ferry.

Thousands of seafarers are left on board their vessels in foreign waters, unpaid, with scant supplies – and no way of getting home

When Vihaan* set off from his home in Tamil Nadu, south India, to work on a vessel crossing the Bay of Bengal into neighbouring Bangladesh, he told his family he would be gone a few months. After delivering his cargo of stone to Bangladesh’s Kutubdia Island, the marine engineer was due to head home in March 2024 to disembark at Thoothukudi port, India.

But that month, the rusting tug, the Navimar 3, which was being operated by Middle East Marine (MEM), was detained by the authorities in Bangladesh due to unpaid fees. For almost a year, Vihaan has become a virtual prisoner on board, he says, forced to work without pay to keep the vessel safe, amid strong currents where it is anchored off the island in the cyclone-prone bay. His passport and certification documents are being held by a local agent for the Dubai-based company. With no means of getting home, no visa to disembark and without supplies, he has to rely on food and water from charities and unions.

Three times in the postwar era Germany made strategic choices that benefited Europe – with the US at its side. Now it must do it in opposition to Trump

Three times in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany, its chancellors have made strategic choices that opened the door to a better future for Europe. Today there’s not just an opportunity but an urgent need for a fourth such historic moment. If the country’s new coalition government under Friedrich Merz manages to seize the chance of this crisis, both Germany and Europe will go forward. If it fails, then by the end of the 2020s both may have fallen backwards farther and faster than most of us could have imagined in our worst nightmares.

The big difference with those three earlier pivotal moments is this: in 1949, 1969 and 1989 the Federal Republic’s policy was fundamentally aligned with that of the United States. This time, Germany has to build up a stronger, free, democratic and Ukraine-supporting Europe against the current policy of the US. The most staggering moment of Sunday’s election evening was when the lifelong Atlanticist Merz declared that Europe must “really achieve independence from the US”. (When compared with Emmanuel Macron’s almost British sycophancy in the White House the next day, Germany’s prospective chancellor is sounding more robustly Gaullist than the French president.)

Timothy Garton Ash is a Guardian columnist

Exclusive: Art historian points to ‘bad craftsmanship’ in 17th-century work entitled Samson and Delilah

Doubts about whether Peter Paul Rubens painted the Samson and Delilah picture in the National Gallery have been revived by new evidence.

Forty-five years after it was bought for a then record price, it is being dismissed as a 20th-century copy of a long-lost painting by the 17th-century Flemish master.

Northvolt, which claims to run Europe’s first homegrown gigafactory, admits it depends on Chinese suppliers for cathode active material

The Swedish startup Northvolt has admitted that a vital component of its batteries is imported amid claims that the company, which claims to run Europe’s first homegrown gigafactory, depends on Chinese suppliers.

It comes as a documentary programme to be shown in Sweden on Wednesday by the national broadcaster SVT, exposes the company’s failure to build a truly homegrown battery after its attempts to produce its own cathode active material at its Northvolt Ett factory in Skellefteå, northern Sweden, were unsuccessful.

Senior doctors and surgeons describe the torture, starvation, humiliation and denial of medical care they endured while being held without charge

• More than 160 Gazan medics held in Israeli prisons amid reports of torture

Many days I was tied to a chair in the interrogation room for maybe 15 hours. I was not allowed to sleep or eat or drink. They tied my arms to the chair very painfully and when they were beating me they would put their hands or legs on my chest to bend my back.

Move comes a day after administration won ruling allowing it to bar AP from the Oval Office and Air Force One

The White House said it will take control over which news organizations and reporters are allowed into the presidential press pool covering Donald Trump.

“The White House press team in this administration will determine who gets to enjoy the very privileged and limited access in spaces such as Air Force One and the Oval Office,” the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said during a briefing on Tuesday.

• Both sides fight back from two-goal deficits in 4-4 draw
• Inter sink Lazio in Coppa Italia; Werder Bremen stunned

Barcelona and Atlético Madrid both rallied from two goals down in a frantic 4-4 draw in the first leg of their Copa del Rey semi-final at the Estadi Olímpic Lluís Companys.

Atlético took an early lead with goals from Julián Álvarez in the first minute and Antoine Griezmann in the sixth, but the home side had levelled the game by the 21st minute thanks to two goals two minutes apart from Pedri and Pau Cubarsí.

• Hosts take lead at Hampden before Dutch fight back
• Northern Ireland enjoy dramatic win, Wales hold Sweden

Scotland let slip a half-time lead as they lost 2-1 against the Netherlands at Hampden Park, resulting in back-to-back Nations League defeats for the hosts. The Celtic defender Emma Lawton’s first goal for her country put Scotland in front at the interval, but the visitors hit back with second-half efforts from Lineth Beerensteyn and Chasity Grant.

Michael McArdle, Scotland’s interim head coach, made five changes after the opening 1-0 defeat in Austria on Friday and his side soaked up plenty of early pressure. The Netherlands, who drew their opening match 2-2 in Germany, were denied an early lead when Lee Gibson brilliantly kept out Vivianne Miedema’s header.

