This shadowy treaty on medicine imports will cost the NHS billions and take funding away from doctors, nurses, cancer scans and the rest

For all the crowd noise and heavy-breathing match analysis, British democracy is a simple sport. We elect politicians to serve our interests. They direct the vital services that look after our families and communities, such as our healthcare and our schools. The entire political system rests on one basic premise: they work for us.

Believe that, as I do, and this week is one of vast democratic failure. Rather than working for us, Keir Starmer and his ministers are acting against us. They have rammed through parliament a sweeping law that will, independent experts agree, harm the public; and they have done so without even coming clean on the costs or the consequences. What’s worse, MPs and the press have failed to put this under scrutiny.

Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist

Nicola Wilding’s mother was a Labour voter, who specialised in treating those with chronic memory disorders. Then she started supporting the far right. In a new family memoir, Wilding explores how this happened – and what it says about Britain today

Nicola Wilding knew the letter was from her brother, Billy, as soon as she saw the line of tape on the envelope flap. His mail had to pass inspection: he was three months into a prison sentence for attempted carjacking with an imitation gun. “Have you spoken to Mum lately?” he wrote. “She’s turned into a fascist, lols.”

It was 2013 and their mother – a 59-year-old care worker, who for most of her life had voted Labour – had just attended her first march with the English Defence League. Wilding read her brother’s news while at the kitchen table in her flat in Glasgow. “Was I worried?” she says. “I was bemused. I thought: ‘Oh, Mum’s just being daft. She’s having an adventure. She’ll get over it.’” But instead, “the anger stayed”, more marches followed – and Wilding started to wonder what personal and political forces had led her family to this place.

(Warner)
After years spent chasing trends like trap and Latin pop, Madonna settles back​ nicely into​ old-school dance music to tell vivid vignettes of life in 80s New York

‘Ask yourself this – what are you doing it for? / Is it for you? Is it for them?” ponders Madonna during Bring Your Love, a collaboration with Sabrina Carpenter from Confessions II. It’s a question you could ask of her decision to release a follow-up to 2005’s Confessions on a Dance Floor 21 years on.

The official line is, of course, that it’s for her. Confessions II was inspired by Madonna’s 2023 Celebration tour, a rampage through her back catalogue – with staging that recreated the videos for old hits including Don’t Tell Me and Human Nature – that apparently set the singer thinking about her past. Certainly, Confessions II is rich with references to Madonna’s history, and not only the album from which it borrows its title and its initial structure, a sequence of house-influenced tracks that segue into each other like a DJ mix. There’s also the trip-hop-inspired Madonna of Bedtime Stories (the album concludes with a suite of slower, more introspective material); the club-hopping, fame-hungry Madonna of her 1982 debut single Everybody, who keeps cropping up in the lyrics; and the maternal, spiritually inclined Madonna of Ray of Light. The Test, a duet with her daughter Lourdes, is an older, wiser sequel to that album’s lullaby-like Little Star, alluded to in its opening lines.

Lydia Wood began drawing the capital’s pubs after losing her job. Now, after her sketches went viral, she is on a mission to illustrate all the city’s watering holes – before some are closed

On the pavement outside a London pub, 32-year-old Lydia Wood is sitting in the sunshine at her easel, peering up at the building and sketching with a pencil. Passersby pause to catch glimpses of her work, but what they might not know is that for the artist, this isn’t just a nice day out, but part of years-long project with no apparent end in sight.

Wood began what she calls “the pub project” in 2021. Since then, she has drawn intricately detailed sketches of more than 350 pubs: her goal is to draw all 3,500-or-so of London’s beloved watering holes – a quest that could take her at least 10 years.

