After a serious stroke, Mike’s friends rallied around, helping to bring some joy back into his life. His death came as a shock
We are going through the list of overnight admissions when my phone beeps. Expecting a medical request to do something or see someone, my chest cramps at the message.
I must be sufficiently distracted for the trainee to ask, “All OK?”
Erin Patterson had been in the witness box for 142 minutes, a window to her right showing the rain falling outside in regional Victoria, when her barrister Colin Mandy SC said: “I’m going to ask you some questions now about mushrooms”.
Patterson had already spoken to the court about her children and her family, her hefty inheritances, her relationship with her estranged husband, Simon, and their slow and gradual decoupling, in her evidence on Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning.
Soueif is willing to do ‘what it takes’ to free Alaa Abd el-Fattah, after a lifetime of speaking up against injustice
Laila Soueif, lying shrunken on a hospital bed at St Thomas’ hospital in London on the 247th day of her hunger strike in pursuit of freedom for her son, imprisoned British-Egyptian activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah, is locked in what may prove to be her last of many trials of strength with Egypt’s authoritarian regime.
A remarkable, witty and courageous woman, she has the self-awareness to admit: “I may have made a mistake, God knows,” but she will not back down, and anyone looking back at her rich life has little evidence to doubt her perseverance.
I told her we’d have to be in a relationship to be lovers again. So we got back together – and two weeks later she ditched me
My last relationship felt like the best sexual relationship I’d ever had. After my marriage ended, exploring intimacy with a new partner with a well-matched libido felt liberating and life-affirming. After a brief split last summer, she reappeared and said she wanted to have sex again but not to resume as a couple. I declined, explaining that intimacy worked for me only in the context of a relationship. She then said she wanted to get back together, so our relationship briefly resumed.
Two weeks later she said she wanted out again, leaving me feeling I had been duped and manipulated. The destruction of trust has eroded much of the confidence I had gained. I have found it impossible to consider starting a new relationship. How do I move on from this feeling and untangle the damage?
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.
Kelleher was keen to be No 1 after deputising for Alisson
Move happens as Mark Flekken joins Bayer Leverkusen
Brentford have completed the signing of Caoimhín Kelleher from Liverpool in a deal that could rise to £18m.
Liverpool had wanted more than £20m for the Republic of Ireland goalkeeper but, with only a year remaining on his contract and Kelleher keen for regular football, the Premier League champions have accepted an initial payment of £12.5m plus add-ons from Brentford for the 26-year-old.
Rare intervention from former president urges people to call their senators to oppose Trump tax bill
Barack Obama has warned that Congress is putting millions of Americans at risk of losing healthcare coverage, in a rare intervention from the former president as the Republican party advances legislation that would gut major provisions of the Affordable Care Act.
“Congressional Republicans are trying to weaken the Affordable Care Act and put millions of people at risk of losing their health care,” Obama posted on social media. “Call your Senators and tell them we can’t let that happen.”
There is a new type of toxic dater in town – one who disappears, then resurfaces
Name: Submarining.
Age: The first contraption that could really be called a submarine was built by a Dutchman, Cornelis Drebbel, in 1620 for King James I, and tested on the Thames.
Fraudsters use fake artists to juice royalties from streaming services – but real musicians are getting blamed. Might they be better off without Spotify et al?
There is a battle gripping the music business today around the manipulation of streaming services – and innocent indie artists are the collateral damage.
Fraudsters are flooding Spotify, Apple Music and the rest with AI-generated tracks, to try and hoover up the royalties generated by people listening to them. These tracks are cheap, quick and easy to make, with Deezer estimating in April that over 20,000 fully AI-created tracks – that’s 18% of new tracks – were being ingested into its platform daily, almost double the number in January. The fraudsters often then use bots, AI or humans to endlessly listen to these fake songs and generate revenue, while others are exploiting upload services to get fake songs put on real artists’ pages and siphon off royalties that way.
Mississippi’s Operation Good engaged teens in a range of programs, protecting them from violence – but that work is now in jeopardy
Most days, Fredrick Womack and his team can be found scattered throughout Jackson, Mississippi, talking to groups of young Black men and teens – whether they’re working, which bills need to be paid at home and if any brewing conflicts are at risk of turning violent. Through these conversations with young men, who are both perpetrators and victims of much of the city’s violence, Womack hopes he can help steer them in a different direction.
