For all its gloss and elitist governance, football will not bend to the will of a president so eager to demonise and exclude

At 4.38pm on 28 June Donald Trump dropped a Truth. Nothing unusual in that. Trump’s Truth Social feed is relentless and ever-giving.

That same afternoon he also Truthed at 3.58pm, 3.59pm, and twice at 7.42pm, all in the same instantly recognisable, weirdly cartoonish tone, as if a giant maize-based salted snack from a jaunty 1970s TV advert has been pumped full of voodoo and vitamins and propped up behind a lectern to explain geopolitics to the world, but only in the kind of words you might use while arguing with your nine-year-old sister.

An estimated 185,000 babies were taken from unmarried mothers in England and Wales between 1949 and 1976. I was one of them

After my adoptive father died in November last year, my adoptive siblings found a short story by Enid Blyton among his possessions. The Child Who Was Chosen was read to us as children to explain the circumstances of my adoption. It follows a nice middle-class couple whose domestic bliss is marred by childlessness, prompting them to go to a “very kind lady” who helps them to find a “chosen baby” instead. In its foreword, Blyton advises adoptive parents to tell the tale to their adopted child “again and again … so that to him ‘adoption’ means something lovely”.

The “chosen child” narrative, where parents tell adoptees they were specially picked, helped to shape the still widespread public perception of adoption as unambiguously altruistic. But it has also long been criticised by adult adoptees for masking the trauma of separation from their original parents. Reading Blyton’s saccharine story, I was struck by its glaring omissions. There is no mention of how the boy, who is unnamed until he is adopted, came to be put up for adoption; nor any suggestion that he once had another family and identity. There is no recognition of his first mother or her loss, only the loneliness of the prospective adoptive mother. The woman from the adoption agency also tells the couple that if this child isn’t the one they really want, she will find another one – as though she’s running a baby market.

David Batty is a news editor and writer for the Guardian

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Women from minority backgrounds are less likely to receive adequate pain relief during childbirth

• Women from minority backgrounds in UK less likely to get epidurals, study finds

• How the ethnicity pain gap follows people from birth to death

Julie Hammond, a 35-year-old mother of three from Kent, believes that the “excruciating” pain she experienced during the birth of her second child was not well managed by the medical professionals caring for her.

“It’s difficult to put into words just how traumatic it was,” Hammond says. “I could just feel myself panicking throughout the whole procedure, while also trying to tell myself to calm down.”

Whether it’s a brilliant beach towel or the perfect party bag, our fashion expert’s monthly edit is full of summer winners

• The best summer sandals for men and women

Summer arrived with a bang in that heatwave, right? And it’s the World Cup. And Wimbledon. And nearly the end of term. Which means: it’s time to have fun.

Welcome to my secret shopping list for July: high-street treasures to snap up, an upgrade on the classic white T-shirt, a perfect wedding-party handbag and a towel to elevate your beach basket. Get them while it’s hot!

As GLP-1s drive the current protein craze, a supplement once only taken by powerlifters is now so popular US producers are struggling to keep up

For generations, the Meives family made cheese. Tony Meives’s grandfather, a Swiss immigrant, and his father both ran small cheese factories in Wisconsin, in the heart of America’s dairyland. “I worked in the cheese factory my whole life,” Meives says. “I have four world-class cheesemakers in my family.” But when it came time to inherit the family business, Meives found there was more money in the industrial runoff that his grandfather would have once thrown away. Today, the 39-year-old bodybuilder and gym owner runs a company that sells whey protein powder, the watery byproduct of cheesemaking that was once considered waste. “Twenty years ago, the only people who took whey were bodybuilders,” he says. “Over the past five years, the market has really opened up to each and every type of person you can probably think of.”

When Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary, declared late last month, that “the war on protein is over”, he sounded a bit like one of those Japanese soldiers of second world war lore, who spent years hunkering in the jungles of south-east Asia, oblivious to the fact that hostilities had long ceased. Perhaps there was a time when advice leaned more towards a diet based around fruit, vegetables and carbohydrates – but by May 2026, the war on protein was surely over. Protein had won.

As she tours the UK, we pick the best of an artist who defined the ‘sad banger’ – but also radiates joy and strength from her perfect pop songs

Robyn has written and recorded more striking and melodically rich songs than this, but the opening track of Body Talk Part 1 might be this famously unbiddable pop star’s mission statement: an appealingly minimal bit of house music that dismisses a list of eye-rolling complaints aimed at everything from the music industry to uncomfortable shoes by repeating the title over and over again.

NCA says offenders arrange to sexually assault and film victims via online networks with crimes often taking place in trusting relationships

Criminal investigators in the UK say they have uncovered a “truly international network” of organised drug-facilitated sexual assault in which victims are sedated before being raped and sexually assaulted.

