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.

Jacob was in Atlanta last night to witness England’s Harry Kane-led comeback against DR Congo. He is online now answering all your questions about the Three Lions’ chances against Mexico, England’s defensive frailties and anything else you’d like to know

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nwake3 asks: How do you think Mexico will approach Sunday’s game? Low-block or all-out? Will they play to win?

Jacob says:

Unlike Thomas Tuchel I was awake for the Mexico v Ecuador game and expect Mexico to be all out again.

I think Madueke was staying high and with Masuaku, the DRC left-back. My reading of the goal is Sadiki confuses the defence by running from midfield. Konsa should take him, he doesn’t, Spence gets dragged over and that creates the overload. It wasn’t really that complicated. If Konsa takes Sadiki then Spence can stay with Cipenga. I think.

(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.

Keir Starmer has been accused of leaving Andy Burnham with a £4.7bn black hole in defence funding. The government announced on Tuesday the defence investment plan, complete with a £15bn boost – but nearly £5bn would have to be found by a future chancellor. Allies of Burnham have called the announcement an ‘unexploded bomb’, so what options does the PM-in-waiting have? Kiran Stacey and Jessica Elgot discuss the political fallout. Plus Kiran and Jess answer your questions on Labour, No 10 North and Burnham

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.

First judge found to have erred by giving 15-year-olds youth rehabilitation orders for rape of two girls in Hampshire

Two 15-year-old boys who were spared custody for the rape of two girls have been sentenced to four years’ detention after the court of appeal ruled their sentences were “unduly lenient”.

After a national outcry, the attorney general, Richard Hermer, referred the case to the court to consider whether the sentences given to three boys – identified only as X, Y and Z – were too light

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

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At least 20 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.

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.

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

The release of the Rochdale grooming gang leader is “really scary” for women and girls because of failings in a “weak” probation service, a whistleblower who exposed the paedophile ring has said.

Amid demands for the government to find ways to deport Shabir Ahmed, Sara Rowbotham, a former council worker whose team gathered evidence that led to the imprisonment of Ahmed and eight other men in Rochdale, said she was “terrified” by the prospect of meeting him in the street.