The hemlines were high and the diamonds hefty as the world’s second-richest fiancee and her entourage stormed the Seine. Formez vos bataillons!

To Cannes, in the country of France, where last night Jeff Bezos’s fiancee, Lauren Sánchez, got what she deserves: a philanthropy award. Lauren was honoured at something called the Global Gift Gala, where she received the women empowerment award for her commitment to climate justice, social justice and coming off at absolutely all times as a woman who refers to her breasts as “my girls”. Regular readers will know I have a huge amount of time for her. She accepted her gong wearing a necklace with a diamond pendant slightly larger than an Amazon warehouse, once again redrawing the blueprint that other humanitarians will simply need to watch and learn from.

Meanwhile, if there were awards for hen nights – or bachelorette parties, in the American style – then Lauren would surely have taken one for her full-scale invasion of Paris last weekend, after French forces withdrew and declared the city open. Hand on heart, I initially assumed Lauren was the new US ambassador to France, but then remembered that state department randos were probably seated in some windy overspill gazebo for Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, while Lauren had pride of place ahead of the actual cabinet as part of Oligarchs’ Row. Plus, having just Googled, I discover the Senate yesterday confirmed Trump’s pick for the ambassador to France – his own son-in-law’s former jailbird dad.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

Dreading the thought of giving a speech, or stressed about a big work event? Your GP may prescribe beta blockers to reduce the effects of adrenaline on your heart. Here’s what happened when I took them

I first took beta blockers two years ago, when I was asked to give a eulogy. Terrible at public speaking on a good day, let alone at a funeral, my first instinct was to refuse to do it. I had made a speech at a friend’s wedding 15 years before and my legs shook so violently throughout that I thought I would collapse. This isn’t a case of being overcritical or dramatic: I find it almost impossible to stand up in front of a crowd and talk. It is an ordeal, for all involved – or it was before I took beta blockers.

Beta blockers are a prescription medication that blocks adrenaline and therefore temporarily reduces the body’s reaction to stress. Routinely given to patients with heart and circulatory conditions, including angina, atrial fibrillation and high blood pressure, as well as to prevent migraines, they are also prescribed for some kinds of anxiety. Some doctors will suggest taking them regularly, at certain times of the day. Others will suggest taking a specified dose when you feel you need it. “They work by reducing the effects of adrenaline on the heart, so you don’t get that heart-racing feeling, you may not get short of breath or sweaty, and they can reduce the symptoms of a full-blown panic attack,” says doctor and broadcaster Amir Khan, who has been a GP in Bradford for 16 years.

He’s been jailed, gone on hunger strike and been forced to sell his house for bail. In his first newspaper interview for 15 years, the great director explains why every film is worth the consequences

In February 2023 Jafar Panahi walked free from Iran’s Evin prison after nearly seven months behind bars. Friends and supporters had gathered to greet him, but the moment of release felt bittersweet and he struggled to adjust back to civilian life afterwards. In the weeks that followed he developed a habit. He’d drive his car back and forth on the road that paralleled the high prison walls, pining for those who were still inside. “These people had become my people,” he says. “I thought, ‘How could I go and leave them behind?’”

Panahi makes humane, heartfelt pictures about life in Iran. He refers to these as “social films”, although this definition cuts no ice with the Iranian government, which has ruled them to be “propaganda against the system” and therefore hazardous, offensive material. He has to date been imprisoned twice, undergone a hunger strike and sold his house to make bail. Panahi is officially banned from making movies, although he continues to make them all the same. This is his first press interview in more than 15 years. Technically, he’s not allowed to do this either.

Florida governor stands isolated from Trump and is feuding with Republicans at home – is he drifting to irrelevance?

• US politics live – latest updates

These are challenging days for Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who would have been king. Barely two and a half years since his landslide re-election and anointment as “DeFuture” of the Republican party in a fawning New York Post cover, he stands isolated from the national political stage, feuding with his once blindingly loyal Florida legislature, and limping towards the finish line of his second term with an uncertain pathway beyond.

It has been, in the view of many analysts, a fall of stunning velocity and magnitude. And while few are willing to completely rule out a comeback for a 46-year-old politician who was the darling of the Republican hard right until he dared to challenge Donald Trump for his party’s 2024 presidential nomination, it is also clear that everything has changed.

The Guardian journalist and the Brazilian Indigenous expert were killed while investigating the impact of deforestation. In this extract from the book Phillips was writing at the time of his death, he reflects on his encounters with the rainforest and its people – and why it is so vital to save this precious place

Phillips and Pereira disappeared on a research expedition into the far western Amazon. Pereira had received death threats due to his work helping Indigenous people protect the rainforest from illegal fishing and hunting. When the pair did not return, a search was launched. After 10 days, their bodies were found. Two men will go on trial for their murder later this year.

