Keir Starmer has unveiled his long-delayed defence investment plan to keep Britain “safe and secure long into the future”. The £15bn proposal, upped by £1.5bn since John Healey’s recent resignation as defence secretary, includes £5bn towards drones and autonomous weapons, as well as plans to create a “hybrid navy” using self-controlled vessels and AI alongside warships and aircraft. The British Medical Association has voted to accept a pay deal for junior doctors, hopefully ending years of strike action that has cost the NHS billions of pounds. Under the agreement, junior doctors will receive an average 6.6% pay rise – taking the highest paid to £100,000 – and have their exam fees reimbursed, while the government will create 4,500 more training posts. Ford has pivoted back to human employees after an experiment in using AI backfired. The American car manufacturer has rehired 350 veteran technicians to train younger workers and AI tools after its 900 AI-powered cameras were found to lack the depth of institutional knowledge and troubleshooting intuition of human engineers.

The big story of the Ukraine war at the moment is “the siege of Crimea”, says Lawrence Freedman on Substack. The Ukrainians have been systematically preventing supplies getting to the peninsula by attacking road, train and ferry links. The Kerch Bridge, which connects to the Russian mainland, is still standing but fuel tankers and other heavy goods vehicles are forbidden from using it in case of drone strikes. Attacks on energy infrastructure have left around half the peninsula with no electricity. Air defences are “practically non-existent”. And it’s not as if Moscow has spare fuel and military hardware it can send to Crimea. Repeated strikes on Russian refineries have led to “chronic” fuel shortages, resulting in flight cancellations and long queues at petrol stations. “For an energy superpower this is, if nothing else, humiliating.”

As things get worse for Vladimir Putin, says Peter Frankopan in Foreign Policy, the flailing Russian president may succumb to “drowning man syndrome” – when a sinking swimmer pushes others underwater as he scrabbles to stay afloat. Moscow’s warnings have become more belligerent. Last month, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned that Russia would launch “systematic and sustained strikes” on Ukrainian command centres known to contain Americans, and advised Western states to evacuate their staff. (Familiar with Kremlin threats, they all stayed put.) And when a Russian drone hit an apartment block in Romania, Dmitri Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s security council, said Europeans should get used to such incidents and could no longer “sleep peacefully”. It’s worth noting too that Russia’s nuclear doctrine has been quietly updated to allow strikes on non-nuclear states if they are “supported by a nuclear power”. As Russia’s situation worsens this summer, “beware the drowning man”.

🇰🇷🇰🇵 Those arguing that now is the perfect time for Ukraine to negotiate misunderstand how Putin works, says Bill Browder in The Independent. In the 17 years I have spent fighting the Russian president after my lawyer was murdered in a Moscow prison, “I have never seen him do a single thing that looks like weakness”. He will never negotiate at a summit or shake hands with Volodymyr Zelensky. For my money, the conflict will end the way of the Korean War: an “unspoken arrangement” that sees both sides quietly stop the bombing, creating “a frozen line that holds for decades”.

When American mercenary tycoon Erik Prince tried to do business in China, he concluded it was “absolutely impossible”, he tells Malcolm Moore in the FT. The Chinese Communist Party is simply too “neurotic and controlling”, a conclusion he reached after watching police try to quell unrest in Xinjiang. One officer carried a pistol, another carried the ammo, and both needed permission from their superiors back at the station before the weapon could be loaded.

The latest faddy diet trend is “biblical eating”, says Zoe Strimpel in Engelsberg Ideas: sticking to foods that are mentioned in the Bible. Janice Armstrong has amassed nearly 600,000 followers on Instagram explaining how God intended humans to eat; Kayla Bundy tells her half a million followers that “Christian eating” involves bone broth for breakfast, “raw” milk, no commercial yeast, sardines (what she thinks about the tins is a mystery) and buying local where possible. It’s not entirely new. In the 1990s the American Baptist minister George Malkmus claimed his “hallelujah” diet (based on Genesis) cured his colon cancer.

If Andy Burnham is to be believed, says Andrew O’Brien in The New Statesman, practically every question in British politics can be answered with one word: “devolution”. In his first big speech as the presumptive prime minister yesterday, he pledged to create new “strategic centres” within England and empower them to develop their own economic strategies – the thinking being that it will spur growth in areas previously overlooked by Westminster. This is, I’m afraid, “delusional”. It relies on some “heroic assumptions” about cross-party collaboration, and ignores the fact that Scottish devolution has hampered, not improved, relations with London. Advocates for devolution in Westminster may think they are “cleverly shifting responsibility” away from themselves, but all they’re doing is “creating more sticks with which they will be beaten”.

The real significance of Burnham’s speech, says Patrick Maguire in The Times, lies in his proposal to set up “No 10 North”, which will have responsibility for his three economic priorities: the reform and public control of key utilities (water, energy and transport); reindustrialisation through investment in defence, farming, steel and much else; and state-led regeneration initiatives. In other words, this isn’t just a “brass plate on a suite of rented rooms in Manchester city centre”. It is a plan for “the most serious check on the centralised power of the Treasury in half a century”. Burnham won’t be the first to try to do this: everyone from Harold Wilson to the last Tory government gave it a go, and “all ultimately failed”. But he thinks that by taking control of things himself – setting up No 10 North not as a satellite office but as a “counterweight” to the Treasury – he can succeed where they failed. So yes, the economic levers that will make or break the next government’s priorities will indeed be leaving London. “But it’s Burnham who’ll be pulling them.”

Hue is a colour-matching game in which players are presented with a particular shade and have to recreate it by combining up to eight “drops” of five basic colours. Very tricky at first, but can usually be done with only a couple of drops. Try for yourself here.

The pasta company Barilla has created a series of short playlists on Spotify that serve a very special purpose, says Alexis Morillo in Delish. Each one is the perfect length of time to cook a particular type of pasta. So the fusilli playlist is 11 minutes long; rigatoni is 12 minutes, and spaghetti is nine minutes. Just boil water, add pasta and press play. Click here for linguine.

It’s an absolutely awful restoration job in Brazil, says Patrick Reilly in the New York Post, which has left the Holy Family looking like goggly-eyed freaks. The “not so heavenly paint job” in the public square in Carmo do Cajuru has angered parishioners, but has also become an “instant tourist attraction”, with out-of-towners flocking to the site in their tens of thousands. The botched spruce-up has since been removed.