• Six Nations defeat to Italy was 14th consecutive reverse
• Cardiff’s Matt Sherratt takes over for rest of Six Nations

Warren Gatland has left his position as Wales rugby union head coach, with immediate effect, after a dismal run of 14 consecutive Test match defeats. Wales lost 22-15 in Rome on Saturday, continuing a stretch that began with their 2023 World Cup quarter-final defeat to Argentina.

The Welsh Rugby Union (WRU) confirmed the news on Tuesday afternoon and has appointed Cardiff’s Matt Sherratt as interim head coach for the remaining Six Nations fixtures against Ireland, Scotland and England. The WRU said that Gatland had reached out to them to discuss his future on Monday and they mutually agreed he would step down. In a statement, the New Zealander, thanked Welsh fans and said it was the right time for him to leave.

Refusal to release next batch of Israeli hostages as planned could derail fragile agreement

Hamas has said it will not release the next batch of Israeli hostages this weekend as planned, citing alleged Israeli violations of the fragile ceasefire, a development that could derail an already fragile three-week-old truce agreement.

Donald Trump then inflamed the situation by threatening that “hell is going to break out” unless Hamas releases all of the Israeli hostages it is holding on Saturday – an intervention that, along with his proposal for the US to take over and “develop” the Gaza Strip, appears to nullify the next stages of the truce.

Debut feature does its best to keep things feeling supernatural as woman faced with impossible parenting demands slides into psychosis

Descending fully inside postnatal depression and psychosis, this horror film blends hallucination, premonition, memory and flashback; what it loses in storytelling precision it makes up for in desperate incarceration within one new mother’s headspace.

As soon as she comes home, Meredith (Emily Hampshire) is scrubbing her own birth discharge off the floor. While husband Jared (François Arnaud) is unexpectedly delighted at fatherhood, her new role chafes at an existential level. Son Alex won’t settle in her hands, Jared pushes her to take care of the house while she’s busy expressing milk and, rather than dealing with a burning meal, she smashes her smoke detector. “It’s better to accept you need to try, than be ashamed you need to try,” says Meredith’s therapist of her misfiring maternal affections. But by the time she is seeing visions of cribs overflowing with blood, and of Alex as a young boy, it feels like she needs far more regular sessions.

Ben Lamm of ‘de-extinction’ specialist Colossal Biosciences not only has plans to bring back prehistoric creatures, but also preserve those on the verge of vanishing

Colossal Biosciences founder Ben Lamm is working to revive the woolly mammoth and the dodo – but he wants to make clear the ending will be different to that of Steven Spielberg’s gory dinosaur epic Jurassic Park.

“People have to remember that that was a movie, right?” the serial entrepreneur sighs, sitting in the Hard Rock Cafe on the fringes of the World Economic Forum in Davos – a little outpost of America in the swank Swiss resort.

• Pair had been mooted as possible pair in combined event
• Vonn made comments on X after teams were announced

Lindsey Vonn acknowledged that “I didn’t help myself” through comments she made about Mikaela Shiffrin’s participation at the skiing world championships.

Vonn had campaigned to race with Shiffrin in a skiing “dream team” at the world championships for the new combined event, which will also make its Olympic debut next year. When Shiffrin announced on Instagram that she was racing with recently crowned downhill world champion Breezy Johnson, Vonn reacted with displeasure.

Incident at Scottsdale airport leaves two others taken to trauma centers but Vince Neil was not onboard aircraft

One person was killed and others were injured when a private jet owned by the Mötley Crüe singer Vince Neil collided with another jet on Monday afternoon at the Scottsdale airport in Arizona, authorities said.

Neil’s jet was landing at the airport when it veered off the runway and collided with another parked plane, Neil’s representative, Worrick Robinson IV, said in a statement. Two pilots and two passengers were on Neil’s plane, but he was not among them.

