Decision affects secondaries and primaries approved by previous government using its ‘free school’ application process UK politics live – latest updates Ministers have paused plans to open 44 new state schools in England, including three sixth form colleges backed by Eton, while they review each school’s potential demand and value for money. The decision will affect mainstream secondary and primary schools that were approved by the previous government using its “free school” application process, introduced by Michael Gove in 2010. Continue reading...

We love each other and have recently navigated a serious family crisis. But I am starting to think he just isn’t very sexually attracted to me My partner (46, male) and I (39, female) have been together for just over a year and moved in together five months ago. We’ve been through a lot together already, including a serious family matter that impacted our lives a great deal. The issue is our sex life. While I am a very sexual being, he doesn’t seem to be. We have sex about once a week, which might be enough for many people, but not for me. I have tried talking to him about it, but he says there is nothing wrong, which I find hard to believe. I know he regularly watches pornography, so I assume libido is not the issue. I am starting to believe that although I’m sure he loves me very much, he is just not very attracted to me sexually, and I don’t know how to deal with this. I have never had this experience in previous relationships, and it’s triggering insecurities in me I didn’t even know I had. I have tried talking to him, suggesting we try to spice things up – such as dressing up for him – but to no avail. As much as I love him, I don’t think I’m prepared to live a life of infrequent, vanilla sex. Family issues and stressful events – in fact, any type of stress – can negatively affect anyone’s libido. It might be best to put your partner’s current level of sexual interest into perspective – and to understand that it’s not about you. Remember that people view erotic material for many different reasons, including when they are trying to elevate their sexual interest in general. Do not pressure him. Instead, try to find ways to de-stress both of you – ideally, planning relaxing leisure time doing things you both enjoy, or taking a vacation. One year of being together is not a long time. It will take considerably longer to truly get to know each other sexually, and it’s never wise to put pressure on a partner or create sexual anxiety. Your sexual frequency will always wax and wane depending on what else is going on in your lives. Don’t count your weekly lovemaking sessions or compare their frequency to what you think is normal or believe that others are experiencing. When it comes to eroticism, prioritise quality over quantity. 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. Continue reading...

John Kirby says Biden administration unsure if leak or hack led to secret documents appearing online on Telegram The FBI has launched an investigation into the unauthorized release of classified documents describing Israel’s preparation for a potential retaliatory attack on Iran. The White House national security spokesperson, John Kirby, said on Monday that the Biden administration was still not certain if the classified information was leaked or hacked but that officials did not have any indication at this point of “additional documents like this finding their way into the public domain”. Continue reading...

The 34-year-old was last seen at 9am on Monday 30 September in Malton, North Yorkshire A body has been recovered in the search for missing woman Victoria Taylor, North Yorkshire police temporary assistant chief constable Wayne Fox said. Taylor, 34, was last seen at 9am on Monday 30 September at her home in Malton, North Yorkshire, police said. A picture taken from CCTV of her at a garage in the town later that morning had been released. Continue reading...

Vice-president’s team concerned Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvia might not vote as a block for first time since 1988 Don’t miss important US election coverage. Get our free app and sign up for election alerts Kamala Harris has a significant advantage over Donald Trump among young voters, matching the lead Joe Biden ended up taking in the 2020 election, a new poll finds. The survey from CNBC Generation Lab shows Harris up 20 percentage points with voters aged 18 to 34, with 60% support compared with Trump’s 40%. That’s about the same margin by which Biden won the group four years ago. Continue reading...

Tate St Ives, Cornwall With a series of fabric collages, the artist pays tender, nuanced and beautifully realised homage to the Roma of Czarna Góra and the suffering they endured The wider world woke up to Małgorzata Mirga-Tas at the 2022 Venice Biennale, when the Polish artist became the first Romani to represent a country at the international art festival. Stitched from domestic textiles – old clothes, rugs, patterned bedsheets and curtains – Mirga-Tas’s maximalist presentation transformed the Polish pavilion with pictorial panels that blended art history, mythology and astrology with images of her Roma community in Czarna Góra. It was one of those rare instances when an un-hyped artist burst on to the scene with bold, fresh, transporting work. She is deservedly now much in demand. Blending art and activism, Mirga-Tas uses her growing visibility to honour Roma lives and in particular those of Roma women. The striking final gallery at Tate St Ives carries six portraits from the series Siukar Manusia (“Wonderful People”) in which stitched and painted figures are set against sombre indigo backdrops. Many are survivors of the Holocaust during which an enormous proportion of Europe’s Romani population was killed. The dapper violinist Augustyn Gabor is pictured with his young daughter on his lap and a cat curled beneath his seat. Krystyna Gil, who survived imprisonment in a concentration camp as a child and went on to found an association for Romani women, appears at an advanced age, her face lined with care, seated in a bright floral skirt beneath a frilly standard lamp. Continue reading...

