Throwing a party can be nerve-racking. How do we get over anxiety so we can get together?

It’s Saturday night and the entire back half of the tapas restaurant is packed for my friend Ivy’s birthday dinner.

Ivy is queenly at the centre of the table, bouquets and little gift bags crowding her elbows. Multiple lines of conversation flow above the small plates, and drinks and desserts keep coming, because no one wants to call it a night. It’s an unequivocal success.

Four beavers were legally released at Purbeck Heath in Dorset in what experts say is a huge step for national nature recovery

• Why are beavers being released into England’s rivers? What you need to know

The sun was shining, people were gingerly paddling in the sea and dogs were being walked up and down the coast – a typical day on the beautiful Dorset coast. But the beachgoers probably didn’t know that just a few minutes inland, history was being made.

On Wednesday, at the National Trust’s Purbeck Heath nature reserve, four beavers were released from crates and crawled into Little Sea, a 33-hectare lake. They are the first beavers to be legally released in England, after 400 years of absence and a fight to return them to the landscape.

• Paris bronze medallist avoids social media before races
• Hunter Bell targeting gold at European Indoors

Georgia Hunter Bell, Britain’s Olympic 1500m bronze medallist, has revealed she no longer goes online before her races because of the “really dark side of social media”. Eilish McColgan was subject to a wave of body shaming abuse this week with people posting that she “looks like a skeleton” and had anorexia, and Hunter Bell called for more to be done to protect sportswomen.

The 31-year-old was one of the feelgood stories of 2024 as she went from her full-time job in cybersecurity to the podium in Paris, smashing the British 1500m record by running 3min 52.61sec along the way. But she said her success has led to her being targeted more.

Deceased dog belonging to actor and Betsy Arakawa was kelpie, not German shepherd, local pet care specialist says

Authorities misidentified a deceased dog while investigating the deaths of the actor Gene Hackman and his wife, pianist Betsy Arakawa, according to a pet care specialist.

The news comes as authorities have been searching for answers after the deaths of Hackman and Arakawa, whose partially mummified bodies were discovered on 26 February at their Santa Fe home. Hackman and Arakawa may have died more than a week earlier, the Santa Fe county sheriff, Adan Mendoza, said.

The government and opposition seem to have parked their rancour like divorcees at a parents’ evening

• UK politics live – latest updates

Prime minister’s question time existed, on this ordinary-looking spring day, to answer one monumental question that nobody in the chamber had even asked: are we, as the unsettlingly thuggish US vice-president, JD Vance, has said, “some random country that has not fought a war in 30 or 40 years”?

Keir Starmer’s opening statement, in which he soberly read out the names and ages of men “who fought for their country, for our country”, crescendoing: “Across the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, 642 individuals died fighting for Britain alongside our allies,” was arguably his direct and quite lawyerly response. We may be random, chum, but we’ve definitely fought in a bunch of wars, which – wait, let me check my notes – you started.

Chair of wellbeing commission says countries should follow Denmark to halt digitalisation of children’s lives

The whole of Europe should follow Denmark’s lead by banning mobile phones from schools to stop them from being “colonised by digital platforms”, the chair of the country’s wellbeing commission has said.

Removing mobile phones from schools gave young people a “pause” from online life, teaching them how to be part of analogue communities and train their attention spans, said Rasmus Meyer, who led the government commission to investigate growing dissatisfaction among children and young people.