Mowi to give fishers £36 per fish after loss from farm in what campaigners say is a ‘disaster for wild salmon’

The global seafood company Mowi is offering a bounty to fishers who catch escaped salmon after an estimated 27,000 fish went missing from a farm off the Norwegian coast in what campaigners said was a “disaster for wild salmon”.

The world’s largest farmed salmon producer is offering a reward of 500 kroner (£36) per salmon caught after it said a quarter of its 105,000 salmon population escaped from a cage in Troms, north-west Norway.

Manchester City, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich are among the teams fighting for a place in the last 16

By Ben McAleer for WhoScored

Familiar foes face off in the first Champions League playoff game this week as Brest take on PSG at the Stade de Roudourou​ in Guingamp.​ Brest’s ground did not meet Uefa’s requirements, so they will continue to play at the home of their local rivals. The Bretons will hope to extend their fine debut run in the Champions League, and they have won their last two matches, beating Troyes in the Coupe de France and Nantes in Ligue 1.

At Bisto and Aardman’s new pop-up floating restaurant you can pour gravy over your pudding or down a gravy drink – but where’s the cheese board, Gromit?

Ever since A Grand Day Out was released in 1989, we as a nation have grasped Wallace & Gromit to our collective heart like nothing else. We’ve watched them for decades, falling in love with their Rube Goldberg inventions, their nostalgic mid-century charm and their fingerprint-flecked faces. Wallace & Gromit is this country’s specialist subject. Their lives are ingrained into ours, and as such there is nothing about them that we don’t know.

For instance, when you think of Wallace & Gromit, one foodstuff instantly springs to mind. A food that has propelled Wallace & Gromit narratives and inspired Wallace & Gromit catchphrases alike. Of course, I am referring to gravy.

Animals suspected of being illegally left in ‘extremely harsh’ environment near where lynx were found last month

Rangers in the Cairngorms are searching for a herd of feral pigs believed to have been illegally released in the national park.

The animals were spotted near the Uath Lochans area, close to the village of Inch and only 5 miles from where four lynx were illegally released last month.

Protesters are facing increasingly draconian charges that get dismissed but could still have a chilling effect

As pro-Palestinian demonstrations broke out across the US during the first year of war in Gaza, thousands of people were arrested, charged, or cited for their involvement. Most of the cases against them did not stick, a new Guardian analysis of prosecution data in a dozen major cities finds.

About 60% of alleged offenses committed by protesters did not result in prosecutions. The Guardian identified about 2,800 charges, summons and citations brought or requested against Gaza protesters. Around 1,600 were dropped, dismissed or otherwise not filed, data shows.

A sharp, zesty salad served with streaky bacon

This is a really useful herb-speckled mayonnaise, to toss with crunchy raw veg for a quick lunch or to serve as an accompaniment.

Place 4 rashers of smoked streaky bacon on a shallow grill pan and cook under an overhead grill until crisp.

Former Spanish football federation boss is accused of sexual assault after kissing player at Women’s World Cup

The former Spanish football federation boss Luis Rubiales has told a court that he asked the player Jenni Hermoso if he could kiss her before doing so after the Women’s World Cup victory in 2023.

“I am absolutely sure that she gave me her permission,” Rubiales, 47, told the court in Madrid. “In that moment it was something completely spontaneous.”

Sixfold rise from days of Peña Nieto suggests Americans have increasingly become pawns for criminal drug gangs

The number of Americans arrested in Mexico for offenses related to organized crime increased by 457% – or nearly sixfold – during the 2018-24 presidency of Andrés Manuel López Obrador compared to his predecessor, according to a new report.

Since the current president Claudia Sheinbaum took office in September, 185 US citizens have been arrested by the Mexican army on organized-crime related charges – an average of three a day.

