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Texas would expand what can be defined as sexually explicit material or potentially harmful to children in order to ban books from public and charter school libraries, under a bill given final passage by the state Senate late Tuesday night and sent to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott. The Texas move is the latest attempt to ban or regulate reading material in conservative states around the country. Critics say the standards set in the Texas bill are too vague, will snag books that are not inappropriate, and that materials dealing with LGBTQ+ subject matter are more likely to be targeted for bans. The bill passed by the GOP-controlled Legislature defines “sexually explicit material” as anything that includes descriptions, illustrations or audio depicting sexual conduct not relevant to required school curriculum, and prohibits it from school libraries. The bill requires the state’s Library and Archives Commission to adopt standards that schools must follow when purchasing books, and a rating system that would be used to restrict or ban some material. “What we’re talking about is sexually explicit material ... that doesn’t belong in front of the eyes of kids,” said the bill sponsor, Sen. Angela Paxton, a Republican. “They shouldn’t be finding it in their school library.” Abbott, a Republican, previously joined a former GOP lawmaker’s campaign to investigate the use of books in schools covering topics of race, gender identity and sexual orientation. That inquiry included a list of more than 800 books. In April, leaders of a rural central Texas county considered closing their public library system rather than follow a federal judge’s order to return books to the shelves on themes ranging from teen sexuality and gender to bigotry and race. Under the measure passed Tuesday night, book vendors would have to rate books based on depictions or references to sex. "Sexually relevant” material that describes or portrays sex but is part of the required school curriculum could be checked out with a parent's permission. A book would be rated “sexually explicit” if the material is deemed offensive and not part of the required curriculum. Those books would be removed from school bookshelves. State officials will review vendors’ ratings and can request a rating change if they consider it incorrect. School districts and open-enrollment charter schools will be banned from contracting with book sellers who refuse to comply. Read More Ukraine war’s heaviest fight rages in east - follow live Charity boss speaks out over ‘traumatic’ encounter with royal aide

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Ron DeSantis will officially enter the 2024 presidential race on Wednesday following months of speculation. The Florida governor will take part in a live Twitter event with Elon Musk on Wednesday night, NBC News reports. Afterward, the campaign will release an official launch video. On Tuesday night Casey DeSantis kicked off her husband’s campaign by posting a video of him getting ready to go on stage in front of an American flag. “America is worth the fight... Every. Single. Time,” Ms DeSantis tweeted along with the expensively produced video. On Monday, Mr DeSantis, 44, teased his 2024 bid while speaking at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention in Orlando in which he outlined his vision for a conservative grip on the Supreme Court to last a quarter of a century. In what appeared to be a subtle swipe at Donald Trump he announced his plans to run for eight years – something Mr Trump cannot do. Mr DeSantis, 44, is seen as Mr Trump’s biggest rival for the Republican vote with several Republican lawmakers and right-wing media rallying behind him after the midterms. However, the latest polls show Mr DeSantis trailing Mr Trump. This comes at a time when Mr DeSantis is going to war with Disney and pushing back on the NAACP‘s advisory warning travellers that Florida is “openly hostile” towards Black people, people of colour and LGBT+ people due to his laws. Read More DeSantis’s wife launches his presidential campaign with first 2024 video: ‘America is worth the fight’ Everything Elon Musk has said about the 2024 election so far David Sacks: The controversial entrepreneur hosting Ron DeSantis 2024 event with Elon Musk

The teenage girl in Guyana carried out the deadly arson after being disciplined, officials say.

Kai Cenat and ISnowSpeed collaborated for a song titled 'Dogs'

Jonnie Irwin has revealed that he felt like he was living a lie before he was honest with the world about his terminal cancer diagnosis. The Escape to the Country presenter, 49, said in November that he “doesn’t know how long” he has left to live, after first being diagnosed with lung cancer in August 2020. Irwin, who also fronted the Channel 4 property programme A Place In The Sun, kept his cancer a secret among close friends and family for two years, before deciding to share the news in November 2022 when his cancer spread to his brain. In a new podcast launched on Wednesday (24 May) titled OneChat, by life insurance company AIG Life, Irwin has revealed that he hated hiding his condition from the world. "The day I came out and told the world I had terminal cancer is the day I started living again, I started being Jonnie Irwin again and I actually feel alive,” Irwin said. The presenter explained that he kept his terminal diagnosis a secret out of fear he would lose work. “The only reason I kept it a secret is because I’ve got to feed my babies, I’ve got pay the bills because when you’ve got cancer, people write you off,” he said in the podcast. Irwin and his wife Jessica have three children; three-year-old son Rex and two-year-old twins Rafa and Cormac. “I had to keep on providing for my family. I was living with such a dark cloud above me... anyone outside of my tight-knit [circle] didn’t know.” This “dark cloud” meant Irwin would hide from photographs and selfies with fans as his appearance started changing after chemotherapy. He said that telling the world was a “massive weight” off of his shoulders. “One of the things that really inspired me to go public was because I will leave a little footprint on this planet because of a TV career but I want to leave a positive footprint but I think I can educate people into living their lives better, then I’ve got something my boys can be proud of.” In March, Irwin gave a health update, telling The Sun: “I’m weak now, fragile and my memory is terrible… but I’m still here.” Read More Couple with 37-year age gap who met when he was 15 have hopes dashed Elle Fanning wows fans with daring cut-out dress at Cannes: ‘My nips could never’ ‘I spent too much money on your wedding’: Musician calls out married friend for flirting with other women

