Conquering of Beaufort Castle for first time in 26 years brings back memories of occupation of south

• Middle East crisis – live updates

When Hussain Alawieh used to take tourists to Beaufort Castle, they would marvel at the view. The ancient hilltop fort, captured nearly 1,000 years earlier by Crusaders, still offered the same sweeping panoramic views of south Lebanon and the Litani River that empires fought over for a millennia.

On Sunday, the view from the castle was obscured by white phosphorus smoke, the toxic incendiary munition providing a smoke screen for advancing Israeli soldiers. Out of the fog rose an Israeli flag, and the castle, for the first time in 26 years, was once again conquered.

Casting shifts to EU talent as paperwork delays and visa limits make hiring British crews less viable

From blacklists for UK passport holders to being asked to work illegally while on holiday, the plethora of extra costs and red tape thrown up post-Brexit are restricting opportunities for British actors seeking work in the EU.

Mainland Europe has always been a springboard for those in the creative industries, from gaining crucial first credits on a TV, film or theatre production to building a marketable resume and paying the bills while attempting to make it big in the UK or US.

It’s natural to focus on breakthroughs, but there are many challenges in Britain and around the world. There is no magic bullet, but there’s room for optimism

Cancer causes nearly one in six deaths worldwide every year, some 10 million all told. That is a stunning number, but it also masks the reality that some cancers are more deadly than others. We have become remarkably good at detecting and treating melanoma and prostate cancer, for example, and today five-year survival rates for those cancers are well over 90% in most rich countries. Others, such as pancreatic cancer, are more difficult. In the UK, just over one in 20 people with pancreatic cancer are still alive five years after diagnosis.

That is why a new drug for pancreatic cancer, called daraxonrasib and announced at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s (Asco) annual meeting in Chicago at the weekend, has been met with such jubilation. The drug – taken as a pill once a day – doubled the survival time of those enrolled in a 500-person trial, with fewer side effects compared to traditional chemotherapy. The drug works by shutting down a protein, Kras, that causes cancer cells to grow and divide. One longtime cancer researcher reported that she cried reading the results. With so few effective treatments for this cancer available, the drug is likely to be a real game-changer.

For the star’s 100th anniversary, Lawrence Schiller relives the nude photoshoot that showed, far from being a ‘messy’ blond bombshell, Monroe was a shrewd controller of her image

A few days after doing a nude swimming pool shoot on the set of the 1962 comedy Something’s Got to Give, Marilyn Monroe jumped into her raven black T-Bird and drove her photographer, Lawrence Schiller, to Schwab’s Pharmacy on Sunset Boulevard. Schiller had brought his negatives, now ready to be turned into prints. And in her purse Monroe had brought her scissors, which she now reached for – and, under the glow of the now legendary Hollywood hangout’s streetlights, began to cut the colour film into pieces.

“Ziiiiiip – the ones she didn’t like,” says Schiller, animating the sound. “Ziiiiiip.” She destroyed them? “Oh yeah, but that came with the territory,” laughs the now 89-year-old, the last living photographer of Monroe, as he recalls his 25-year-old self bending down to pick up the debris and thinking: “Well, I would’ve killed that one, too.” In fact, he speaks of her editing with nothing but admiration: “There wasn’t a picture she destroyed that I would’ve published.”

In HBO docuseries Bring Me the Beauties, a lesser-known, image-obsessed cult from the 80s is put under the spotlight

Documentary film-maker Chris Smith made the seminal 1999 film American Movie, about an indie director’s struggle to complete a horror film, which he hopes will then finance the completion of his dream project. More recently, he’s profiled well-known subjects in projects for Netflix about Jim Carrey and Andy Kaufman, the bands Devo and Wham!, and the disastrous Fyre festival, among others. His new HBO miniseries Bring Me the Beauties is similarly connected to popular culture, but through a story with far less immediately available background material: the rise and fall of Eternal Values, a cult started in the 80s by the eccentric Frederick von Mierers, consisting largely of models.