Experts say the US president’s takeover threat will shift election priorities to who seems best suited to face Trump

Until just a few weeks ago, it was an exhilarating time to be a Conservative in Canada

After nearly 10 years of Liberal rule, a deepening cost of living crisis had soured public support for Justin Trudeau and his shop-worn government. The Tory leader, Pierre Poilievre, had seized on a controversial carbon levy, and pledged to make the next federal vote an “axe the tax” election. Pollsters predicted his party would seize a convincing majority of seats. The country was on the cusp of a new Conservative era.

Referencing DEI is the new rightwing abstraction deployed by Republicans to conceal their anti-Black racism

In 1981, Lee Atwater, the most influential Republican party strategist of the late 20th century, sat down for an off-the-record interview with the political scientist Alexander P Lamis. At the time, Atwater was a junior member of the Reagan administration, but he would later go on to run George HW Bush’s presidential campaign in 1988 and then become chair of the Republican National Committee in 1989.

In perhaps the most revealing, and most infamous, portion of the interview, the hard-charging Republican operative explained to Lamis how Republican politicians could mask their racism – and racist appeals to white voters – behind a series of euphemisms.

You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘[N-word, N-word, N-word]’. By 1968 you can’t say ‘[N-word]’ – that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites … ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘[N-word, N-word]’.

Mehdi Hasan is the CEO and editor-in-chief of the new media company Zeteo

Scientists observe decreased motor function in rodents exposed to microplastics

Microplastics can move through mice brains and block blood vessels, essentially mimicking blood clots that could potentially be fatal or otherwise disrupt brain function.

The findings are detailed in a peer-reviewed paper for which researchers for the first time used real-time imaging to track bits of plastic as they moved through and accumulated in brain blood vessels. When one piece of plastic got stuck, others accumulated behind it, like a “car crash”, the authors reported.

A playlist designed to capture the excitement of first love has become a record of my romantic encounters and 14 years of singledom

The first time I kissed a boy I was 19 years old. I was in the basement of a dank student bar at university. Our eyes met across the dancefloor, we smiled at each other, and he came over. He told me his name was Sean, he was studying commerce and then put his hands on my waist. Just as he leaned in to kiss me the beat dropped on the final chorus of Rihanna’s We Found Love.

The next morning, I fired up my iPod Touch, created a nameless playlist and added We Found Love. I was still so deliriously excited by what had happened with Sean that I wanted something to preserve that moment. The song turned out to be all that I would get from Sean – he told me after one date I wasn’t really his type.

There was a time when being a millionaire represented fantastical, unimaginable wealth – but our language needs an update

Two friends and I were walking through our various rationales for some recent stupid act or thought. I didn’t pay my tax on time, because I didn’t want to cash in my premium bonds before the end of the month, because maybe I’d win a million pounds. H reckons if she applied herself seriously to writing erotic fanfic, she would definitely make a million pounds. D was wondering what the maximum amount of compensation would be for a range of workplace accidents, what limb you’d have to lose for a million pounds. She’s dreaming. She’s a graphic designer.

One million pounds has been the objective unit of gigantic wealth for as long as I’ve been alive. There has never been any point in two million and it would sound unbelievably pedantic to wish for three. That’s 50 years, during which time the value of one million pounds has changed quite a lot. Half a century ago, you could have bought an island, and now you might get a house with a well-made kitchen island. Yet the word has meant “unimaginably massive” all that time. It never even respected currency variation – when a photo caption once ran “Elizabeth Taylor arrived looking like a million dollars” and the newspaper sub added, per house style, “(£565,000)”, people found that ridiculous; of course she didn’t look like £565,000. If she looked like a million dollars, she looked like a million pounds.

The PM’s makeover collaboration was kept a closely guarded secret for fear it would hurt her ‘ordinary housewife’ image

• Tim Walker is a writer and broadcaster. When Maggie Met Larry is on Radio 4 at 3pm on 15 February and on iPlayer

If Jim Callaghan and Ted Heath had one thing in common, it was a stodginess that characterised political leaders of the 70s: baggy suits, sweaty faces, leaden delivery. When she succeeded Heath as leader of the Conservative party 50 years ago, and found herself facing Callaghan across the dispatch box, Margaret Thatcher decided she wanted to truly embrace the TV age.

