Doctors are keeping Adriana Smith on life support months after medical emergency until baby is ready, family says

A pregnant woman in Georgia was declared brain dead after a medical emergency and doctors have kept her on life support for three months so far to allow enough time for the baby to be born and comply with Georgia’s strict anti-abortion law, family members say.

She could be kept in that state for months more.

Scientific study of 3,000 dolls down the decades shows most now wear flats

She walked into the world on high-heeled mules, but as Barbie’s many careers gathered pace, her feet became more planted on the ground, researchers say.

A rare analysis of nearly 3,000 Barbies released over 65 years found that high-heeled incarnations gradually made way for flat-shoed forms, as workplace rules relaxed and career doors opened for the PVC doll.

Failure to recruit NHS radiologists risks creating vicious cycle whereby doctors are drawn to private work, royal college says

The NHS handed private firms a record £216m last year to examine X-rays and scans because hospitals have too few radiologists.

The amount of money NHS organisations across the UK are paying companies to interpret scans has doubled in five years as demand rises for diagnostic tests.

Letters sent by broadcaster and MPs with medical backgrounds call for action to change law

Esther Rantzen has urged all MPs to back Kim Leadbeater’s “strong, safe, carefully considered bill” to legalise assisted dying in England and Wales, which faces its next Commons test on Friday.

In an impassioned letter, the broadcaster, who has stage-four lung cancer, said she and other terminally ill adults asked MPs to allow “a good, pain-free death for ourselves and those we love and care for”.

Gene-editing breakthrough has potential to treat array of devastating genetic diseases soon after birth, scientists say

Doctors in the US have become the first to treat a baby with a customised gene-editing therapy after diagnosing the child with a severe genetic disorder that kills about half of those affected in early infancy.

International researchers have hailed the feat as a medical milestone, saying it demonstrates the potential for treating an array of devastating genetic diseases by rewriting faulty DNA soon after affected children are born.

PM on trip to announce increased cooperation against people smugglers alongside Albania’s prime minister, Edi Rama. This live blog is closed

All Commons Speakers, at least for the past 30 years, have complained about the government making major announcements to the media first, and not to parliament first. But rarely have any of them sounded quite as furious about this as Lindsay Hoyle, who this morning delivered an extended reprimand to the government about this at the start of an urgent question.

The UQ was about plans to limit the use of prison recall – something announced by the justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, at a press conference yesterday, while the Commons was still sitting. After pointing this out, and reminding MPs that details of the immigration white paper were given to the media extensively, long before the ministerial statement about it was delivered in the Commons on Monday, Hoyle went on to imply that, as well as regularly breaking the ministerial code, ministers were also guilty of hypocrisy. He said:

I note that those who now occupy senior ministerial roles were not slow to complain when the previous government made major policy announcements outside this house.

I will continue to uphold and defend the rights of this house, the rights of backbenchers, to be here, and hear it first, the most important announcements of government policy, and the right of honourable members to question ministers on those announcements in person.

When Parliament is in session, the most important announcements of government policy should be made in the first instance in Parliament.

If the government is not going to take the ministerial code seriously, who will?

I’ve got to say, I don’t like this. I believe I am here to represent all backbenchers and backbenchers have the right to ask questions. I’m not interested in Sky News or the BBC or political programmes. I’m here to defend all of you. I will continue to defend. Please do not take MPs for granted. It is not acceptable.

We find out if this fitness supplement can be used to build muscle mass, decrease fatigue and improve mental health

Creatine has long been popular among athletes. Olympians tout it, fitness influencers experiment with it, and Patrick Schwarzenegger’s gym bro character in The White Lotus added it to his famous shake.

It’s primarily considered a fitness supplement, but doctors are increasingly curious about its potential longevity and mental health benefits.

Five years after near-total ban on abortion, campaigners say Sunday’s elections will be critical to see if promised change happens

Poland’s presidential elections are a “historic, groundbreaking” chance for Donald Tusk’s centrist party to show it was not trying to “deceive women” when it promised to change some of Europe’s most restrictive abortion laws, campaigners have said.