• Manager says recruitment and team needs to improve
• Return of Luke Shaw and Mason Mount unknown

Ruben Amorim believes ­Manchester United employees made ­redundant are “paying the price” for poor on‑field performance and that recruitment has to improve to address the problem.

Omar Berrada, United’s chief ­exe­cutive, confirmed on Monday that Sir Jim Ratcliffe is to cut up to another 200 jobs after 250 people were made unemployed last year. Amorim was asked how the ­remaining staff and fans could be confident this will help the club to prosper.

Having recently lost their designer, the house presented a greatest hits package at Milan fashion week

The arithmetic of fashion goes like this: take a status brand, such as Gucci, and multiply it to the power of X by putting it in the hands of a zeitgeist-hitting designer. Pair the right label with the right person at the right moment, and you hit the jackpot.

At this Milan fashion week, Gucci’s numbers were never quite going to add up. Despite having the illustrious, high-value brand name, there is a big fat zero where the designer should be. Sales fell 24% in the last quarter of 2024, and designer Sabato de Sarno exited the brand a fortnight ago. The departure was expected, but the timing spoke of a brand rattled by the failure of recent collections to connect with shoppers.

A new ‘golden passport’ scheme aims to raise funds to relocate people inland as climate change raises sea levels

The Pacific island nation of Nauru is selling citizenship to fund its retreat from rising seas, the country’s president, David Adeang, announced on Tuesday, opening a contentious “golden passport” scheme as climate financing runs dry.

The low-lying island nation of 13,000 residents is planning a mass inland relocation as the human-caused climate crisis raises global sea levels, eating away at the country’s fertile coastal fringe.

Court orders compensation to be paid to 30-year-old from Bangalore, saying ‘in the new era, time is considered as money, each one’s time is very precious’

For some, the adverts that precede the start of a film are the bane of a trip to the cinema; for others, they are a useful buffer as you stand in the popcorn queue.

But for one man in India, the lengthy marathon of cinema advertising was so infuriating that he took the matter to the courts – and won.

Recently married couple selected to look after Great Blasket, the largest island on Europe’s most westerly archipelago

A young couple in search of a new chapter in their lives are swapping creature comforts for life on an otherwise uninhabited island off the coast of Ireland with no hot water, stable electricity or cars.

Camille Rosenfeld, from Minnesota in the US, and James Hayes, from Tralee in County Kerry, have been chosen to be this year’s live-in caretakers of Great Blasket, the largest island of the most westerly archipelago in Europe.

Concerns also raised that practice prevents young working-class people from finding paid work in creative industries

Arts employers could be breaking the law by relying on unpaid interns to perform roles that should be left to paid workers, preventing young people from working-class backgrounds from gaining a foothold, experts have said.

Institutions are getting away with exploiting carve-outs in employment legislation to keep interns working for free, they said, which stops working-class people from finding paid work in the industry.

We are raiding the Guardian Long Read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors.

This week, from 2017: Davon Mayer was a smalltime dealer in west Baltimore who made an illicit deal with local police. When they turned on him, he decided to get out – but escaping that life would not prove as easy as falling into it. By Yudhijit Bhattacharjee. Read by Lola Ogunyemi

Stock up on wig tape, plunge your face in icy water, prepare your poses – and get ready for some really tricky interview questions

Awards season draws to a close this weekend, with the Brits on Saturday and the Oscars on Sunday. At both, stars will face the red carpet – a gauntlet of fans, photo ops and rapid-fire interviews, which involves being scrutinised from every angle.

They make it look effortless, “but it’s an intimidating thing, especially if you’ve never done it before”, says Niamh Eastabrook, a publicist at Multitude Media, who helps actors prepare for red carpets. “People forget that this side of the job is not why anyone becomes an actor.” The makeup artist Lisa Eldridge agrees: “It’s such a nerve-racking experience for most actresses. A lot are quite introverted and they have to walk out and be analysed by the world.”

Two of my red-carpet looks: gold gown by Edeline Lee; green dress by Self Portrait, rented from Rites. Photographs: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

Antimicrobial resistance contributing to estimated 35,000 deaths a year in UK, and government ‘a long way’ from containing the problem, says NAO

Superbugs are on the rise in the UK and the government is failing in its efforts to tackle them, ministers have been warned.

The World Health Organization has described antimicrobial resistance (AMR) – where pathogens evolve and develop resistance to antibiotics and other antimicrobials so the drugs usually used to fight them no longer work – as “one of the top global public health and development threats”.

BoM says category 2 Tropical Cyclone Alfred is about 930km north-east of Mackay and is tracking slowly south through Coral Sea

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A slow-moving tropical cyclone off north-east Australia is expected to linger in the Coral Sea for at least the next few days, but forecasters say there remains a risk the system could eventually turn towards the Queensland coast.

The Bureau of Meteorology says category 2 Tropical Cyclone Alfred is about 930km north-east of Mackay, and is tracking slowly south through the Coral Sea.