Womack, 51, is the co-founder of the non-profit Operation Good, which, in addition to this work on the streets, hosts a youth summer program and trash cleanups, and helps teen boys find odd jobs, like cutting lawns, so they can earn a few dollars instead of resorting to crime for income. It also offers critical resources for the community, like buying school clothes for kids and paying utility bills for families that can’t afford them through its It Takes a Village program. “That is the main underlying factor for violence,” Womack said, “people living in impoverished situations.”
Rijksmuseum exhibition includes contraceptive featuring erotic etching of a nun and three clergymen
A 200-year-old illustrated condom will go on display with Dutch golden age masters in Amsterdam this week, after the 19th-century “luxury souvenir” became the first-ever contraceptive sheath to be added to the Rijksmuseum’s art collection.
The condom, which was probably made of a sheep’s appendix circa 1830, is thought to have come from an upmarket brothel in France, most likely in Paris. It features an erotic etching depicting a partially undressed nun pointing at the erect genitals of three clergymen, as well as the phrase Voila, mon choix (“There, that’s my choice”).
Family fallout. Two feuding brothers. An ambitious American actor wife … the Beckhams certainly seem to have a lot in common with the Sussexes
So long, and thanks for all the jam. Meghan, Duchess of Sussex and queen of Montecito, recently announced that she is reimagining As Ever, her raspberry spread and “flower sprinkle” business. In an interview with Fast Company, which Meghan conducted in fluent buzzword, the actor and entrepreneur said she is thinking bigger than jarred goods and partnering with Netflix to bring forth a vision in which “content and commerce meet, not in a product placement way, but rather in an ideological way”. (I think the ideology she is referencing here is capitalism). Meghan is now involved with so many different projects that she notes: “If I had to write a résumé, I don’t know what I would call myself.”
It looks as though her husband, Henry Charles Albert David Mountbatten-Windsor, doesn’t know what to call himself either. The big Harry news from recent days is that the Duke of Sussex had a moment where he considered changing his double-barrelled last name to “Spencer”, in a nod to his late mother and a middle finger to the rest of his family.
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Authorities say Egyptian national took firearm class but could not make purchase because he is not a US citizen
The man accused of attacking a a pro-Israel peace parade with molotov cocktails in Boulder, Colorado, on Sunday told authorities he planned to use a gun and took a concealed firearm class – but was denied the purchase because he was not a US citizen.
Mohamed Sabry Soliman, an Egyptian national, is facing federal and state charges over the attack which wounded 12 people as they held a weekly demonstration calling for the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza. He had planned to target the demonstration with 18 molotov cocktails in his possession but apparently had second thoughts and threw just two, according to authorities.
Rose Njeri charged with breaching cybercrime law over tool for people to show opposition to proposed tax changes
A Kenyan software developer who was arrested last week after creating a tool for people to express their opposition to a proposed law has been arraigned in court and released on bail, amid public anger at her detention and growing signs of repression in the east African country and its neighbours.
Rose Njeri was charged on Tuesday with “unauthorised interference with a computer system” in violation of the country’s computer misuse and cybercrime law.
UK needs a ‘clear national ambition’ to avoid missing out as science changes rapidly, Space: 2075 report warns
Humanity must prepare for a sweeping revolution as nations and companies gear up to build moon bases, space stations and orbiting factories, and uncover evidence – if evidence is out there – that we are not alone in the universe.
A horizon-scanning report from the Royal Society envisions a new era of space activities that will reshape the world, including clean energy beamed to Earth, robots that mine asteroids or recycle dead satellites, and manufacturing plants that circle the planet churning out products labelled “Made in Space”.
Ukraine has detonated a massive underwater blast targeting the key road and rail bridge connecting the Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula to Russia, damaging its underwater supports.
The operation, claimed by Kyiv’s SBU security service, is the second high-profile operation by Ukraine in days striking significant Russian assets after a sophisticated drone raid on Moscow’s strategic bomber fleet on Sunday.
Inquiry is first since anti-terrorism prosecution unit set up to investigate potential links of crime to ultra-right
French prosecutors have opened a terrorism investigation after a man in the south of France, who they say posted racist videos online, allegedly shot dead his Tunisian neighbour.
Hichem Miraoui, 45, a Tunisian hairdresser who lived in the village of Puget-sur-Argents, near the Mediterranean town of Fréjus, was shot five times near his home late on Saturday and died at the scene.
The president wished his predecessor well but has since reverted to attacks – and dabbled in conspiracy theories
After Joe Biden revealed his cancer diagnosis, Donald Trump offered an uncharacteristically empathetic and simple response.
