Spotify Technology SA is cracking down on white-noise podcasters, reducing the advertising support for programmers that provide little

As a fan of pretty much everything Mario Dedivanovic does, my expectations are high when a new product bearing his name comes out. I’ve yet to be disappointed. Among my vast collection of makeup, I count his long-lasting lip liners, pigmented matte shadows, inky eyeliners, and more among my daily favorites. Naturally, I was excited to try his signature lip treatment, the MoistureGlow Plumping Lip Serum.

An undeveloped piece of luxury Jumeirah Bay Island is snapped up by an unknown buyer for 125 million dirhams -- a little over $34 million -- showing that demand for high-end vacation home real estate in the emirate remains high despite global economic turmoil.

Tom Hanks is warning everyone on the internet that he is not trying to sell

New figures show a dramatic rise in the number of women deciding to freeze their eggs. A report from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HEFA) found that egg and embryo freezing are now the fastest growing fertility treatments in the UK. Egg freezing and storage saw a 64% rise between 2019 and 2021 – increasing from 2,576 cycles to 4,215 completed. What is egg freezing? It’s where a woman’s eggs are extracted and frozen immediately for fertilisation at a later date. Gynaecologist Dr Larisa Corda said it’s a “means of helping preserve fertility for the future”. Freezing the eggs at the point of extraction means they avoid the decline in quality that’s associated with ageing. “It essentially means that a woman becomes her own egg donor later in life, when she decides she wishes to have children,” she said. What’s the process? “It involves the same sort of procedure as the first part of IVF, where a woman takes injections to stimulate her ovaries, to encourage follicles to grow and lead to egg maturation over several days. “After that, the eggs are collected via a simple surgical technique using a needle placed into the vagina and then into the ovaries, to aspirate the eggs which are there,” Corda said. The daily injections (usually for eight to 11 days) involved in the first part of the process is to encourage the ovaries to produce more eggs. “They may be uncomfortable and lead to side-effects like bloating, abdominal pain, nausea, headaches and other hormonal symptoms, such as breast soreness and changes to your mood,” she added. Women are usually put to sleep for the egg retrieval, during which, a long needle is inserted into the vagina to reach the ovaries and remove the fluid in each follicle that contains an egg. “This is all done under direct ultrasound guidance and normally takes around 30 minutes. You will not feel anything during the procedure, but afterwards, you may have some cramps and a bit of bleeding, which all normally settles down within 24-48 hours.” How many eggs are usually frozen each time? It really depends how many are produced by the patient at the time. Corda said the number of eggs doesn’t give a good indication on the quality though – which is only revealed after the eggs are fertilised to create embryos further down the line, when the woman or couple want to try to have a baby. “Because of this reason, women are advised to freeze between 10-15 eggs, to give themselves a good, reasonable chance. This may involve doing several rounds of egg freezing, but there’s no guarantee of success,” she said. The aim varies depending on the clinic though, and the “numbers needed when older become much more unpredictable, and it also becomes much harder to get a good number of eggs too”. What’s the success rate? The success rates are dependant on age and the quality of the eggs. “Not surprisingly, the highest live birth rates from previously frozen eggs are shown to come from women who undergo the procedure before they are 30,” she noted. “However, the average age at which women freeze their eggs is around 37, with many women closer to 40 by the time they consider doing this.” She said it’s generally agreed that the best time is before age 36, when most women’s eggs are still a sufficient quality and you’re more likely to use them in the future (as opposed to someone age 25 and more likely to fall pregnant without medical assistance). It’s important to know that some eggs won’t actually make it, even if they were fine at the freezing stage. Dr Suvir Venkataraman, from the Harley Street Fertility Clinic, added: “For a good prognosis patient, i.e. under 35 with no known fertility issues, roughly 90% of eggs survive freezing and thawing by vitrification. “Approximately 70% of those will be fertilised by good sperm to create embryos. Approximately 50% of those embryos will develop well. And there’s approximately 30% chance of live birth per embryo transferred.” How much does it cost? The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) estimate the average cost of freezing eggs is £7,000-£8,000 – including medication, storage costs and the later process of thawing and transferring to the womb. But it varies from clinic to clinic. What else should you consider? Arm yourself with all the facts on the costs, and understand it’s not a guaranteed insurance policy for getting pregnant in the future. “It’s important to see a fertility specialist to get assessed before considering egg freezing, as the decline in egg number and quality can start much earlier for some women,” Corda said. “If you’re not sure what clinic to go to, the HFEA website has lots of great and useful information to help you to decide and check out their credentials. “Egg freezing does not offer any guarantees, but for a lot of women, it is the best possible chance of having their own biological children later in life.” Read More Charity boss speaks out over ‘traumatic’ encounter with royal aide Ukraine war’s heaviest fight rages in east - follow live How can you save money on your wedding food? Regular napping could be good for brain health, research suggests Dramatic rise in the number of women freezing their eggs

Fire crews put out the blaze in a basement of the famed jewellery store after an all-hands alert.