That was how she came to be given “presentation lessons” by no less an actor than Laurence Olivier, who subsequently arranged for her to receive voice coaching from Catherine Fleming, the woman who helped him perfect the basso profundo he needed to play Othello in a celebrated National Theatre production. The influence Olivier had on Thatcher was profound, and it affected the business of politics in this country.

Tim Walker is a writer and broadcaster whose debut play Bloody Difficult Women was performed in London and Edinburgh in 2022. His play When Maggie Met Larry will be on Radio 4 at 3pm on 15 February and iPlayer

Billions of gallons of irrigation water were wasted under Trump’s orders in what now appears to be a political stunt

Under orders from Donald Trump, billions of gallons of irrigation water were laid to waste in California’s thirsty agricultural hub this month, a move that left water experts shocked and local officials scrambling.

The water, stored in two reservoirs operated by the army corps of engineers, is a vital source for many farms and ranches in the state’s sprawling and productive San Joaquin Valley during the driest times of the year. It will be especially important in the coming months as the region braces for another brutally hot summer with sparse supplies.

The spawn of Satan raises hell at a Scottish nunnery in this retro-styled British fright fest

This cheap-as-chips British horror concerning demented nuns is risible in the extreme, but there’s something about its willingness to commit to the bit that’s sort of admirable. Plus, there’s a faintly amusing retro vibe that harks back not just to low-budget 1970s horror of yore, but also to the so-called “quota quickies” from the 1930s onwards, British film fare made by the yard.

Set during the second world war on an island off the coast of Scotland, the film takes place almost entirely within the confines of a nunnery called St Augustine’s. That said, there’s an opening sequence where a nun is pursued by a wolf outside, a beast so happy to be playing with the actor his tail is up and wagging the whole time – he looks about as menacing as a cockapoo. She manages to escape being licked to death and gets inside where we meet the other players. Wafty Mother Superior (Maryam d’Abo) seems a couple beads short of a full rosary, which also goes for several of the fervent sisters: devout Valerie (Elle O’Hara), intense Agnes (Amber Doig-Thorne), and so on. The most relatable may be Eleanor (Michaela Longden), the least devout of the lot, and prone to lapses in sobriety. There are also two men employed as caretakers: Amos (Paul Barber from The Full Monty) and a younger former soldier, Daniel (Nathan Shepka, who is also one the film’s co-directors as well as co-writer), who is hot for all the comely nunfolk.

Zuckerberg’s company once invested millions and attracted top talent as tech’s leader in corporate diversity. Those aspirations peaked in 2019 and just a few years later, Meta scuttled them altogether

In 2019, Facebook set a goal for itself: ensure half of its workforce was from diverse or underrepresented backgrounds by 2024.

The lofty ambition made the company stand out among its Silicon Valley peers. Maxine Williams, a longtime employee and chief diversity officer at the time, wrote in a 2021 blog post that Facebook was up to the challenge.

Our cartoonist on the shocks, heroes, wondrous own goals and missing teeth of the FA Cup fourth round

• Buy a Squires cartoon in our Print Shop
• David’s new book, Chaos in the Box: buy it now

MP defends removal of scrutiny by high court judge, as critics say change is ‘rushed and badly thought out’

• UK politics live – latest updates

Kim Leadbeater has said her assisted dying bill for England and Wales will still have the strongest safeguards in the world despite the removal of a requirement for scrutiny from a high court judge. Opponents derided the change as “rushed and badly thought out”.

The Labour MP’s decision to replace signoff by a court with an expert panel including a lawyer, psychiatrist and social worker caused significant alarm among MPs who had voted for the bill on the basis that a high court judge would oversee each case.

