Peonies, padel rackets and a genuinely good low-alcohol wine … whatever your plans this bank holiday, we’ve rounded up our top spring essentials so you can make the most of it

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The weather may or may not play ball, but a spring bank holiday is a reason to kick back, get outside and get together with friends.

To help you make the most of the long weekend, we’ve rounded up some of our most-loved seasonal favourites. Whether it’s tools to spruce up your outdoor space, tipples to sip in the garden, a fake tan to jump-start your summer skin or fashion to take you from spring to summer, here are some of our favourite springtime products.

As she releases a clubby new album, Sweat, the former Sporty Spice answers your questions on her raver days, scouse cuisine and Sex Pistols covers

Your acid remix of Jessie Ware’s Free Yourself was a bit unexpected, I admit. Were you a hardcore raver back in the early 90s? Coopertapes
I absolutely was. I discovered raving on my first holiday without parents, just me and three of the girls I was at college with. This was the first environment I’d been in where I heard house music and everyone was dancing, and really expressing themselves. I was like, “Oh my God, I’ve found my people.” That’s where I got the bug. Then we’d also go to a club in Essex called Berwick Manor. I also remember going to the Cross, which was in King’s Cross. It was such a tiny little window of my late teens because the Spice Girls happened so quickly after it. I’d almost compartmentalised it and left it behind until I started DJing eight years ago.

Once the Spice Girls started and your schedule was much tighter, were you ever able to go out like that again? laurasnapes
Absolutely not. That was the thing, although all of my wildest dreams were coming true through being part of the Spice Girls, real life was put on hold. The schedule was brutal. There was very little time for socialising. Also, you remember those times in the 90s, right? The tabloid media and paparazzi were on you like a hawk. So we were terrified. Anything we ever did was usually published in a newspaper, so in our downtime we tried to keep it low key.

As revelations about Reform UK’s donors emerge, it’s clear that increasingly complex forms of patronage can’t be regulated effectively. We need a clean sweep

How do we know whether political funding is corrupt? Mostly, we don’t. A plutocrat delivers a sack of cash to a political party. A few weeks later, it announces a policy that happens to favour the donor’s business. Are the events linked? We might suspect it; we cannot prove it. But the suspicion itself is corrosive and demoralising.

The current funding system, perhaps more than any other factor, turns us away from politics, breeding disillusionment, alienation and cynicism. A survey by the Electoral Commission last year found that only 18% of respondents believed spending and funding are transparent. A government survey in December discovered that 87% of people are “concerned about the possibility of corruption” among politicians. A further survey concluded that political donors are believed to wield the most influence of any elite faction. Disillusionment with politics drives people into the arms of the extreme right. This is paradoxical, as it tends to be highly receptive to the ultra-rich.

I thought my mother was ashamed of my taboo profession. Then I realized our experiences were more similar than I thought

My first viral personal essay was titled: “In Defense of Casual Sex”.

It was 2008. I was 24, living in San Francisco, and working at the online magazine Salon. I was responding to a series of books about hookup culture, including one warning young women that they were ruining themselves for love and marriage by sleeping around.

Everyone is obsessed with the hit hospital drama – and the internet is abuzz with curious predictions and theories. Ghost medics, anyone?

It’s thrillingly intense. It’s obsessed with intubating. It’s occasionally infested with maggots or rats. And it has single-handedly made medical dramas cool again. With each episode covering an hour inside the hectic emergency room at Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center (PTMC), awards-gobbling HBO Max hit The Pitt has become the most talked-about show on TV.

And where there’s a hit series, you’ll find an obsessive fandom. Fully invested devotees of The Pitt are busy spotting details, making predictions and hatching theories. As season two approaches midway, here are 10 for your thorough medical examination. Let’s go save some lives …

Echoes of Liz Truss as Badenoch blusters and blunders through series of short interviews, saving the worst for almost last

It was the sort of day that every politician dreads. One where you can’t not say and do something. The pressure to come up with the right words. The knowledge that even if you do find the right words, they still won’t be enough.

Nothing anyone can say can mitigate the horror of the latest antisemitic attacks in north London on Wednesday. You can promise more money for security. You can proscribe terrorist organisations. You can insist that this is not who we are as a country. But all that must sound hollow to British Jews. They’ve heard all this before and nothing has changed.

Keir Starmer pledges crackdown on protesters chanting or displaying antisemitic slogans as terror attack is assessed to be ‘highly likely’

Keir Starmer has pledged to crack down on those “venerating the murder of Jews” at protest marches as the UK terror threat level was raised to “severe” in the wake of the Golders Green attack.

The prime minister promised to do “everything in our power to stamp this hatred out” after meeting emergency workers and community leaders near the scene in north-west London where two Jewish men were stabbed on Wednesday.

Senator Jack Reed says at hearing that defense secretary failed to give Trump accurate picture of war in Iran

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Pete Hegseth has failed to give Donald Trump an accurate picture of the war on Iran while resorting to “dangerously exaggerated” statements to create an inaccurate picture of a US military triumph, a senior Democrat told a Capitol Hill hearing on Thursday.

Jack Reed, the ranking Democrat on the Senate armed services committee, told Hegseth, the defense secretary, that far from victory, US citizens were having to bear the cost of a war they did not support in the form of increased fuel prices.

President says decision made ‘in honor of the king and queen’ as industry officials call deal ‘significant boost’

In a gesture of diplomatic friendliness after King Charles’s visit to the White House, Donald Trump said the US would be removing all tariffs on whisky imports.

“In Honor of the King and Queen of the United Kingdom, who have just left the White House, soon headed back to their wonderful Country, I will be removing the Tariffs and Restrictions on Whiskey having to do with Scotland’s ability to work with the Commonwealth of Kentucky on Whiskey and Bourbon,” Trump said in a post on social media.

Coroner says none of the five civilians killed in incident in Belfast during Troubles should have been shot

British army soldiers “lost control” and used force that was “not reasonable” in the killing of five civilians in Northern Ireland in 1972, an inquest judge has ruled.

Four of the victims – two teenagers, a father of six and a Catholic priest – posed no risk when they were shot in the Springhill and Westrock areas of west Belfast on 9 July 1972, Mr Justice Scoffield said on Thursday.