The National Crime Agency [NCA] has said online networks, “many as yet unidentified by law enforcement”, were allowing offenders to arrange to rape and abuse victims or arrange for sexual assaults to be filmed.

Makerfield MP said he would consider reducing business rates as part of a package that could also include freeze on private rents

Andy Burnham promised to ease the cost of living if he becomes prime minister in his first interview since returning to parliament.

The Makerfield MP told LBC that if he became prime minister later this month, as expected, he would look at reducing business rates for some high street businesses, bringing down water and energy costs by de-privatising companies and making bus travel free for 16- to 18-year-olds.

PM says ‘whole country will be backing the team’ for 1am game, as licensing hours in England and Wales extended after fierce backlash

Pubs across England and Wales will be able to stay open until 5am on Monday for the England World Cup match against Mexico, after an intervention by Keir Starmer.

The team’s win over the Democratic Republic of the Congo on Wednesday night booked a last-16 tie against Mexico that kicks off at 1am UK time and is due to run until at least 3am.

Zelenskyy says his forces will ‘definitely’ retaliate over Russian bombardment of capital as Kremlin vows to ramp up pressure. What we know on day 1,591

Ukraine and Russia have promised fresh assaults after Moscow launched a huge barrage on Kyiv, killing at least 27 people, tearing open apartment buildings and sending tens of thousands of people to shelters. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Thursday his forces would “definitely” retaliate for the overnight pummelling of the capital as he inspected the site of an apartment block partially destroyed in the attack. In Moscow, the Kremlin vowed to further ramp up the “pressure” on Kyiv as rescuers scoured the rubble for survivors. Mayor Vitali Klitschko described it as the “enemy’s most massive attack on the capital”.

Zelenskyy urged allies to send more air defences and asked the US for licences to manufacture Patriot air defence missiles. “Air defence supplies for Ukraine are an absolute and critical priority,” he said on Facebook. The EU’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, said she would propose new sanctions on Moscow over the attack, while UN chief António Guterres reiterated his call for a ceasefire.

Donald Trump “wants this war settled so the senseless killing ends”, a US official said in Washington after the Kyiv barrage. The president “remains optimistic that we’ll ultimately get a peace deal done”, the official said. US efforts to broker a ceasefire have so far failed. Zelenskyy called on Ukraine’s allies to discuss speeding up air-defence aid at the Nato summit in Ankara next week, which Trump will attend, and has said he hopes ​to have ​a meeting ​with the president on the ​summit sidelines. ‌

A Ukrainian publishing house said it had lost about 800,000 books when a warehouse was destroyed in Russia’s strikes on Kyiv. BookChef Publishing, which is one of Ukraine’s largest publishers and includes books by George Orwell and Barack Obama, posted pictures on Telegram of the destroyed building with smouldering piles of rubble around and firefighters working at the scene. The Ukrainian branch of the Red Cross, meanwhile, said its key warehouse was destroyed in the strikes, with about $2m worth of humanitarian aid lost.

German prosecutors have accused Ukrainian “state authorities” of ordering the 2022 explosives attack on the Nord Stream gas pipelines linking Russia with Europe, a charge likely to ignite tensions between Kyiv and Berlin, its biggest military backer. Deborah Cole reports that a suspect who was arrested last August in Italy and extradited to Germany in November was indicted this week. Zelenskyy said on Wednesday he was yet to receive full details of the indictment and it was too early to comment.

Two people were killed and ⁠another eight injured in Russian attacks overnight on ⁠Ukraine, officials ⁠said on ​Telegram in the early hours of Friday. In ⁠the bordering Sumy region, two people were killed and ⁠one injured after drones hit ​a house, the regional ‌military administration chief said. In Kryvyi Rih, in central Ukraine, seven people were injured after ‌a missile strike, said the city’s defence council head.

Russian attacks on Thursday killed three people in ⁠eastern Ukraine, regional officials said earlier. One person died and three were injured around the town of Nikopol, near the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia ⁠nuclear power plant, according to the Dnipropetrovsk region’s governor, and a seven-year-old ‌child was killed ‌and two other children injured further north-east near the town of Synelnykove. In the Donetsk region, Russian forces bombed the town of Oleksandrivka, ​killing one person and injuring two, the governor said.

A suspect has been identified in the investigation into a parcel bombing that seriously wounded a sanctioned Ukraine-born multimillionaire and two others in Monaco, the principality’s prosecutor’s office said. “An arrest warrant has been issued for the suspect, who will be the subject of an Interpol red notice from this evening,” the prosecutor’s office added on Thursday. France’s Le Figaro daily and BFMTV said the suspect, who was captured on CCTV wearing a black fisherman’s hat, is believed to be a woman who tried to pass as a man.