PM’s spokesman fails to give clear explanation for decision not to sign communique but says government would always ‘put the national interest first’

There will be two urgent questions after 12.30pm: on the Clonoe inquest, which found that the SAS acted unlawfully when they killed four IRA terrorists in an ambush in 1992; and then another on the US steel tariffs.

A Northern Ireland Office minister will respond to the first, and a business minister will respond to the second.

Countries have not immediately explained their reasons for not signing declaration

JD Vance continues, talking about “revolutionary applications” of AI and the need to deregulate to allow for its fast development and its roll out.

Our administration, the Trump administration, believes that AI will have countless revolutionary applications and economic innovation, job creation, national security, health care, free expression and beyond, and to restrict its development now will not only unfairly benefit incumbents in the space, it would mean paralysing one of the most promising technologies we have seen in generations.

I’m not here this morning to talk about AI safety, which was the title of the conference a couple of years ago. I’m here to talk about AI opportunity.

When conferences like this convene to discuss a cutting edge technology, oftentimes, I think our response is to be too self conscious, too risk averse. But never have I encountered a breakthrough in tech that so clearly calls us to do precisely the opposite.

In 1997, the ski lodge where Stuart Diver lived with his wife, Sally, was destroyed by a landslide. She was one of 18 people who died and he was the sole survivor. He describes the pain, fear and long, winding path of recovery

Stuart Diver woke up to a roar that sounded like a low-flying plane. The floor was shaking. The windows rattled. It was 11.35pm and 4,000 tons of mud, building and debris was hurtling down the mountainside in Thredbo, New South Wales, towards Bimbadeen Lodge, where he had been asleep with his wife, Sally. In a few short seconds, the ceiling of their apartment caved in and they were entombed by the concertinaed building. Diver fumbled around in the pitch black room for a way out, cutting his hands and feet on broken glass. But there was nowhere to go.

“I heard the noise and put my head up, but as I rolled forward the wrought iron headboard came down and pinned Sally to the bed.” Freezing cold water from a broken mains water pipe on the road above them soon started “flying around”. Diver, found a small pocket of air to breathe by arching his back and tilting his head up. He tried to cover Sally’s mouth to stop her from drowning but he couldn’t save her. “Sal dying in my hands will stay in my mind forever,” he wrote in his 2012 book, Survival.

Hawa Awanle Ayiboro’s solo exhibition opens this month in Accra with paintings that explore a difficult period in her childhood and the emancipation of other women

Whether self-portraits saturated in blue tones or sex workers elegantly dressed in suits, Hawa Awanle Ayiboro says her paintings are all infused with her childhood struggles. Ayiboro was 12 when she faced becoming a child bride.

The pressure to marry a much older man came from her mother, who first sent her to cook and clean at his house. However, with the support of an aunt, Ayiboro was able to resist. She later channelled her experiences into art, now showcased in a solo exhibition, Fine Feathers Don’t Make Fine Birds, at the renowned Gallery 1957, opening on 13 February in Ghana’s capital Accra.

In his new photography exhibit, Yusuf Ahmed’s experience of moving from Ethiopia to Kenya to the US inspires a poignant series of images

With his new show, Yusuf Ahmed is challenging traditional expectations of who belongs in the narrative of American history. Beyond Nostalgia and Dreams showcases Ahmed’s breathtaking photographs that explore the identities of young Black, brown and queer adults through the use of objects of their choosing that represent their personal history and resilience. It’s a direct act of defiance against efforts by Donald Trump’s administration to erase marginalized communities from history through the banning of DEI and Black history in the federal workplace.

“We’re looking at an administration that’s trying to distort history, suppress the archives, and remove any display or representation of our identities,” Ahmed says. “I think it’s important, especially here in the US, to continue pushing [the] message forward that we exist, that our lives are expansive, and that we hold so many different identities.”