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Despite a pledge that life-saving assistance would be exempt from the USAid freeze, countless groups providing critical care have been forced to stop work

Wah K’Ler Paw, a 30-year-old refugee from Myanmar, survived for about two weeks without dialysis after US president Donald Trump suspended foreign aid.

“She never complained about what she was going through,” says her husband, Thaw, from the Mae La refugee camp along the Thai-Myanmar border, where the couple had lived with their two-year-old daughter, Thaw Wah.

A Labour member of the House of Lords offered access to ministers during discussions about a commercial deal worth tens of thousands of pounds, an undercover investigation can reveal. Henry Dyer reports

Lord David Evans of Watford, 82, offered access to ministers during discussions about a commercial deal, an undercover investigation can reveal.

Lord Evans was recorded explaining to Guardian undercover reporters – who were posing as property developers looking to lobby the government – on how to approach Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister and housing secretary.

Drag show They Will be Kings celebrates masculinity through a transmasculine, non-binary and lesbian lens as part of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras

• They Will be Kings is on at the Loading Dock Theatre in Darlinghurst, Sydney until 28 February 2025

Boat tour captures video of Northern right whale dolphins, Pacific white-sided dolphins and light grey baby calves

More than 2,000 dolphins gathered off the California coast to form a “superpod”, gliding and breaching the clear, aquamarine waters off Monterey Bay.

The superpod included Northern right whale dolphins and Pacific white-sided dolphins, as well as light grey baby calves. Evan Brodsky, a captain and videographer with the private boat tour company Monterey Bay Whale Watch, captured a video of the dolphins, and his company shared it on Facebook, calling the spectacle “mind-blowing”.

Malaysia transport minister says firm Ocean Infinity has resumed hunt for the plane, which went missing in one of aviation’s biggest mysteries

A new search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 has been launched more than a decade after the plane went missing in one of aviation’s greatest enduring mysteries.

Maritime exploration firm Ocean Infinity has resumed the hunt for the missing plane, Malaysian transport minister Anthony Loke said on Tuesday.

In 2023 the federal court ordered $27.5m compensation for an initial estimated 220 Indonesian minors wrongly detained – but that number has now doubled

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The Australian government has revealed that a further 220 Indonesian children may have been wrongly detained as adult people smugglers, doubling the number initially thought.

Late in 2023 the federal court ordered $27.5m in compensation for an estimated 220 Indonesian children who were wrongly detained as adult people smugglers between 2010 and 2012.

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A small but growing number of Chinese people are fleeing home, with their sights set on Germany thanks to its reputation as a safe haven for refugees

Ling*, 42, arrived in Germany with his 10-year-old daughter, Feifei* in late 2024. Their journey from Jiangsu province in eastern China to the small town of Schöppenstedt on the outskirts of Hanover took more than three months and cost thousands of pounds in payments to people smugglers and plane tickets. Starting in August, it culminated with a dangerous wintry trek across the Balkan mountains from Bosnia into the European Union – first Croatia, then Slovenia, Italy and, finally, Germany.

Ling is one of the hundreds of Chinese people who claimed asylum in Germany in 2024.

President says ‘I hear he’s coming on Friday’ amid reports that terms of US-Ukraine aid exchange have been reached

Donald Trump has said that Volodymyr Zelenskyy is likely to visit the White House on Friday to sign a rare earth minerals deal to pay for US military aid to defend against Russia’s full-scale invasion.

The announcement followed days of tense negotiations between the US and Ukraine in which Zelenskyy alleged the US was pressuring him to sign a deal worth more than $500bn that would force “10 generations” of Ukrainians to pay it back.

• Inter Miami star was booked for dissent
• Messi provided two assists in the match

Lionel Messi has been fined an undisclosed amount by Major League Soccer after grabbing the neck of a New York City assistant coach at the end of Saturday’s game between the sides.

The World Cup winner was caught on camera in a confrontation with NYC FC assistant coach Mehdi Ballouchy after the final whistle. Messi twice put his hands on the back of Ballouchy’s neck during the arguments. MLS said in a statement that their disciplinary committee had ruled that the Argentinian had violated the league’s “Hands to the face/head/neck of an opponent policy.”

The UK government will cease attending events hosted by Rwanda, as well as pausing aid to all but the ‘poorest and most vulnerable’

The UK government has announced it will cease attending events hosted by the Rwandan government and suspend aid to the east African nation over advances by Kigali-backed rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Britain has also threatened sanctions against Rwanda, which is supporting the M23 rebel group in the DRC.

News comes as leading network star criticizes management for decision to cancel shows hosted by non-white anchors

MSNBC has told the majority of the employees who produce Rachel Maddow and Joy Reid’s primetime evening news shows they are being let go as part of the network’s programming overhaul with the option to apply for new roles, according to two people directly familiar with the matter.

Maddow, the biggest star and highest-rated anchor at MSNBC, will get to keep her executive producer, Cory Gnazzo, and several other senior producers, the people said.