“Melania and I are saddened to hear about Joe Biden’s recent medical diagnosis. We extend our warmest and best wishes to Jill and the family, and we wish Joe a fast and successful recovery,” the president wrote on social media.
Trucks carrying food for 2m people in famine-threatened El Fasher targeted in RSF-controlled Al Koma, western Sudan
A UN aid convoy carrying critical food supplies to a famine-threatened city in western Sudan has been targeted in a brutal attack that appeared to have caused “multiple casualties”.
A number of trucks belonging to the UN’s food and children’s agencies were attacked as they headed towards El Fasher, capital of North Darfur, which has been besieged by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) for more than a year.
1st over: West Indies 3-0 (King 1, Lewis 0) A quiet over to start with, Mahmood gets some decent bounce and carry off the pitch but slams down two wides to get West Indies going. King then takes a quick single that was drenched in risk – there’s a shy at the stumps but it missed by a fair way, it think Lewis was struggling to make his ground too. All eyes on England’s fielding today, not the best start so far.
Apologies I didn’t post the teams after the toss. England are unchanged from Cardiff. West Indies have made three changes – Shamar Joseph, Sherfane Rutherford and Evin Lewis for Matthew Forde, Shimron Hetmyer and Jewel Andrew.
Part-interpreters, part-comedians, video jockeys translate and contextualise western movies for audiences at home
On a recent Saturday afternoon in an informal settlement in the Ugandan capital, Kampala, dozens of young men sat on benches in a dark shack to watch a bootlegged version of the Hollywood comedy-horror film The Monkey.
As the English-language action unfolded on the screen, a voiceover translation in the Bantu language Luganda by VJ Junior, one of Uganda’s top video jockeys, boomed into the room.
In her new memoir, Hala Alyan reflects on her fractured lineage and having a child against all odds
In the poem Hours Ghazal, published in 2024,Hala Alyan writes: “The cost of wanting something is who you are on the other side of getting it.”The line is a glimpse into the mind of a woman, who, at 38, has paid a high price for desire and emerged intact after living through what might feel like several lifetimes for the rest of us.
Alyan is a Palestinian American poet, novelist, clinical psychologist and psychology professor at New York University. She is also the author of a memoir published this week titled I’ll Tell You When I’m Home.
I have never not been a Palestinian. That has never not been written upon my body. In Lebanon, in Kuwait, in Oklahoma – I am what my father is, and my father is a man who was once a boy who was born to a woman in Gaza. Who speaks with the accent of that place.
Controversial plans could see the slaughter of almost 200 black bears, about 5% of the state’s estimated total
It’s tough to be a bear in Florida these days, where only a year ago a Republican state congressman was accusing the ursine population of shooting up crack cocaine and trashing people’s houses.
Then came a controversial new law that allows anybody to shoot and kill any bear perceived as a threat without fear of consequences, which animal advocates say could be bad news for any creature that inadvertently wanders into a back yard.
Our expert panel recommends the dips that are worth whizzing up fresh at home, and which shop-bought options are good to be titivated before serving
Dips are a great unifier, whether they’re married to a big bowl of crisps and crudites or served as a companion for a picnic spread. If there’s hummus, cacik or borani in the picture, then it’s a party. Happily, says David Carter, founder of Smokestak, Manteca and Oma in London, “you can get a lot of good stuff in stores these days”. That said, he adds, anything involving vegetables is “always going to be best when made fresh”.
If your dip needs lead you to the shops, the trick is to create contrast. Much like getting dressed, you first need to consider the temperature. “Let’s say you have some shop-bought hummus,” Carter says. “If you put that in a pan with a bit of hot water and maybe some lemon juice, then whisk, the hummus will loosen, turn creamy and completely change from the usual fridge-cold stodge.”
A small corner of one of the world’s oldest universities has moved the sport forward, and made the argument for research institutions writ large
If you hope to grasp why modern soccer looks the way it does, or the long strides we’ve made recently in understanding how it actually functions, it helps to know about what’s been happening at one of the world’s oldest universities, in Belgium.
That’s where you’ll find the Sports Analytics Lab at the Catholic University of Leuven, headed up by Jesse Davis, a Wisconsinite computer science professor. Davis grew up going to basketball and football games at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and didn’t discover soccer until college, during the 2002 World Cup. When he was hired in Leuven in 2010 to research machine learning, data mining and artificial intelligence, a band of sports-besotted colleagues brought him back to soccer.