“What was odd about this story,” Smith said, “is that there was very little about it online.” He met Hoyt Richards, sometimes referred to as the first male supermodel and a former Eternal Values member, on another project, “and as we started talking, hours went by”, Smith said. “It was one of those situations where I just became more and more curious about his life.” Richards became the backbone of the series, sitting for many hours of interviews, but wasn’t sure if Smith and his collaborators would be able to coax anyone else into participation. As seen in the series, not everyone’s account of their experience with Von Mierers is the same; not everyone is even convinced they were involved with a cult in the first place.

The acronym ‘FOH’ for ‘Fuck off home’ was used beside the names of expectant mothers. Senior midwives advised others not to be ‘too kind’. But as this and other shocking evidence is brought to light, sexism is only one part of the story

It’s said to be mother nature’s stunning con trick, the single most helpful move in the propagation of the species – that childbirth might be the worst thing ever to happen to anyone, but once you are through it, you instantly forget how painful it was. And that is true, up to a point, although you can often remember enough of the surrounding detail – swearing at strangers, wishing you were dead – that you can infer the rest.

What you don’t forget, however, is what the midwives were like, and nor, even in moments of extremis, do you fail to notice if they’re treating you scornfully. Panorama tonight is about the maternity unit run by Nottingham university hospitals NHS trust, the subject of the largest maternity inquiry in NHS history, spanning 13 years from 2012, and covering 2,500 families. The details are hair-raising: “FOH” written next to women’s names on a whiteboard, which stood for “fuck off home”; accounts of senior midwives advising others not to be “too kind”; gut-wrenching individual cases of women being warned off coming in to hospital for so long that, when one finally arrived, her baby was dead and her perineum and vaginal wall had collapsed. And every one of those women will have known, on some level, even if she was in no state to ask for her notes or read them, that someone wanted her to “fuck off”. You get a superpower in a life-and-death situation, though it’s unclear how helpful it is: you can tell pretty fast who’s on your side and who isn’t.

Criticisms revealed in major release of files relating to Mandelson’s appointment as ambassador to US

• UK politics live – latest updates

Peter Mandelson exchanged WhatsApp messages with a senior cabinet minister criticising Keir Starmer’s lack of “verve” and tendency to buckle under pressure, suggesting the prime minister should behave in a more “Trumpian” fashion.

The former US ambassador said No 10 was “beleaguered and bereft” and that the public were “crying out for leadership”. In another exchange, he described both the advisers and policy coming out of No 10 as “rubbish in, rubbish out”.

McFadden complaining how Labour MPs wanted to raise taxes to pay for welfare.

Starmer’s chief of staff considered setting up an external No 10 unit to circumvent existing staff.

Mandelson venting his annoyance about Ed Miliband and net zero.

Report from the IRGC-linked Tasnim news agency says talks on hold until Israel stops operations in Lebanon and Gaza

• Iran suspends all peace talks in protest at Israeli offensive in Lebanon

The exchange of strikes between the US and Iran reflects the fragility of the current ceasefire, which has seen repeated violations even as American and Iranian officials try to negotiate a deal to extend it.

Iran has maintained its chokehold on the strait of Hormuz, disrupting global energy supplies as a fifth of all oil and natural gas traded once passed through the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf. The US continues to enforce its own blockade on the strait, as it pressures Tehran to reach an agreement.

Met says non-fatal stabbings took place after most of the crowds had dispersed on Sunday evening

Six people were stabbed after Arsenal’s Premier League victory parade in north London on Sunday, police have said.

The Metropolitan police said the stabbings took place in the evening after most of the crowds had dispersed. Twenty-four people were arrested.

Children of those on care worker visas, who came legally before rule change, told to leave even if parents can stay

Children as young as five who are living legally in the UK are being told by the Home Office they must leave the country even if their parents have been given permission to remain.

The Guardian has seen five letters sent to children by the Home Office telling them they must leave the UK. A sixth letter has been sent to a woman who is six months pregnant and lives in the UK with her husband, telling her she must leave him and return to her country. The children have parents on care worker visas, which until March 2024 had allowed them to bring partners or children with them to the UK.