People with working sense of smell sniff more than those with anosmia, with possible implications for health People born without a sense of smell breathe differently to those with one, researchers have found, which could help explain why problems with odour perception are associated with a host of health issues. While some have dismissed the sense of smell as unimportant – Charles Darwin said it was “of extremely slight service” to humans – studies have associated its loss with depression, feelings of personal isolation and even an increased risk of early death. Continue reading...

Statement comes as tech firms try to use creative professionals’ work to train AI models Abba’s Björn Ulvaeus, the actor Julianne Moore, the Radiohead singer Thom Yorke are among 10,500 signatories of a statement from the creative industries warning artificial intelligence companies that unlicensed use of their work is a “major, unjust threat” to artists’ livelihoods. The statement comes amid legal battles between creative professionals and tech firms over the use of their work to train AI models such as ChatGPT and claims that using their intellectual property without permission is a breach of copyright. Continue reading...

Keen to show off their newfound riches, and to kick back at a society that suppressed them, Roma families are filling rural Romania with exuberant symbols of wealth – boasting gilded turrets and gleaming staircases that lead to nowhere In the village of Hășdat in the heart of rural Romania, geese roam the dusty streets, bonfires burn in back gardens, and the houses are not quite what you would expect. Not at all. One sports a pair of golden Versace Medusa heads and Rolex crown emblems on its tall metal gates, flanked by marble pillars topped with trios of cherubs. They mark the entrance to a compound where a creamy stuccoed pile groans with balconies and plaster mouldings, its roof dripping with ornamental guttering. A group of women stand around a table in its courtyard, plucking feathers from freshly slaughtered chickens behind a fence of gilded scrollwork. Across the street, the neighbours have gone even further. A shoal of metal fish surmount the four-tiered pagoda roof of this five-storey mansion, where gold-painted columns glitter on either side of bulging mirror-glass doors. A bright blue Ford Mustang is parked in the forecourt next to an Audi and the discarded box for a widescreen TV. Two girls in matching velour tracksuits and gold jewellery race in circles on their scooters. Continue reading...

Gerton, North Carolina, population 250, was badly hit by the storm. Emma Churchman describes how the community came together in the aftermath The small mountain community of Gerton, about 16 miles south-east of Asheville, North Carolina, was one of the areas badly hit by Hurricane Helene. Three weeks on from the storm, the Gerton resident Emma Churchman describes its devastating impact and how locals and volunteers have come together to help the community on its way to recovery. Continue reading...

People’s party tasked with coalition talks with Social Democrats after winning Freedom party fails to find partner Austria’s president has tasked the incumbent chancellor with forming a new government, after the general election winner, the far-right Freedom party (FPÖ), failed to find a coalition partner to allow it to take power. Alexander van der Bellen, the 80-year-old head of state, told reporters he had asked Karl Nehammer, head of the centre-right People’s party (ÖVP), to begin negotiations with the centre-left Social Democrats (SPÖ). Continue reading...

Sign up now! Sign up now! Sign up now? Sign up now! Season previews are a funny old game. Think back to the summer, all that hope, those words now coming back to haunt their writers. And the managers, too. Back in August, Oliver Glasner was the adept, urbane, Big Vase-winning, Österreichisch meister of in-game management. He had locked down Crystal Palace’s defence and mounted a canvas for Eberechi Eze and Michael Olise’s artistry. Adam Wharton, meanwhile, was the second coming of Paul Scholes, equally strawberry blonde but better at tackling. The summer’s Euros began with nationwide calls for Gareth Southgate to push the Wharton button. Jean-Philippe Mateta was a goal machine. He showed that off at Big Sports Day, too. What could possibly go wrong? While I completely share your cynicism over Inter Miami’s ‘qualification’ for Fifa’s Bigger Club World Cup (yesterday’s Football Daily), I wonder if before you wrote your ‘31 of the best teams in the world and …’ line, you’d noticed that RB Salzburg (one appearance in Big Cup’s last 16 in the last five years) had somehow qualified as well” – Gordon MacLeod. Yesterday’s Football Daily reported that the MLS Supporters’ Shield is given out to the ‘best team in the regular season’. Alas, no. It is given to the team that accumulates the most points in the regular season. Surely these are the same? Alas, no. A wildly unbalanced schedule in which, for example, Inter Miami play weak teams like Chicago and New England twice while playing zero times against 10 other teams in the league makes it rather tough to say who the best team is. Credit to Inter Miami, they are very good. But the MLS schedule is silly, almost as silly as Gianni Infantino” – Patrick Connolly. I can’t be the only wearisome old git who read the 25-year-old link from Noble Francis (yesterday’s Football Daily letters) and pined for better days. Yes, we always had irksome gum-flapping, but all of it then – the bleeding David Beckham thing, Alan Shearer trying to recall the steps to ‘Saturday Night’ on Neil Lennon’s head – lack the underlying air of constant crass, commercially-driven connivance we get today. Perhaps the only canary in that coalmine was the mention of Ronaldo being persuaded to play a game after having a fit. Mind you, that was in a Fifa competition, so I’m sure it was all above board” – Jon Millard (and no other wearisome old gits). This is an extract from our daily football email … Football Daily. To get the full version, just visit this page and follow the instructions. Continue reading...