The abortion debate – the language of life, choice and rights – severs women, and their pain, from history. I don’t want to forget my abortion and I don’t want to forget theirs

The physical fact of my abortion caught me off guard. I had been so accustomed to defending abortion as an abstract right – as a right to privacy, to healthcare, to autonomy – that when it came to having one, I was surprised by the brutality of it. Fasting for hours before. Clammy and light-headed, my hands freezing and damp, in the clinic waiting room. Waves of contracting pain afterwards, the blood and the vomit from the anaesthesia, the days of cramping and bleeding. Soaking through pads. Cold sweat. I thought having an abortion would feel like the exercise of the hard-won autonomy of generations of feminists before me. But mostly it just hurt.

What do you do with the brute fact of pain? Of what Annie Ernaux describes, writing about her own abortion before legalisation in France, as an experience that sweeps through the body? I could not translate it easily into a feminist politics, into a slogan, into something I could shout or wanted to shout. It did not feel like the exercise of bodily autonomy; it did not feel like a choice, though of course, in some formal and factual way, I did choose to have an abortion. It’s just that the choice seemed to be the least important and least interesting part of the whole experience, totally unmemorable when it came up against the violence and urgency of the body, reeling and revolting against the sudden transformation from pregnancy to unpregnancy. Nor did the sensations of aborting feel like the making of an abortion story, like the raw material for an anecdote that could be compressed and publicised on social media, piled up with the others to make some kind of aggrieved claim. There was no real plot – but feeling.

Poaching and wildfires have driven the country’s jaguar population to a critical level, and until now even rescued animals faced life in captivity

A tentative paw emerged from a steel cage on to the sandy riverbed deep in the Bolivian rainforest. Then, another. Slowly, the female jaguar looked right, left and right again, as if waiting to cross a busy road. Then, muscles stiff from the long journey, it strolled away and disappeared into the undergrowth.

Yaguara had been in captivity since August 2024, after being orphaned as an eight-month-old cub amid Bolivia’s worst recorded wildfire season. As the fires raged, burning more than 10% of the country’s surface area, authorities handed the cub over to a team of veterinarians from the Comunidad Inti Wara Yassi (CIWY), a wild-animal rescue centre.

Between 1949 and 1976, an estimated 185,000 babies were taken from unmarried mothers and placed for adoption in England and Wales

Starmer said what happened to the mothers, and their children, should never have happened. He said:

What happened to them, and to tens of thousands of mothers, children, and families, should never have happened. It is a stain on our history.

Mothers, many young, vulnerable, and without support were coerced, bullied, or misled into feeling that they had no choice but to have their children taken away from them. What a thing to do.

I have to confess, as I said to them this morning, I found it hard to read the testimonies and to hear their stories.

I find it particularly hard, as a dad. How much harder it must have been for them to go through that, to set out their testimonies and tell their stories over and over again.

Ukraine capital targeted as Russia faces fuel shortages following long-range strikes against its oil refineries

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At least 18 people have been killed and dozens injured overnight in Kyiv, local authorities have said as Russia launched its latest massive drone and missile attack on the Ukrainian capital.

Fires were burning at sites across Kyiv as dawn broke on Thursday, with strikes or debris hitting residential buildings in several districts and a hotel on one of the central boulevards. The death toll may rise, as emergency services said 86 people were injured, 70 of whom had been admitted to hospital.

Exclusive: Finance experts warn against investing in bitcoin treasury companies after Stack BTC assets plunge

A bitcoin company that Nigel Farage has advertised lost more than 15% of its asset value, prompting finance experts to warn investors against investing in those types of firms.

The Reform UK leader has invested £215,000 in a bitcoin treasury company named Stack BTC. A bitcoin treasury buys the cryptocurrency on behalf of its shareholders, and Stack aims to purchase other companies with the increase in value it gets from holding bitcoin.

Exclusive: Health worker Sara Rowbotham fears for women and girls because of ‘weak’ probation service

The impending release of the Rochdale grooming gang leader is “really scary” for local women and girls because of failings in a “weak” probation service and his lack of remorse, a former health worker who exposed the paedophile ring has said.

Sara Rowbotham, whose team gathered evidence that led to the imprisonment of Shabir Ahmed and eight other men in Rochdale, said she is “terrified” by the prospect of meeting him in the street.