Chicken tikka masala is a much-loved dish, but it’s only scratching the surface of delicious food cooked in a tandoor. The tandoor – a clay oven used in a lot of Indian cooking – offers a world of possibilities, and that’s something chef Maunika Gowardhan is keen to uncover. It’s not like there’s just one type of chicken tikka. From murgh malai to reshmi tikka, the options are endless – and Gowardhan, 44, had the best exposure possible growing up in Mumbai. “I grew up on really, really good street food – India is such a vibrant, diverse space. In every region you find some sort of street eat somewhere, and every corner of the country will have some sort of kebab or tikka,” she says. “Sometimes, books can have one or two of those recipes – you can’t have a whole book on just that” – and that’s what Gowardhan has set out to change in her latest cookbook, Tandoori Home Cooking. She wants people to recognise the history of the tandoor: “What really sets it apart, for me, is that it’s a cooking technique that is dated back to the Indus Valley [from 3300 BCE to 1300 BCE]. It’s something that is so historic, that has so much of a rich heritage – it’s such a vital part of how we eat, not just in the streets of India or in restaurants, but even in our own homes.” Even though most homes in India don’t have a clay oven, there are plenty of techniques to replicate that smokey flavour. “When you have a look at the way a clay oven works, essentially it’s heat that’s 360 [degrees],” Gowardhan explains. “In our domestic kitchens, the endeavour is to replicate that – conventional ovens provide heat in an encapsulated space. So they are similar, but they’re not the same.” The main difference is the coals at the bottom of a tandoor – when fat drips from any meat or anything else you put in the clay oven, it drips onto the coal and the smoke that is produced gives the food that “charred, grilled smokey flavour”, she says. But how can you get that at home? One of Gowardhan’s genius tips is making smoked butter. “You can store it in the fridge, and when you start basting your food with that smoked butter, you’re getting the charred, smokey flavour that you’re really yearning for in tandoori dishes.” Not that Gowardhan has been perfecting smoked butter from a young age. “I’m going to put my hand up here and say when I first came to England [25 years ago], I didn’t know how to cook Indian food,” Gowardhan, who now lives in Newcastle upon Tyne, confesses. She came to the UK for university, during which she was “thrilled” to be away from her parents with that “sense of freedom”. But after moving to her first house and getting a job in the city of London, Gowardhan says: “It slowly creeps up on you – when you go to an unfamiliar place, what you really miss is that familiarity.” That’s when Gowardhan started to learn how to cook Indian food, because “I craved it and yearned it all the time”, she says. She would ring her mother back in India and ask for simple recipes – daal, rice, green bean dishes. “I cooked not just for sustenance, I cooked because I missed home and I missed good food,” she reflects. Since then, Gowardhan fell in love with food and made her way into the industry, and this is her third cookbook. She now deems it her “calling”, saying: “I knew food was something that was a leveler on every aspect of my life. “When we did really well, my mother would say, ‘Can I make you something?’ If we were really upset she was like, ‘Let me cook for you’.” Gowardhan also suspects some of it comes from her grandmother, who was an “avid cook”. “My grandmother was the hostess with the mostess. In the 1950s in the city of Bombay, a lot of film stars and Bollywood film stars in India would actually come to my grandmother’s house to eat her food. To be a fly on the wall at my grandmother’s dinner parties…” Gowardhan’s grandmother passed down these recipes, and her mother’s passion for food “gave us this effervescence for cooking and eating good food”, she adds. After dedicating the past 20 or so years of her career to Indian food, there’s a major thing Gowardhan would like people to know about the cuisine. “People tend to forget it’s actually a subcontinent. Because it’s a subcontinent, you realise there is so much more, and every community has so much more to say about the food they cook. “Of course, it’s blurred boundaries as you go through every space, but I feel like every 20 or 30 kilometres you’re travelling, the food changes – because the crop changes, because the climate changes, because the soil changes. All of that makes a huge difference.” So, when people ask her to sum up Indian food, Gowardhan says: “It’s like saying, ‘What is your favourite European food?’ Impossible.” ‘Tandoori Home Cooking’ by Maunika Gowardhan (Hardie Grant, £25). Read More Banging brunch recipes worth getting out of bed for Think pink: Three ways with rhubarb to make the most of the season Love wine but can’t afford it? Here’s how to drink luxury for less Three meat-free dishes to try this National Vegetarian Week How to make TikTok’s viral whole roasted cauliflower Gordon Ramsay: ‘I’m going off the beaten track to become a better cook’

Insider, a Turkish artificial intelligence-backed marketing platform, raised as much as $105 million in funding from two existing

India plans to overhaul rules governing use of the internet, potentially altering business practices for Silicon Valley giants