Portrait of the week: Charles’s cancer, Churchill’s teeth and a hot cross bun crisis

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The King announced that he had cancer, which was discovered during his treatment for non-malignant prostate trouble. He would continue with state duties, including weekly audiences for the Prime Minister, while receiving out-patient treatment. Public engagements, of which he performed 425 last year, would be kept by the Queen and the Prince of Wales. The Duke of Sussex, his younger son, flew from California to see him.

Michelle O’Neill, the Deputy Leader of Sinn Féin, became the First Minister of Northern Ireland as the Northern Ireland Assembly met for the first time in two years since the Democratic Unionists boycotted it over post-Brexit trade rules. The DUP nominated, as Deputy First Minister, Emma Little-Pengelly. Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, and Leo Varadkar, the Taoiseach, visited Stormont Castle. Opponents of a plan to carve caves from strata of salt under Larne Lough, to store half a billion cubic metres of gas, took their campaign to the Appeal Court. A woman aged 31 was badly wounded by a corrosive substance and her daughters, aged three and eight, were also hurt, in Clapham, south London. A man called Abdul Shokoor Ezedi, wounded in the face, was sought by police; he was believed to have come by lorry from Afghanistan in 2016, was convicted of a sexual offence in 2018, but was granted asylum on the third application after ostensibly converting to Christianity. A 68-year-old woman was killed by a pair of dogs in Jaywick, Essex.

The carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth had to be withdrawn from Exercise Steadfast Defender, the largest Nato exercise in Europe since the Cold War, because of trouble with a propeller shaft. After 260 80ft steel nails were driven into the embankment to counter landslips, the Eastleigh to Fareham railway line reopened after five days.