Our cartoonist looks ahead to crunch ties in the Champions League, Europa League and Conference League

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The actor has a string of films on the way, but insists her plan to quit is ‘serious’ and she has other plans for her life

Cate Blanchett says that she is “giving up” acting to do other things “with [her] life”.

In an interview with Radio Times , Blanchett suggested she was uncertain over calling herself an “actress”, saying: “It’s because I’m giving up.”

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The Selecter frontwoman recounts her own astonishing personal journey interwoven with her pioneering presence in 70s musical history

‘I was never going to be a nice little white girl,” says Pauline Black, singer with the ska band the Selecter – and a woman with an amazing personal story to tell. There’s her childhood growing up as an adopted mixed-race girl in a white family in 1960s Romford in east London, and her time as the impossibly cool frontwoman of the Selecter. Black is a brilliantly blunt straight-talker and very funny. Here she is joking about her open marriage in the hippy 70s: “I did get the hump one time, when I came home, and she was using my frying pan.” (She is still happily married to her husband.)

Black was adopted as a baby and at that time in Romford racism was everywhere. “It would come at you like a slap.” Even in her family, she remembers an uncle singing the praises of Enoch Powell. When she was 10, Black was sexually abused by a neighbour (her parents’ reaction was appalling). Her childhood made her mistrustful; lonely and alienated, she spent hours practising the piano and reading. In 1979, Black was working as a radiographer in Coventry when the Selecter took off – and she changed her name from Pauline Vickers to Pauline Black. (“I don’t think my family ever forgave me.”)

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Elon Musk is obsessed with falling birth rates, as is the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. Why would leftwingers want to buy into their ‘pronatalist’ agenda?

‘Perpetuating humanity should be a cross-politics consensus,” read an article in the Atlantic last week, “but the left was mostly absent at a recent pronatalism conference.” It’s such a simple proposition – everyone loves babies and wants the species to perpetuate, right? – but pronatalism has provoked a ferocious battle on the American left. Should they be trying to engage meaningfully at a preposterous far-right conference? Or should the left stop self-flagellating and start organising?

But what is pronatalism – and is it really borderline fascist ? I don’t want to think about slippery, bad-faith, rightwing claptrap any more than you do, but in an era in which US politics can sneeze and the world catches encephalitis, we do, regrettably, have to think about bad-faith everything, all the time.

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Bear Grylls-inspired vessel helps wardens on Coquet Island care for UK’s only breeding colony of roseate terns

It looks like something James Bond might drive – or, more accurately, Bear Grylls. But rather than enabling secret missions or carrying millionaires, this innovative amphibious boat is helping RSPB wardens look after Britain’s only breeding colony of roseate terns.

The endangered birds nest on Coquet Island off the Northumberland coast each spring but seasonal wardens who manage the tiny island struggle to get on and off it because there is no safe mooring point or harbour at low tide. This means boats can only take people and kit to the island at high tide – often at inconvenient times of day or night – making life for the wardens, who live in the island’s lighthouse, a little complicated.

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There is a middle ground on tariffs. But Democrats’ free-trade advocacy allows Trump to play the populist

To tariff or not to tariff? Today’s tweet-length political discourse pretends this is a binary choice. Donald Trump has pitched across-the-board import levies as a panacea to rebuild American manufacturing, while Democrats insist the president’s proposals are an attempt to crash the economy, and that their party should tout its opposition to all tariffs.

But neither the policy nor politics of this moment are that neat and simple. While too few or too many tariffs can destroy economies, there is a Goldilocks zone that’s just right. It’s just being omitted from the conversation.

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At the end of March, the Sudanese army took full control of Khartoum from the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, which it had been fighting since April 2023. After seizing several key sites across Sudan's capital, the army forced the RSF to retreat, marking a critical turn in the country’s civil war. Footage from the capital shows a city devastated by two years of fighting, which has left many of Khartoum’s most important landmarks badly damaged. The Guardian has collected before and after footage to illustrate the scale of the destruction

• Death, displacement and devastation – two years of war in Sudan

• The siege of Khartoum has lifted. Left behind are scenes of unimaginable horror

• Sudan in ‘world’s largest humanitarian crisis’ after two years of civil war

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Medical information will be available from UK Biobank, despite western intelligence agencies’ security fears

Researchers from China are to be allowed access to half a million UK GP records despite western intelligence agencies’ fears about the authoritarian regime amassing health data, the Guardian can reveal.

Preparations are under way to transfer the records to UK Biobank, a research hub that holds detailed medical information donated by 500,000 volunteers. One of the world’s largest troves of health data, the facility makes its information available to universities, scientific institutes and private companies. A Guardian analysis shows one in five successful applications for access come from China.

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Wendy Jones, 68, died after part of a ceiling collapsed on guests at Brean Sands holiday park in 2019

The owner of Pontins holiday parks has been charged with corporate manslaughter after part of a ceiling collapsed six years ago on to guests at a bar, one of whom died months later in hospital.

Eighteen people were injured at the Brean Sands site in Somerset in February 2019 after a 40-metre section of structural ducting and ceiling fell inside an entertainment area and exposed live electrics.

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