What does a “smacked cucumber” look like? What is a “rutabaga”? Why does a “spiny caldereta” sound so threatening? Is “blackened” just a fancy word for “burnt”? These are some of the many questions diners have to grapple with when they look at a menu in some restaurants these days. But Britons are a shy bunch who would rather curl up in a ball and disappear than actually have to utter these queries out loud to a waiter. I would know – my husband is one of 41 per cent of diners who would choose to google an unfamiliar menu term under the table instead of asking for clarification, according to recent research from reservation service Resy. Whenever me and my husband come across an obscure word on a menu, my suggestion of asking the waiting staff to explain is swiftly shot down by the appearance of his phone, followed by a muttered definition from a search engine. Navigating a menu has become harder in recent years. It’s not just the use of lesser-known techniques, nor the use of alternative words for common ingredients (a rutabaga is a turnip and a cep is a porcini or pennybun mushroom, by the way). With Covid came menus only available via QR code, a development that’s now the bane of eating out – some restaurants still use them. It means having to point our stupid camera phones at stupid, alien-looking squares and scroll through the menu in stupid silence, as if we need to be even more enslaved to our devices than we already are. And then, if menus do get printed, they’re impossible to see because restaurants insist on turning their lights down lower and lower. Or they print the text in smaller and smaller typeface, making it a struggle to read even with 20/20 vision – which I haven’t had since I was 10. I’ll never forget trying to read the menu at the ever-trendy Smoking Goat in Shoreditch in 2019, me and five of my companions sat squinting in the dark with our phone torches on. Going to a restaurant should be a relatively easy endeavour, an experience free of stress and embarrassment. But recent menu trends might be off-putting to the customer, says Gavin Rankin of the Mayfair-based French brasserie restaurant Bellamy’s. “Restaurant menus are supposed to seduce you, to persuade you,” he tells me. “There’s a tendency now to list vegetables or ingredients nobody’s ever heard of, but I don’t like it and people don’t like having to ask questions about what something is because it makes them feel foolish. Restaurants aren’t out to humiliate the diner.” Descriptors that give an idea of texture or flavour are important, but they don’t have to be complicated. It’s definitely possible to achieve a balance between having your menu be stylish and still informative Hugh Richard Wright, restaurant PR But could it be a good thing for menus to spark conversation between a diner and the restaurant? When I ask Rankin this, he blows a raspberry down the phone line, though not rudely – just in exasperation. “There’s something a bit… aggressive about it,” he says. “You can see on some menus they are deliberately choosing to list things that will force people to ask. Keep it simple, in my opinion. It’s different if you’re trying a really unfamiliar cuisine, but not when you go to an English or French restaurant. You should be able to look at a menu and be happy to eat 90 per cent of it with pleasure.” I’m someone who’s quite happy to have a chinwag with the waiter and ask questions about a menu. I also like it when a menu provides the opportunity to learn something new. But Rankin is right in pointing out that many diners don’t like asking questions at all, and menus shouldn’t force a diner into having to enquire about every single item. Hugh Richard Wright, leading restaurant PR and man-about-town with years of eating and consulting experience under his belt, says restaurants need to be mindful of striking the right balance with their menus. “A menu is more than just a list of dishes,” he says. “It should tempt you and excite you, so the descriptions should be tantalising. A menu that makes you want to have a conversation with your server is nice but it’s a balance. You don’t want to have everything explained to you and to go through every dish asking, ‘What’s this, what’s that’. That’s what a lot of places get wrong.” He adds that a menu should give the diner a “realistic impression of what you’re getting on your plate” – a reasonable enough expectation that some restaurants have foregone in favour of just listing ingredients. “For example, ‘pork, leek, kumquat’. It should describe how the pork is cooked. Is it pulled pork? Or roasted? Descriptors that give an idea of texture or flavour are important, but they don’t have to be complicated. It’s definitely possible to achieve a balance between having your menu be stylish and still informative.” David Paw, international editor at Resy, advises that we shouldn’t be put off by a sparse menu. “It may be deliberate,” he says. “The restaurant is setting up the chance for a guest and the front of house staff to engage in a dialogue. I lean into these moments as opportunities to have a chat about ingredients, techniques, and the kitchen’s creative process. I’d encourage diners to always try to ask for more information. Even frequent diners are always learning and expanding their food vocabulary.” It comes down to what kind of experience we’re looking for when we dine out. For some, like Paw and myself, it’s fun and exciting to come across new things on a menu. But for many, given that eating out nowadays is much more of a pricey indulgence than it used to be, relaxation is key, not being challenged. This isn’t to say that every single restaurant should acquiesce to simplicity, but it would be no small potatoes to consider ways to make a diner feel less like they need a thesaurus before sitting down. It doesn’t diminish a fine restaurant to make its menu more accessible – instead, it would make it so much more appealing, bringing incredible food to the many instead of the few. That said, we go to restaurants to eat food we wouldn’t normally cook ourselves, and often food that we’re not familiar with. There is so much joy to be had in allowing new flavours and textures to colour your palate, and the culinary world has never been more creative or diverse than it is right now. So in a time where suspicion of anything unfamiliar is rife, perhaps it would do us all some good to try something new on our plates. Next time you’re stuck, ask your waiter for assistance. I promise they won’t bite. Read More Best burgers in London: Where to eat top patties in the city Why ‘chain’ restaurant shouldn’t be a dirty word Three ramen recipes to change your life Best burgers in London: Where to eat top patties in the city Why ‘chain’ restaurant shouldn’t be a dirty word Three ramen recipes to change your life

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