Yulia Mykytenko leads a platoon of men in a reconnaissance and attack unit – and has already lost her husband, father and many friends in the devastating war. In her memoir, she writes that she was always destined for combat The sound of birdsong is so loud outside Yulia Mykytenko’s current home, an abandoned house somewhere in the Donbas region of Ukraine, that I can hear it through my laptop. We’re speaking on Zoom, Mykytenko visible briefly – young, wearing black, her dark bobbed hair with blue-dyed streaks in it – before she turns the camera off because her signal isn’t great. She has some outside space and, she says with a laugh, a local sheep sometimes comes to visit her dog. Mykytenko, a lieutenant in the Ukrainian army, also feeds the street cats, pets abandoned by residents who fled, and has her own cat. In her new memoir, How Good It Is I Have No Fear of Dying (the name comes from the first line of a poem by the Ukrainian poet Vasyl Stus), she writes that each of the houses her 15-strong platoon live in has a cat, to catch the mice and rats that chew everything, including the cables to the generators and satellite communications. Their numbers boom in the area, she writes, as they “feed on the bodies of hapless soldiers”. Mykytenko, 29, spent two years here between 2016 and 2018, when Russia invaded the region, then again after the full-scale invasion in 2022. One of the first female frontline commanders, she leads a reconnaissance and attack unit. Her pilots use drones to track the Russian army and to locate the dead bodies of fallen colleagues and support their retrieval. Just this morning, some of her men – she lives with five of her platoon – told her there had been some heavy shelling at 5am, but she slept through it. “I got used to it,” she says. This current house is “quite comfortable” – it has running water (at the previous one, they had to fetch water from a well), but it is cold and takes an hour to heat. Continue reading...

Saud al-Qahtani had been suspended permanently on Twitter before Elon Musk took over and rebranded it as X A key Saudi suspect in the murder of US-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 has had his account reinstated on X, the social media company controlled by Elon Musk, after it was permanently suspended under the company’s previous owner. Saud al-Qahtani, a onetime key adviser to Mohammed bin Salman, had “direct involvement” in the murder of Khashoggi, according to a US intelligence assessment released by the Biden administration in 2021. Continue reading...

Mats Steen had muscular dystrophy and died very young. But a touching new documentary has used animation and his own posts to reveal the fulfilling gaming life he led in World of Warcraft – right down to his first kiss The night after their son Mats died aged just 25, Trude and Robert Steen sat on the sofa in their living room in Oslo with their daughter Mia. They couldn’t sleep. “Everything was a blur,” remembers Trude of that day 10 years ago. “Then Robert said, ‘Maybe we should reach out to Mats’ friends in World of Warcraft.’” Mats was born with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a progressive condition that causes the muscles to weaken gradually. He was diagnosed aged four and started using a wheelchair at 10. By the end of his life, Mats could only move his fingers, and required a tube to clear his throat every 15 minutes. As he became increasingly disabled, he spent more time gaming: 20,000 hours in his last decade (about the same as if it were a full-time job). Continue reading...

Experts and poor sleepers share their tried and tested products and tips for a restful night Whether you struggle to nod off or wake repeatedly during the night, the secret to sleeping more soundly could be as simple as a new bedside lamp or a 99p app. We asked former insomniacs and sleep experts to share the things that worked for them. Here are their tips for transforming your bedtime routine for the better. Continue reading...

Witchy, cozy, and murderously mischievous, this 1998 film about a clan of women beset by an ancient curse feels like a warm hug. Its resurgence is long overdue Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email The formulaic 90s romcom shouldn’t – in theory – involve accidental murder or exorcising evil spirits. Yet Griffin Dunne’s Practical Magic proves that the feminine urge to murder your evil ex-boyfriend (twice) is funny, sexy, even mischievous. Picture Nicole Kidman with copper hair and curtain bangs, hurtling through an expanse of American highways to a soundtrack featuring Stevie Nicks and Joni Mitchell. Or Stockard Channing and Dianne Wiest as wickedly witchy aunts poised around a kitchen bench, chanting a spell (“Adder’s fork and blindworm’s sting, Barbados lime is just the thing!”) as they blitz together midnight margaritas. Although the term “chick flick” is perhaps outdated, Practical Magic’s alchemy, comedy and darkness has resonated with generations of women – so much so that more than 25 years after its initial release, Sandra Bullock and Kidman are lined up to reprise their roles in an upcoming sequel. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning Practical Magic is available to stream on Stan in Australia and Max in the US, and available to rent in the UK. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here Continue reading...