Teams expected to use radar equipment that can scan beneath ground as they look for evidence that could implicate prime suspect Christian Brückner
A new search for Madeleine McCann is under way in Portugal with police officers gathering a few miles from where the British toddler was last seen in 2007.
Portuguese and German police are carrying out the search 18 years after the three-year-old disappeared from the resort of Praia da Luz while her parents were having dinner out, leaving her sleeping in a nearby room with her toddler twin siblings.
Man who led campaign to oust Yoon Suk Yeol comfortably ahead of conservative opponent, according to polls
Exit polls in South Korea have projected that Lee Jae-myung will become the country’s new president after a snap election triggered by a brief period of martial law imposed by the now-impeached former leader Yoon Suk Yeol.
After polls closed in what Lee described as “judgment day” for Asia’s fourth-biggest economy, the broadcaster MBN put Lee, the Democratic party candidate, on 49.2% of the vote, comfortably ahead of his closest rival, the conservative Kim Moon-soo, on 41.7%. A joint exit poll by three other broadcasters showed Lee with 51.7% and Kim with 39.3%.
Club keen on Brentford forward after Liam Delap blow
Fernandes rejects move to Al-Hilal of Saudi Pro League
Manchester United will explore a deal for Brentford’s Bryan Mbeumo after missing out on Liam Delap and have been boosted by Bruno Fernandes rejecting a move to the Saudi Pro League.
Ruben Amorim had said he thought Fernandes would stay despite interest from Al-Hilal. Provided the playmaker does not receive an offer from a leading European club that he wants to pursue, that settles the captain’s future.
Two of PSG’s Champions League winners are strong contenders but are up against Mohamed Salah
George Weah remains the only African to win the prize and the Liverpool forward’s form in the past year has put him in a similar bracket to the Liberian. “The Egyptian King” scored 29 goals and assisted a further 18 to lead the Reds to the Premier League title, but he could not take them further than the last 16 in the Champions League. Arne Slot played Salah in every league match, a sign of his importance and his stupendous fitness. “He’s had very, very, very good seasons at Liverpool but this one probably stands out in terms of numbers,” Arne Slot said of Salah’s Ballon d’Or chances. “If there’s ever a chance for him, it would be this season. If not, then he’s going to try to push even harder next season”. Turning 33 in mid-June, this might be Salah’s final chance to achieve the highest personal accolade in the game, even if his head coach thinks otherwise.
Trump blames attack on Biden’s ‘ridiculous open border policy’ as Miller says attack committed by ‘illegal alien’
The immigration status of the man who allegedly attacked people with a makeshift flamethrower and other incendiary devices at an event for Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado, has become further fodder for the Trump administration’s deportation agenda.
Mohamed Sabry Soliman, a 45-year-old who came to the US in 2022 from Egypt and overstayed his initial tourist visa, according to the US government, allegedly planned his attack on the event specifically to target Zionists, federal authorities said. He shouted “Free Palestine” while carrying out the attack, which the FBI has called an “act of terrorism”, and he was charged on Monday with a federal hate crime.
When social media first exploded, we missed our chance to protect women and girls. Now history is repeating itself
Society is sleepwalking into a nightmare. The rate of global investment in AI is rocketing, as companies and countries invest in what has been described as a new arms race. The Californian company Nvidia, which dominates the market in the chips needed for AI, has become the most valuable in the world. The trend has been dubbed an “AI frenzy”, with the components described by analysts as the “new gold or oil”.
Everyone is getting in on the act, and politicians are desperate to stake their countries’ claim as global leaders in AI development. Safeguards, equitable access and sustainability are falling by the wayside: when countries gathered for the Paris AI summit in February 2025 and produced an international agreement pledging an “open”, “inclusive” and “ethical” approach to AI, the US and the UK refused to sign it.
Laura Bates is the founder of the Everyday Sexism Project and author of The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution is Reinventing Misogyny.
In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support for rape and sexual abuse on 0808 802 9999 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html.
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Starmer bound to accept Mark Rutte’s higher target after announcing ‘Nato-first’ defence strategy, insiders say
Defence sources believe that Britain will be forced to sign up to a target of lifting defence spending to 3.5% of GDP by 2035 at this month’s Nato summit after a campaign by the alliance’s secretary general to keep Donald Trump onboard.
One senior insider said Britain would “without a doubt” sign up to a proposal from the Nato chief, Mark Rutte, to lift allies’ defence spending, which would represent a real-terms increase of about £30bn from the Labour government’s plan.
