Author: The Guardian

My biggest rejection came from my father. He left and as a result there was a lot of overcompensation, me trying to be a tough guy on the streets. He was an alcoholic, a really bad guy, but my mother chose me over him. I’d tell people he’d died, because I didn’t want to address it. I didn’t do anything wrong, but for 20 years I thought I had.I was raised in a situation that wasn’t judgmental and I was never dissuaded from being sensitive to other people’s feelings. I was brought up by my mum. I had a lot…

Violet, 74 I used to have trouble taking my clothes off with the lights on. Now I’m perfectly happy to hang naked from the ceiling When I met Oliver I was 72, but sexually I felt like a novice. My 30-year marriage had been passionless. My ex-husband and I did have sex in the early days, but it was very conventional: we only ever tried two positions. A year into dating Oliver, he presented me with a tiny vibrator as a Valentine’s gift, and I was amazed. I had heard of vibrators, but had never seen one in real life.I…

The Nigerian chess champion broke the record for the longest chess marathon by playing chess continuously for 58 hours.Tunde Onakoya, 29, hopes to raise $1 million for the education of African children through a world record attempt in New York’s Times Square.He ran 58 hours in the early hours of Saturday morning, breaking the current chess marathon record of 56 hours, 9 minutes and 37 seconds set by Hallvard Haug Flatebø and Sjur Ferkingstad from Norway in 2018.He played against U.S. chess champion Shawn Martinez, complying with Guinness World Records guidelines, which states that any attempt to break the record…

Influenza is the pathogen most likely to trigger a new pandemic in the near future, according to leading scientists.An international survey, to be published next weekend, will reveal that 57% of senior disease experts now think that a strain of flu virus will be the cause of the next global outbreak of deadly infectious illness.The belief that influenza is the world’s greatest pandemic threat is based on long-term research showing it is constantly evolving and mutating, said Cologne University’s Jon Salmanton-García, who carried out the study.“Each winter influenza appears,” he said. “You could describe these outbreaks as little pandemics. They…

A man has died after setting himself on fire outside the New York courthouse where Donald Trump’s hush-money trial is taking place.The New York City police department said on Saturday the man had been declared dead by staff at an area hospital.Officials had said earlier the man, who was in his late 30s, was in critical condition.The New York police department said the man, who they identified as Max Azzarello of St Augustine, Florida, did not appear to be targeting Trump or others involved in the trial.Witnesses said the man pulled pamphlets out of a backpack and threw them in…

Is there an easy way to know what you need to do each weekend without having to look it up?Few domestic gardens need work every weekend – whisper it, but they’re quite good at looking after themselves. Broadly speaking: new growth on twiggy, brown (or woody) stems is a fair sign to prune old growth back to encourage the new growth into a neater, fuller shape; a shift to spring and summer signals a need to feed plants; if your plants are romping away, your weeds probably will be too – pulling them out while they’re small is easier –…

Ukraine says so Shot down a Russian Tu-22M3 strategic bomber at 308 kilometers (180 miles) It took part in a long-range air raid over Dnipro that killed eight people, including two children. Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine’s military spy agency GUR, said: “All I can say is that the plane was hit at a distance of 308 kilometers, which is quite far away.” An intelligence source told Reuters the plane Hit by a modified S-200 Soviet-era long-range surface-to-air missile system. Unconfirmed social media footage showed a fighter jet with its tail on fire spiraling towards the ground. The Russian Defense…

Oxford University this week shut down an academic institute run by one of Elon Musk’s favorite philosophers. The Future of Humanity Institute, dedicated to the long-termism movement and other Silicon Valley-endorsed ideas such as effective altruism, closed this week after 19 years of operation. Musk had donated £1m to the FIH in 2015 through a sister organization to research the threat of artificial intelligence. He had also boosted the ideas of its leader for nearly a decade on X, formerly Twitter.The center was run by Nick Bostrom, a Swedish-born philosopher whose writings about the long-term threat of AI replacing humanity…

A U.S. citizen known to have fought against pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine between 2014 and 2017 was killed in Moscow-occupied Donetsk, according to Russian media reports.Russian authorities in eastern Ukraine reported the disappearance of 64-year-old American Russell Bentley earlier this month.”Russell Bentley, known as ‘Texas’, a real American, truly from Texas, was killed in Donetsk,” said the pro-Kremlin RT TV channel Margarita Simonyan said on social media.”He’s fighting for our people,” she said. Simonyan gave no details about how he died.Bentley’s “Eastern” battalion confirmed his death and called for “severe punishment for those who killed Russell Bentley” and suggested that…

Iran’s missile and drone attack on Israel had, by the end of this week, become one of the most interpreted events in recent modern history. Then, in the early hours of Friday, came reports of Israel’s riposte. As in June 1914, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated in a moment that ultimately led to the first world war, these shots were heard around the world, even if few can agree conclusively on what they portend.By one de minimis account, Tehran was merely sending a performative warning shot with its attack last Saturday, almost taking its ballistic missiles…