We like to think patients judge us for our medical acumen but, in fact, they observe the words we say, the empathy we show and the kindness we offer “Now I am crying because you are sitting there.” “I am sorry,” I say, preparing to jump up. Continue reading...

Faye Carruthers, Suzanne Wrack, Chris Paouros and Tom Garry to discuss the weekend’s WSL action and look ahead to the internationals. Plus, FA’s women’s technical director, Kay Cossington, joins for an exclusive interview On today’s podcast, the panel reviews a weekend full of drama. Chelsea showcased their five-star quality, and our discussion centres around whether Johanna Rytting Kaneryd is currently the best winger in the world. Additionally, Arsenal kicked off the post-Jonas Eidevall era with a much-needed win, but do they still face lingering problems? Manchester City came from behind to take the top spot in the league. Meanwhile, Leicester defeated Everton to achieve their first victory of the season, and just how pleased was Nikita Parris to score against her former club, Manchester United, while playing for Brighton. Continue reading...

Jeffries was arrested as authorities investigate allegations that he and others sexually exploited and abused young men at parties Former Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries was arrested on Tuesday as part of a criminal sex trafficking investigation by federal prosecutors and the FBI in Brooklyn, according to news reports. Jeffries was arrested with his partner, Matthew Smith, and a third man, Jim Jacobson, as authorities investigate allegations that the men sexually exploited and abused young men at parties they hosted in the US and around the world. Continue reading...

Unclear if UN secretary general will attend Kazan meeting of countries including China, India and Iran The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, ostracised by the west and labeled a potential war criminal by the International criminal court, has played host to 36 world leaders from nations including China, India and Iran as part of a summit of the Brics group designed to display Moscow as anything but isolated. It was unclear if the UN secretary general is willing to defy the west and Ukraine by attending the summit, as Moscow claims he intends. António Guterres’s spokesman was equivocal about his plans on Monday. Continue reading...

Whatever the cause is found to be, a third collision in four years is another blemish on UK’s strong safety record The fatal collision of two trains between Talerddig and Llanbrynmair in rural Wales on Monday evening is, in many respects, unique in Britain’s recent rail experience: no head-on crash had been recorded this century, and only one passenger had died in a UK crash since 2007. Inspectors from the Rail Accident Investigation Branch (RAIB), who arrived on the scene in Powys last night and resumed in daylight, are likely to release an early report this week. Continue reading...

Manchester City player injured against Belgium in March ‘Never ever before was I so disappointed. I didn’t like it’ Pep Guardiola has stressed the importance of John Stones staying fit by revealing he has “never been so angry” as when the Manchester City defender was injured in England’s friendly against Belgium in the spring. Stones suffered a muscle problem 10 minutes into the 2-2 draw at Wembley on 26 March, causing his withdrawal. It came after he played all of the 1-0 loss to Brazil three days previously. The injury has hampered Stones, leading to him making only three Premier League starts since. The 30-year-old underlined his importance to City with Sunday’s added-time winner at Wolves, which followed an added-time equaliser in September’s 2-2 draw with Arsenal. Continue reading...

The great and good of US media and politics can’t decide if the lavish giveaway is unethical or illegal. I’m no expert, but it seems off to me For a guy who has spent his entire life making “I am very rich” the keystone of his personal brand, there is something quite poignant about watching Donald Trump get financially cucked by Elon Musk on stage every night. Musk is much younger, much richer, and has had a much more successful series of hair transplants. But needs must, it seems. As you might be aware, Musk has recently decided to update the tired dystopian fiction trope in which impoverished citizens are forced to compete in deadly gameshows where the winner gets a life-changingly glittering prize, and the losers are killed for sport. In Elon’s rebooted version, the richest man in the world is giving struggling voters the chance to win a million dollars if they sign a “petition” in favour of free speech and the right to bear arms. Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist A year in Westminster: John Crace, Marina Hyde and Pippa Crerar. On Tuesday 3 December, join Crace, Hyde and Crerar as they look back at a political year like no other, live at the Barbican in London and livestreamed globally. Book tickets here or at guardian.live Continue reading...

PM says he shares public’s anger but claims there would have been ‘paralysis’ if government had not acted UK politics live – latest updates Beaming prisoners were greeted with hugs and kisses as they stepped out of the metal gates of HMP Manchester and into the arms of waiting friends and family after being freed under the government’s early release scheme. By lunchtime on Tuesday, 14 prisoners had been released from the prison, known locally as Strangeways, with several confirming they had been let go early. Two said they had been serving time for drugs offences. Continue reading...