Voters across Poland will head to the polls on Sunday in the first round of the elections to replace Andrzej Duda, the current president who is aligned with the former rightwing government and has veto power over legislation.

MP hits back after Royal College of Psychiatrists refuses to support bill in its current form before Commons vote

Kim Leadbeater has hit back at criticism from the Royal College of Psychiatrists over the assisted dying bill and said there had been no drop-off in support for it among MPs before a vote on Friday.

The Labour MP said it was “misleading” to say RCPsych had pulled its support and that there were enough psychiatrists who backed the change to mean “it wouldn’t be an issue to get psychiatrists to engage” in the process.

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

Membership of British gyms is at an all-time high as many younger people see exercise as integral to their daily routine

A perfect evening out for Louis involves getting hot and sweaty, and the only drink he is downing is water.

He is one of a growing number of gen Zers who regard going to the gym as an integral part of their routine and often preferable to sinking pints in the pub.

I was told my husband would never talk again, while physiotherapy was dismissed entirely. My son was failed in similar ways, but for the brilliance of some medical staff who refuse to believe a stroke is the end

On the night before the accident, John and I and our son Jay, who was then 26, lingered in the garden drinking wine and enjoying the mid-summer scent of jasmine and lilies. We talked about the Manet exhibition we had just seen at the National Gallery. We probably talked about how the end of the cold war might affect the chances of Bill Clinton winning the presidential election against George HW Bush in November. I know what John thought about that. I only wish I could recall his words.

The next morning, 30 July 1992, John got up before me as he always did. In the kitchen I found the contents of the dishwasher – knives, forks, spoons, plates, mugs – jumbled together on the table. This was odd because unloading the dishwasher was the one domestic ritual he willingly performed. It would be years before I learned the reason. At the time I put it down to absent-mindedness. It was a month since he had delivered a book to the publisher and he was already preoccupied by the next one, about art in the European Renaissance. Before I had time to be annoyed, I heard a crash from his study at the top of the house. I ran upstairs and found him lying on the floor next to his desk. He looked up at me with the radiant, witless smile of a baby. And he said: “Da walls.”

The Liver King’s raw-meat-to-ripped-abs regime has been exposed – but thousands of other influencers claim their bulging muscles are just the result of hard, honest graft. Should we believe them?

Looking back to 2022, it seems impossible that anyone ever believed that Brian “Liver King” Johnson achieved his physique without pharmaceutical assistance. He looks like a hot water bottle stuffed with bowling balls, an 80s action figure with more veins – an improbably muscular man who put his bodybuilder-shaming physique down to a diet of “raw liver, raw bone marrow and raw testicles”. And that last part, really, was the trick: by crediting his results to a regime that nobody else would dare try, he gave them a faint veneer of plausibilty. Maybe, if you followed a less extreme version of his protocol, you could get comparable (though less extreme) results. And if you couldn’t stomach an all-organ diet, well, you could always get the same nutrients from his line of supplements.

The Liver King, of course, was dethroned – leaked emails revealed that he was spending more than $11,000 a month on muscle-building anabolic steroids, as detailed in a new Netflix documentary. But the story of a charismatic person promising ridiculous results is just the most outrageous example of a phenomenon that’s been around ever since performance enhancers were invented. In the 1980s, Hulk Hogan urged a generation to say their prayers and eat their vitamins in his VHS workout set; then in 1994 he was forced to admit to more than a decade of steroid use during a court case against his former boss, Vince McMahon. In 2025, influencers post their morning ice baths and deep breathing exercises, but don’t mention what they’re injecting at the same time, whether that’s steroids intended to encourage muscle growth in the same way that testosterone does, or testosterone itself, or human growth hormone (HGH). As a result, a generation of young men and women – and, to be fair, plenty of middle-aged ones – are developing a completely skewed version of what’s possible with hard work and a chicken-heavy diet. And things might be getting worse, not better.

Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary, leapt out of his seat as protesters disrupted his committee hearing on Wednesday. Demonstrators could be heard shouting pro-Palestine slogans and confronting RFK on his record on Aids

• RFK Jr defends downsizing health department as protesters disrupt Senate hearing – US politics live

Research raises questions about long-term treatment of and support for people using weight loss drugs

People on weight loss drugs regain all the weight they have lost within a year of stopping the medication, analysis has shown.

Analysis of 11 studies of older and newer GLP-1 weight loss drugs by the University of Oxford found that patients typically lost 8kg on weight loss jabs but returned to their original weight within 10 months of stopping them.

The trial of Nicola Packer shows why MPs should seize the opportunity to change the law and safeguard vulnerable women now

The Crown Prosecution Service has yet to explain why it thought that pursuing a case against Nicola Packer was in the public interest. Thankfully, jurors last week cleared the 45-year-old of illegally terminating her pregnancy. But more than four years of police and criminal proceedings have had a lasting impact on a woman already traumatised by discovering that she was 26 weeks pregnant, not about 10, when she acted. The trial dragged her private life – even her sexual preferences – into the public eye. Understandably, she called it “humiliating”. But it is prosecutors who should feel shame.

Ms Packer was prescribed abortion pills in a remote consultation, due to a Covid lockdown. Prosecutors alleged that she deliberately breached the abortion time limit. Jurors believed Ms Packer, who said that she was horrified to realise how advanced her pregnancy was when she saw the foetus and that she “wouldn’t have put the baby or myself through it” had she known.

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Justices rejected Planned Parenthood’s argument over the definition of a ‘fetal heartbeat’ in loss for the health giant

South Carolina’s state supreme court upheld the state’s six-week abortion ban in a decision issued on Wednesday, in a disappointing loss for Planned Parenthood.

Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, which operates clinics in South Carolina, sued over the state’s abortion ban, which outlaws the procedure after the emergence of a “fetal heartbeat”. Generally, these kinds of “heartbeat” bans have been interpreted to prohibit abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, when providers can detect cardiac activity from a fetus.

Acquitted woman wants to ensure there​ is never again an abortion trial in England​ ​

“I hate sitting in silence now,” Nikki Packer says. A quiet room reminds her too much of the police cell she was locked into just hours after undergoing a traumatic stillbirth.

Arrested in hospital by uniformed officers while still recovering from surgery, she was accused of carrying out an illegal abortion. It took four-and-a-half years for her case to come to court, where last week she was unanimously cleared by a jury.

For almost five decades, she witnessed first-hand how access to safe and legal abortion improves women’s lives. Now, she fears for the future

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When June Dryburgh cleaned out her desk after almost five decades as a counsellor, it was a reminder that even though many of her consultations were brief, their impact was significant. “I found so many letters and cards. There was even a long letter from one woman who wanted to share just how much the care she received at the clinic had meant to her,” she says.

Dryburgh started at the East Melbourne Fertility Control Clinic (FCC) less than a decade after abortion was effectively decriminalised in Victoria, Australia. She saw first-hand how access to safe abortion changed lives, and personally helped more than 100,000 women. She was also witness to anti-choice campaigners’ relentless efforts to wind back this access, weathering daily harassment of staff and patients, which turned deadly when a gunman entered the clinic in 2001 and shot their security guard.

College says it is neutral on assisted dying, but ‘many, many factors’ need addressing in proposal for England and Wales

The Royal College of Psychiatrists (RCPsych) has voiced its opposition to the assisted dying bill in England and Wales over “many, many factors”.

The college says it is neutral on the principle of assisted dying but it has listed nine substantial reasons it cannot back the bill – which returns to parliament on Friday – in its current form.

UCL study of 9,000 children also found marked inequality, with people from ethnic minority backgrounds having higher exposure risk

Young children who are exposed to high levels of air pollution are more likely to experience poor health outcomes in later adolescence, according to new research.

The study, conducted by academics at University College London, looked at data from 9,000 young people taking part in the Millennium Cohort Study born between 2000 and 2002 across the UK, measuring their exposure to various types of air pollutants including PM2.5, PM10 and NO2.