Author: The Guardian

I’ve been campaigning and raising money for assisted dying for decades, but now we have an icon like Esther Rantzen talking about it, suddenly the game has changed. My mother died in 1964 and some time after that I decided to join the Euthanasia Society, which is now called Dignity in Dying. When I looked after my mother-in-law, she was begging to get off the planet but nobody would help her. After that there was my husband Eddie [Kulukundis, theatre and sports philanthropist] who had dementia. He was such a gentle man, a pleasure to look after for 14 years. But 18…

This week I have seen more than one tweet from mortified people who thought it would be OK to watch the new batch of Bridgerton episodes on the train on their way to work. The reason they were mortified was the first new episode, in which a sex scene goes on and on. And on. And on.According to people who know these things, the sex scene – between Nicola Coughlan’s Penelope Featherington and Luke Newton’s Colin Bridgerton – was the longest in the show’s history, clocking in at almost six minutes. It was so long, in fact, that Coughlan and…

A federal judge in Texas on Friday ordered the liquidation of the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones′s personal assets and was still deciding on his company’s separate bankruptcy case.The decision could determine the future of his rightwing and conspiracy theory-laden Infowars media platform, as Jones owes $1.5bn for his false claims that the shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012 was a hoax.Judge Christopher Lopez approved converting Jones’s proposed personal bankruptcy reorganization to a liquidation. He was still set to rule on whether Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, based in Austin, Texas, also should be liquidated.Many…

timeAll net run rate calculations may have gone away after England beat Oman, but Scotland still have a path to the T20 World Cup Super Eights: they advance by defeating Australia in St Lucia on Saturday night.If so, then their former captain Kyle Coetzer will consider it the greatest moment in their history, surpassing the wins against Bangladesh and West Indies during the previous two T20 World Cups, as well as the 2018 The famous ODI victory over England at the Grange.Cozer, who led Scotland 110 times before stepping down in 2022, said: “There were great days and it still…

When Christi Angel first talked to a chatbot impersonating her deceased partner, Cameroun, she found the encounter surreal and “very weird”.“Yes, I knew it was an AI system but, once I started chatting, my feeling was I was talking to Cameroun. That’s how real it felt to me,” she says.However, the experience soon jarred. Angel’s conversation with “Cameroun” took a more sinister turn when the persona assumed by the chatbot said he was “in hell”. Angel, a practising Christian, found the exchange upsetting and returned a second time seeking a form of closure, which the chatbot provided.“It was very unsettling.…

My 15-year-old daughter has zero sense of personal hygiene. She currently has about a dozen used sanitary towels dropped on the floor, with food wrappers and rubbish. I have to nag her to bathe. She wears knickers several days in a row. I went in to her room and the stink turned my stomach. She’s looking at her tablet, oblivious to how disgusting and smelly it is.She’s not depressed. She’s perfectly sociable at school and at home. I cannot wrap my head around how she’s so content to be to so disgusting. I am ashamed, especially given how many times…

One of my earliest gardening memories is of tomato feed: the dark brown potion that left a sticky residue, the ritual of pouring it into the watering can and diluting it like squash. Most of all, it’s an olfactory memory: there’s something Proustian about tomato feed, of hot greenhouse stuffiness and being small. It’s one of the key smells of summer for me.This is partially down to my grandad, who was a Percy Thrower type, growing tomatoes in his greenhouse and trails of sweet peas for my grandmother. Photographic evidence attests that he merrily let my siblings and me run around with…

I knew it wasn’t a normal phone call. A man was asking if I could sing at a wedding he was organising. It was in 2000. Only a few years before, I’d become one of the first female priests ordained in the Church of England. There had been a lot of press coverage – positive and negative. For a time, it seemed I was the public face of the controversy around female priests and I didn’t like it.What piqued my interest was that the man I was speaking to wouldn’t tell me who was getting married, just that it was very high-profile.…

The prosecution: Mandy Barry is very leftwing and wants to change my views. But I have a right to keep my thoughts to myself My husband, Barry, has strong political opinions and is very leftwing. He’s always trying to persuade me to change my views, and I don’t like it. I was brought up in a very conservative family – it’s all I knew. I don’t like being told what to think, so I try to vote in secret, which he hates.Recently, when it came to the mayoral elections in London, he got very wound up because I wouldn’t tell him who…

A tropical disturbance has brought a rare flash flood emergency to much of southern Florida as residents prepared to weather more heavy rainfall on Thursday and Friday.Wednesday’s downpours and subsequent flooding blocked roads, floated vehicles and delayed the Florida Panthers on their way to Stanley Cup games in Canada against the Edmonton Oilers.The disorganized storm system was pushing across Florida from the Gulf of Mexico at roughly the same time as the early June start of hurricane season, which this year is forecast to be among the most active in recent memory amid concerns that climate change is increasing storm…