Author, 77, to take stand in trial of Hadi Matar, 27, after prosecution alleges suspect came close to killing him

Salman Rushdie is expected to take the stand in the trial of the man accused of attempting to kill him at a literary gathering in western New York in August 2022, more than 35 years after he was first placed under a death warrant by Iranian religious leaders.

Rushdie, 77, has agreed to testify for the prosecution against Hadi Matar, 27, the man accused of assaulting him with a knife as he was about to address an open-air audience on a theme of shelter and home.

Singer will visit US, UK and Europe later this year alongside members of the original band who recorded the classic punk text

Patti Smith is to perform her classic album Horses in full on a tour to mark the album’s 50th anniversary.

Playing gigs across the US, UK and Europe, Smith’s band will feature guitarist Lenny Kaye and drummer Jay Dee Daugherty, each of whom played on the original recording. The tour includes two UK dates, at London’s Palladium on 12 and 13 October, with Dublin, Madrid, Bergamo, Brussels, Oslo and Paris also featuring on the European run. The US tour will visit Seattle, Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Boston, Washington DC and Philadelphia.

A Japanese man journeys to the Lake District to honour his late wife, testing his relationship with his son in the process

The curse of Beatrix Potter-associated cinema – from the lamentable Peter Rabbit films to the merely dismal Miss Potter – is lifted, at least temporarily, by the debut feature from Patrick Dickinson, even if his picture’s relationship to Potter’s work is purely tangential.

It was as a child on holiday in Windermere in the 1960s that Akiko (Tae Kimura) was first enchanted by the author’s stories. After her death from Alzheimer’s, her husband, the novelist and teacher Kenzaburo (Lily Franky), is given a letter written in the early stages of her diagnosis in which she asks him to travel from Tokyo to the Lake District to scatter her ashes in that cherished location. Though he has a strained relationship with their son, Toshi (Ryo Nishikido), Kenzaburo allows him and his family to come along on the emotional expedition, only to feel constrained by the timetable that Toshi imposes. Soon, the old man is off on his own, pedalling around the English countryside without a map.

In her new book, Normal Gossip podcaster Kelsey McKinney explores our unending interest in talking about other people behind their backs

“We gossip and tell stories because that is how we make sense of the world,” Kelsey McKinney writes in her new book, You Didn’t Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip.

Growing up in an evangelical community in Texas, McKinney was taught that gossip was a sin and spent years praying that God would take away her desire for it. She wanted to stop, but each time she heard a piece of gossip, she felt a deep desire to retell it. “I wanted to take it in my hands and mold it, rearrange the punch lines and the reveals until I could get the timing right enough that my friends in the cafeteria would gasp,” she writes in her book, out in the US this week.

UK steel industry fears surge of foreign imports as US imposes 25% tariffs, as Bank of England chief says world should not forget 2008 crisis

• Trump announces 25% tariffs on foreign steel and aluminium

It’s always worth noting when a bird changes its plumage. Shedding one coat for another can be both attractive and informative – alerting us to a change in conditions (that’s enough Spring Watch, Ed).

And as in ornithology, also in monetary policy. Last week, Catherine Mann – previously a hawkish Bank of England policymaker opposed to large interest rate cuts, emerged as a dove!

“Demand conditions are quite a bit weaker than has been the case — and I have changed my mind on that,

“To the extent that we can communicate what we think are the appropriate financial conditions for the UK economy, a larger move is a superior communication device, in my view.”

Italy-based David Yambio, a critic of Meloni government, helps ICC find evidence of abuse of detainees in Libya

An Italy-based human rights activist whose work supports the international criminal court in providing evidence about cases of abuse suffered by migrants and refugees held in Libyan detention camps and prisons has revealed that Apple informed him his phone was targeted in a spyware attack

David Yambio, the president and co-founder of Refugees in Libya, has been a critic of the Italian government’s migrant pact with the north African country and its recent controversial decision to release Osama Najim, a Libyan police chief wanted by the international criminal court (ICC) for suspected war crimes, including torture, murder, enslavement and rape. Yambio, 27, was an alleged victim of Najim’s abuses during his detention at the notorious Mitiga prison near Tripoli.