Jersey Mike’s employee reportedly called county sheriff’s office after finding note in store bathroom that read ‘HELP’
A Navarre, Florida, sandwich shop employee reportedly helped authorities save a domestic violence victim who had allegedly been kidnapped by her abusive, pro-wrestler boyfriend after the worker recently found a note in a store bathroom that read “HELP!”
At the center of the incident is Eleanor Coffee, who was at her job making sandwiches for a shop belonging to the Jersey Mike’s chain when she noticed a “little piece of crumpled up paper” that had been discarded next to one of the business’s toilet paper dispensers, as she put it to the local news station WEAR-TV.
Paramilitaries and organised crime gangs make it UK’s most dangerous place to be a reporter, rights group says
Journalists in Northern Ireland routinely face attacks and death threats from paramilitary and organised crime groups that act with impunity, according to Amnesty International.
Reporters have been physically assaulted and told they will be shot, stabbed, raped or blown up, making Northern Ireland the most dangerous place in the UK for journalism, a report said on Tuesday.
Chelsea have decided against signing Jadon Sancho on a permanent basis and will pay a £5m penalty to send the winger back to Manchester United when his loan ends on 30 June.
Chelsea, who are set to announce the £30m signing of Liam Delap from Ipswich after finalising personal terms with the striker, loaned Sancho last summer with an obligation to buy for £25m.
The British pop musician questions the gender-critical movement in her new song Germ, and argues that cis women need to stand up for the trans community
In Kate Nash’s new single, released last week, the 37-year-old musician and actor has coined a new acronym, Germ: “girl, exclusionary, regressive, misogynist”. In the lyrics, she states: “You’re not radical … You’re not rad at all,” and that “using feminism to erase the rights of others and endanger them is inherently un-feminist”. It arose from Nash seeing “trans-exclusionary radical feminist” –the contentious term “terf”– as something of a misnomer. Those who espouse gender-critical views are, in her opinion, neither radical nor feminist.
The song was written in response to last month’s supreme court ruling that the legal definition of “woman” ought to be based on biological sex (a judgement that doctors at the British Medical Association have called “scientifically illiterate”). “I have a lot of trans people in my life that I care about,” Nash tells me on the day the track is released. “This feminist-trans ‘debate’ – it’s not a debate to me. A friend of mine was the victim of a hate crime last year. I took the ruling very personally.” She says the time felt right for her to speak out. “The LGBTQIA+ community supports women so much, and they have been there for me in my life and career. That’s why I think cis women really owe it to trans people to step up at this moment. This song is for that community.”
Since Trump returned to the White House, the checks and balances of US democracy have proved remarkably resilient
Have we reached peak Trump? Is it possible that we have arrived at a moment, a mere four months into his second term, when the president’s capacity to do harm is diminishing?
That is undeniably a provocative question. Like any US president, Donald Trump remains immensely powerful. It is early days; he can still cause plenty of damage – and certainly will.
Trump’s attacks on the restraints on his power should be viewed not in isolation, but as part of a deliberate scheme to build an autocracy. Each step matters. He is attacking not just big law or Ivy League universities but democracy.
Early opposition is important because resistance becomes harder over time as checks on presidential authority weaken.
The temptation to save one’s own skin should be resisted because it plays into the autocratic strategy of divide-and-conquer. A collective defense works best.
Appeasement may seem like a way to calm the bully, but bullies see it as weakness, an invitation to demand more.
Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch, is a visiting professor at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs. His book, Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments, was published by Knopf and Allen Lane in February
Documentary charting the British Olympian’s career including his return from breaking his neck is for equestrian fans only due to tight-lipped interviews
It’s one hell of a comeback. In 2000, champion showjumper Nick Skelton broke his neck in a bad fall; two years later, he was back on a horse and out of retirement. He went on to win Olympic gold twice, first in London in 2012, then aged 58 at Rio in 2016 (with a replacement hip), becoming the oldest British winner of an individual Olympic gold medal in more than 100 years. Skelton (and his horse Big Star) finally retired in 2017; his story is told in this solid but largely unrevealing documentary, flawed by tight-lipped interviews, no one rocking the boat.
Skelton was born in Warwickshire, the son of a chemist. He rode his first pony aged 18 months (“we did everything together”) and after parting ways with school at 15, he went to work for tough guy horse owner and trainer Ted Edgar (“a bastard” according to one friend). Talented and ambitious, Skelton was a superstar showjumper, but back at the stables, boss Edgar still made him clean the lorries. In the end, Skelton decided to go it alone with his wife, Sarah; they mortgaged their house and bought a horse.
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