News (old posts, page 924)

My boyfriend is almost perfect – but he’s too vanilla in bed

He is kind, caring, romantic and makes sure I always have a healthy packed lunch. So why am I fantasising about sex with more adventurous partners?

I’m a woman in my early 30s, and after dating my male partner for seven months I’ve become frustrated by his vanilla and mundane sexual preferences. This makes me feel bad about myself, because he is perfect in all other ways. Not only are we intellectually compatible and share many interests, but he is also kind, caring and romantic. He makes sure I never leave for work without a healthy packed lunch and is full of fun ideas for our outings. He makes me feel safe and secure. I had an unstable childhood and am not on speaking terms with my father. With my boyfriend, I am able to open up about this.

In the past, I dated difficult and unreliable men with whom I could nonetheless indulge in kinky sex, role-playing and other experimentation – and I always loved that part of the relationship. When I try to initiate this with him, he rejects it; he once said he finds it degrading to women. Sometimes I fantasise about having sex with more adventurous partners, but I can’t stand the thought of losing such a wonderful partner with whom I can build a future.

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Governments like mine have a duty to stand up to Israel. Far too many have failed | Gustavo Petro

Without decisive action, we risk stripping the global legal order of its remaining protections for less-privileged nations

  • Gustavo Petro is the president of Colombia

Over the past 600 days, the world has watched Benjamin Netanyahu lead a campaign of devastation in Gaza, the escalation of regional conflict, and a reckless abandonment of international law at large.

Governments such as mine cannot afford to remain passive. In September 2024, when we voted for the United Nations general assembly resolution on Israel’s policies and practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, we assumed concrete obligations – investigations, prosecutions, sanctions, asset freezes, and cessation of imports and arms. That resolution set a deadline of 12 months for Israel to “bring to an end without delay its unlawful presence”. One hundred and twenty-four states voted in favour, including Colombia. The clock is now ticking.

Gustavo Petro is the president of Colombia

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Inside Kondengui prison: ground zero of Cameroon’s war on dissent

Thousands have been detained and tortured in the Yaoundé jail as Paul Biya, 92, seeks to keep his grip on power

In the visitors’ area in the courtyard of Kondengui maximum security prison, French-dubbed Nollywood films play on a TV as inmates and their guests hug each other and laugh. The green, red and yellow flag of Cameroon flutters above.

The happy picture in this corner of Cameroon’s capital, Yaoundé, belies the prison’s dark status as ground zero of Paul Biya’s five-decade crackdown on dissent in the central African country. Thousands of people have been detained and tortured here as Biya, who turned 92 this year, seeks to keep Cameroon under his grip.

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Chelsea are favourites for final but they face a familiar foe in Thiago Silva

The 40-year-old has led Fluminense with experience and passion. Could he do the same for Brazil next summer?

And then there was one. Nobody expected a Brazilian club to reach the Club World Cup semi-finals, and if any team was going to make a deep run in the tournament, it was not Fluminense. After winning the Copa Libertadores in 2023, they narrowly avoided relegation last year and have gone through four managers in less than two years.

Thankfully for them, they are now coached by the charismatic Renato Gaúcho, who told us earlier in the tournament: “It’s no use having a team of 500 million reais, because football is decided on the field.” Throughout the tournament he has encouraged Brazilians to take pride in what their teams have achieved, despite being written off due to the wealth of the European sides.

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Carlisle to Bosnia: Tyler Burey on an unlikely path to the Champions League

London-born winger is rekindling his joy for the game in an unlikely location and is about to live out a lifelong dream with Zrinjski Mostar

At the end of last year Tyler Burey was playing out of position in defence for a team doomed to relegation from the Football League. Seven months later he is preparing to make his Champions League debut after leaving England behind, seeking to rediscover his love for the game in an unlikely location.

Burey moved to Igman Konjic, a club in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in January on a short-term deal and impressed to such an extent that the country’s title winners, Zrinjski Mostar, signed him on a two-year contract. On Tuesday they visit Virtus of San Marino in the opening leg of their Champions League first qualifying round tie, allowing Burey to live out a lifelong dream.

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Fossils, forests and wild orchids: exploring the white cliffs of Denmark

A short stretch of chalk cliffs on the island of Møn could soon become a world heritage site due to its unique ecology of wild orchids and geology of 30-million-year-old fossils

As we sauntered along sun-splashed woodland paths, our knowledgable guide Michael started to explain the links between the local geology and flora. The unusually luminous light green leaves of the beech trees? “That’s due to the lack of magnesium in the chalky soil.” The 18 species of wild orchid that grow here? “That’s the high calcium content. You see? Everything is connected.”

That’s a phrase my companion and I kept hearing at Møns Klint on the Danish island of Møn. This four-mile (6km) stretch of chalk cliffs and hills topped by a 700-hectare (1,730-acre) forest was fashioned by huge glaciers during the last ice age, creating a unique landscape. In 2026, a Unesco committee will decide whether Møns Klint (“the cliffs of Møn”) should be awarded world heritage site status, safeguarding it for future generations.

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Wolf Moon by Arifa Akbar review – night terrors

The Guardian theatre critic’s imaginative exploration of life in the shadows

Arifa Akbar, chief theatre critic of this newspaper, is used to working at night: the journey from curtain call to home computer screen, writing into the early hours to make sure a review can appear as soon as possible, is familiar and comfortable – indeed, often actively comforting – to her. But all this exists very close to far more troubling thoughts and feelings. A childhood fear of the dark has persisted into adulthood, and is linked to recurrent bouts of insomnia; her rational awareness of the dangers inherent in being a woman out of doors at night are augmented by a less easily definable anxiety at what the shadows might conceal; and darkness also functions as a painful and complicated metaphor for the frequently impenetrable world of her elderly father, who has frontal lobe dementia and often, the staff at his care home tell her, passes a “difficult” night.

That last is a compact description, a kind of shorthand – easy to understand at surface level, but also vague; the nature of the difficulties, either for Muhammad Akbar or for the care home staff supporting him, is not revealed. His daughter’s book keeps returning to what happens under cover of darkness – what we fail to see, what we misinterpret, and what we allow to go unrecorded. For those who work at night, that will likely entail disturbed sleep patterns that, over time, have severe consequences for physical and mental health. Care workers, nightclub bouncers, transport staff, those in the hospitality industry, sex workers – all find themselves at risk of paying heavy penalties for their nocturnal lives.

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