From showers to unlocked rooms, types of spaces offered to mothers wanting to express have been a source of dismay

An employment judge has ruled that a healthcare worker suffered “harassment related to sex” after a suitable private space for her to express breast milk was not provided to her by an NHS health board.

Robyn Gibbins told an employment tribunal that she was not given a room that she could lock and felt let down by the trust in Cardiff. A trust spokesperson said the Cardiff and Vale university health board was committed to ensuring all colleagues are treated respectfully, with dignity and without discrimination or prejudice.

Step inside the vibrant home of Cissi Åhlén, known on Instagram for her knack for ‘dopamine decor’

In a quiet corner of Bandhagen, a small neighbourhood on the outskirts of Stockholm, Cissi Åhlén lives with her partner and their nine-year-old son in a home bursting with vibrant colour. The house, a 1957 villa, is a testament to the unspoken connection that can exist between a space and the people who inhabit it.

“We had seen the house for sale online, but weren’t that impressed,” Åhlén admits. “It wasn’t until one morning, on a walk to the park, that we passed by it and we saw the potential. That’s when it clicked.”

Domestic workers and day laborers – many of whom are undocumented immigrants and ineligible for US aid – face unique burdens amid raging wildfires

Mayra Chacon’s home cleaning service, Ocean Housekeeping, employs Guatemalan and Mexican immigrants who arrived in the US less than six months before. They clean dozens of houses around Los Angeles and, every Saturday, send their paychecks to loved ones back home.

But as wildfires erupted earlier this month, Ocean Housekeeping lost more than 50% of its business overnight. Fires burned down 25 homes in the Palisades that Chacon’s company cleaned on a weekly basis, and 10 homes in Altadena and Pasadena. Her employees speak little English and don’t know how to find work elsewhere, Chacon said. With the plunge in revenue, she’s offering a 25% discount to new customers so she could book more jobs to keep everyone paid.

Exclusive: Restoration fund in England could be ‘siphoned off’ to be used for general government spending, not repairing rivers

Rachel Reeves’s Treasury is looking to keep millions of pounds levied on polluting water companies in fines that were meant to be earmarked for sewage cleanup, the Guardian has learned.

The £11m water restoration fund was announced before the election last year, with projects bidding for the cash to improve waterways and repair damage done by sewage pollution in areas where fines have been imposed.

Pavilion, Glasgow
The Los Angeles musician is developing a heavier, rockier sound than before, but her astonishing voice and intuitive melodies are as strong as ever

Sat with her back to the audience, Madison Cunningham is performing an eerie, unreleased ballad, her white dress mirrored in a glossy black upright piano. The theatre is pin-drop silent as the California singer-songwriter’s astonishing voice, classic and characterful, pours into a heavily reverbed microphone.

“That was a funny way to say hello,” she grins afterwards. The “pitch” for this one-off show, part of Celtic Connections festival, she tells us, is that it will comprise almost entirely new songs, from a record not yet announced. It’s a bold gambit – usually fans come to hear the songs they know – but Cunningham has a winning confidence in her rich, complex new material, and how it develops her sound. One song, with a restless piano melody that echoes Joni Mitchell, slips organically into a verse from Cunningham’s Grammy-winning folk album Revealer, the lyrics altered to address the wildfires in her home town: “You’re all I’ve ever known, Los Angeles,” she mourns.

Royal Festival Hall, London
Haydn’s Mass in Time of War met John Adams’s elegy for victims of 9/11 in this dramatic concert, superbly controlled by Vladimir Jurowski

Always uncompromising in his programming, Vladimir Jurowski ’s latest concert with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir juxtaposed Haydn ’s Missa in Tempore Belli (Mass in Time of War) with John Adams ’s On the Transmigration of Souls, both works written in response to crises at turning points in history. Haydn’s Mass dates from 1796 as the French revolutionary wars began to swing against the Habsburg empire. Transmigration was commissioned as a tribute to the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks by the New York Philharmonic, who gave the premiere in 2002.

Adams refused to label the work a memorial or requiem, describing it as “a ‘memory space’… a place where you can go and be alone with your thoughts and emotions”. The text assembles a documentary collage of phrases from missing-person notices and flyers posted in lower Manhattan, lists of victims’ names, a repeated quote (“I see water and buildings”) from a flight attendant on American Airlines flight 11. A sustained elegy for orchestra, choir, and children’s chorus (the Tiffin Youth Choir here) unfolds against prerecorded tapes of street sounds, sirens and a voice, first a child’s then a man’s, tonelessly repeating the word “missing”. This is slow, at times unvarying music, but acrid dissonances gradually pile up during its course, reaching a wrenching climax before the exhausted, resigned close. It was all superbly controlled by Jurowski, and played and sung with sustained, fervent intensity.

When you attend your local choir or yoga class, just stop and think – where are the disabled adults?

In what passes for the national conversation, our social care crisis tends to be reduced to a handful of factors so familiar they now feel like cliches. Just about all of them are centred on older people, the pressures on financially broken local councils from an ageing society and people having to sell their homes to pay for residential care. All these things, of course, are urgent and hugely significant – but they exclude a huge part of society for whom care is just as important. The reason why that happens is not hard to work out: it reflects a set of ingrained, almost Victorian prejudices – and, without wanting to sound too melodramatic, the last frontier of the struggle for human rights.

Just under 50% of care spending in England goes on support for disabled adults of working age, and more than two-thirds of that money is dedicated to people with learning disabilities. What this part of the social care picture has in common with help for older people is pretty clear: years of austerity, recruitment problems tied to low-paid jobs ( made worse by Brexit ), and the endless failures of successive governments to tackle a huge list of systemic problems. But the failings of care for disabled people have their own specifics: nonexistent local planning for the transition from childhood to life as an adult, no conception of successful grownup lives that does not involve paid work, and a national habit that is completely toxic: shutting away far too many disabled people, to the point where they simply cannot participate in society.

John Harris is a Guardian columnist. His memoir Maybe I’m Amazed, about his autistic son James and how music became their shared language, is published in March. For more information, visit maybeimamazed.substack.com

Bristol Old Vic
Twelfth Night is relocated to the Cotton Club in this sparkling musical, which luxuriates in its musicality and movement

Given the important function of music in Twelfth Night, it seems fitting for Sheldon Epps’ 1996 musical riff to make a virtue of it by infusing Shakespeare’s comedy of unrequited love and disguise with the sounds of Duke Ellington’s jazz and swing.

The title itself, after all, refers to the often-quoted words by the lovesick Duke Orsino: “If music be the food of love, play on”. Ironically, they are never spoken in this musical, set in 1940s Harlem, inside the Cotton Club.

Station was crown jewel of Jeremy Hunt’s strategy to populate the UK with dozens of local TV stations

At midnight on Sunday, London Live, the capital’s dedicated TV channel and crown jewel of Jeremy Hunt’s strategy to populate the UK with dozens of local TV stations , will cease broadcasting after a little over a decade .

Back in 2010, the then Conservative culture secretary’s local TV plan was criticised as financially unviable by much of the media industry, but London was the exception.