“SNAKE!” The cry came from near the end of the line of 11 men, strung out along a narrow trail being hacked out of thick Amazon rainforest. I shivered. I had walked right past the danger lurking unseen in the dense undergrowth. Poisonous snakes are one of the most lethal threats in this part of the world. Indigenous people fear them and they present even more danger to a bumbling, middle-aged journalist like me, stumbling over roots the local men stepped lightly over in their rubber boots, skidding on muddy ground where they were sure-footed.

Cannes film festival
Kleber Mendonça Filho’s study of a man attempting to escape corrupt politics is a tremendous, novelistic study of corruption in high and low places

Director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s new film is set in the Brazilian dictatorship of the 1970s and its visual brilliance, sensual big-city intrigue, shaggy-dog comedy, gruesome lowlife walk-ons and epically languorous mystery combine to create something special. It’s about the everyday nastiness of political tyranny, high- and low-level, and with its subject matter and present-day perspective, could be compared with Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here. Yet this is more ambitious, more totally complex and elusive. As the movie progressed, I found myself comparing it to Sergio Leone, to Antonioni’s The Passenger in its unhurried progress to some terrible violent denouement, to Elmore Leonard via Quentin Tarantino, to Meirelles and Lund’s City of God and Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma.

Wagner Moura plays Marcelo, a man on the run, or preparing to go on the run, driving across the country in a vivid yellow VW Beetle, which irritates the local corrupt cops. He is a widower with a small boy currently being looked after by his late wife’s parents; his father-in-law runs a cinema showing, among other things, Jean-Paul Belmondo in Le Magnifique, the trailer calling him “the Secret Agent”. Marcelo is not exactly a dissident, not precisely a political agitator or really even a leftist, but he does now find it necessary to get out of Brazil with his son. Yet things are not that easy. In a previous life, Marcelo was an a academic working in engineering who found that a minister with private commercial connections was ready to shut down his university department and transfer all its research, with its lucrative industry potential, to a private company in which the minister owned shares. The resulting quarrel results in the minister hiring a couple of gargoyle hitmen, moonlighting from their secret police duties, to whack Marcelo.

Foreign secretary tells parliament that the Israeli government’s ‘egregious actions and rhetoric’ are isolating the country from its friends and partners

The Scottish secretary has said the new UK-EU trade deal provides “12 years of certainty and stability” for the fishing industry, amid criticism from the industry that the government has made too large a concession to the EU on fishing rights.

The Scottish Fishermen’s Federation (SFF) has described the deal as a “horror show”, but Ian Murray said: “I don’t agree with that.”

It gives 12 years of certainty and stability for the industry, it doesn’t change any of the deal that was put in place in 2019, which is 25% more quotas for UK and Scottish trawlers and it gives wide access, of course to the new markets of the EU, in terms of pushing away all that red tape that was there before.

Not one more fish will be taken out of Scottish waters by an EU trawler as part of this deal and that provides that stability and certainty.

We should never trust Keir Starmer. You know, he’s screwing things up domestically, so he gets on the international bandwagon.

He’s selling us out, not just on Brexit, but on Chagos and … we’re hearing all sorts of things about Gibraltar. We’ll hold them to account on this. Where Labour negotiates, Britain always seem to lose.

Agreements with India, US and EU will protect jobs and save businesses millions, prime minister tells Commons

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Keir Starmer has heralded a “hat-trick of deals” with India, the US and the EU, telling MPs they will protect thousands of jobs and save businesses hundreds of millions of pounds.

Addressing the Commons for the first time since announcing the UK-EU deal on Monday, the prime minister said the three agreements showed Britain had regained its diplomatic clout.

Sir Adrian Montague told select committee paying bonuses out of emergency £3bn loan was insisted upon by creditors

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The chair of Thames Water has admitted he may have “misspoken” when he told a parliamentary committee that large bonuses to be paid to senior bosses out of an emergency £3bn loan were insisted upon by creditors.

Sir Adrian Montague told the environment, food and rural affairs (Efra) select committee last week that the lenders “insisted” that “very substantial” bonuses of up to 50% of salary should be paid to company executives from the controversial loan in order to retain key staff. The proposed bonuses provoked fury as the company has said that its finances are “hair raising” and that it had come “very close to running out of money entirely” last year.

High court reduces far-right activist’s contempt of court sentence by four months

Tommy Robinson is due to be released from prison within days after his 18-month sentence for contempt of court was cut by four months.

The high court reduced the sentence for the civil offence, for which Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, was jailed in October. He was sent to prison after admitting multiple breaches of an injunction, made in 2021, that prevented him from repeating false allegations against a Syrian refugee who successfully sued him for libel.