The Warrington head coach reflects on high expectations, learning from pain and a Super League opener against Huddersfield and his younger brother Thomas

“A lot of pain or adversity can be a great foundation for future success,” Sam Burgess says as we track back through the dark times, as well as the glory years, which have shaped him. Burgess, the once imperious rugby league player from Yorkshire who earned searing fame and then infamy in Australia, is about to start his second campaign as the head coach of Warrington Wolves.

Having guided Warrington to third place in Super League and to the Challenge Cup final last season, Burgess aims to end the club’s 70-year wait for another championship. It is a sign of the calm hope he feels now that the 36-year-old can reflect on the tumult and strife he has endured – starting with the death of his father from motor neurone disease when Burgess was a teenager to playing with a shattered cheekbone and fractured eye socket while inspiring the South Sydney Rabbitohs to their first NRL title in 43 years in 2014.

The number of cases globally has surged since 2021, as war and the climate crisis pile pressure on vaccine supplies

Cholera, the scourge of the Victorian era, is staging a comeback fuelled by conflict and climate breakdown. In 2024, there were 804,721 cholera cases and 5,805 deaths, according to the World Health Organization, a near 50% increase from the 535,321 cases and 4,007 deaths in 2023. Numbers have been surging since 2021 and scientists say official figures are probably very conservative. They estimate between 1.3m and 4m cases, and a range of 21,000 to 143,000 deaths from cholera globally each year.

Already in 2025, six countries – Myanmar, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, South Sudan, Angola and Ghana – have requested doses from the global stockpile of cholera vaccines to help contain outbreaks.

My partner doesn’t seem to care about our sex life or my needs as her husband. Should I have an affair?

I haven’t had sex with my wife for more than 10 years. We have four dogs and she has them sleep in the bed; I told her I can’t sleep with the dogs and she didn’t do anything about it. She has me sleeping in another room by myself.I don’t know what to do and I feel so bad because I don’t get what I need. I have contemplated finding another woman and having a private affair, but I don’t know what to do.

If we allow someone to mistreat or disrespect us once there is a high likelihood that it will happen again, and if we continue to allow it again and again, it will escalate. You have put up with this situation for far too long, and if you really want change you will have to address it urgently and firmly. It is not necessary to be harsh or create a big fight. Quietly and clearly state how you feel and ask for change. An example would be: “I care about you and there are many things I enjoy about our life together. However, I am extremely unhappy that we are neither sleeping in the same bed or making love … and I need that to change. I need you to prioritise me as your husband. If there are impediments to you wanting to sleep with me or to you enjoying sex with me I need to understand what they are so we can try to become intimate again. I’m sorry, but I cannot tolerate being replaced in your bed by our dogs … I need you to change this now.” Undoubtedly, there will be reasons and excuses. You need to listen to these things calmly then repeat them back to her: “OK, I heard you say that …” Hopefully this method will give you enough mutual understanding to move forward, but, if you reach an impasse, insist on joint therapeutic help.

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 Dai Yongge Show continues: eight seasons and counting at Reading. It is the soap opera no network can seem to cancel

And by our tennis balls shall you know us. And by our clown outfits and face paint shall you know us. And by our carefully worded media releases and painstaking analysis of tribunal documents shall you know us. And by the gigantic billboard we hired outside the train station shall you know us. Anyway, what we’re saying is: you know us. As for the next step … yeah, we’re working on that part.

“Ripped apart while the world watches” reads the aforementioned billboard outside Reading station. But is the world actually watching? Beyond the RG postcodes it was hard to identify too many concentric ripples from the news last week regarding another mysterious takeover bid for the club apparently falling through. It’s hard to drum up much interest in A Thing Not Happening, particularly when the transfer window is closing and the big beasts of the Premier League demand to be talked about at all times.