Donald Trump says renewed talks between America and Iran could take place “over the next two days” as his now “fully implemented” military blockade on the Strait of Hormuz reportedly saw six vessels turned back in its first 24 hours. The US president also warned that Britain’s trade deal with America could “always be changed” while discussing the “sad” state of the special relationship. The UK’s Help to Buy scheme did little for lower earners, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. While George Osborne’s 2013 policy – which was aimed at helping people on to the property ladder – reduced the amount required for a deposit, the IFS found that homebuyers’ main constraint was their level of income. The primary beneficiaries were higher earners living in cheap areas. Timing workouts to match your body clock could reduce the risk of heart problems. A new study in Pakistan found that early birds who exercised in the morning and night owls who sweated it out in the evening had lower blood pressure and better sleep quality than those whose schedules were mismatched.

Fifteen years ago I wrote a column about a “wacky new phenomenon” in Los Angeles, says Celia Walden in The Daily Telegraph. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, everyone was talking about “anxiety”. Not the mundane, fleeting sensation experienced by, well, everyone at one time or another – this was “Anxiety” with a capital “A”, an apparently serious and permanent new condition that necessitated urgent psycho-medical attention. At the time, I thought such silliness would never happen back in the UK. In fact, we’ve “fallen for the great anxiety scam hook, line and sinker”.

Extreme anxiety is, of course, a genuine condition requiring proper treatment. But do I believe that one in 10 Britons suffers from an anxiety disorder? “Nope. Sorry.” The Personal Independence Payment cost for treating this “disability/normal human emotion” has already jumped from under £100m in 2019 to almost £427m last year. And that rise will no doubt continue, given that in some cases you can collect payments without even having to see a doctor. I gave the assessment a go myself. Do I need occasional prompting to socialise? Yep – that’s two points. Does it take me longer to cook than other people? Another two points. Do I sometimes feel unable to manage it all? Oh yes, every day. “Congratulations!” That’s eight points from the possible 72, entitling me to £73.90 a week, or £3,843 a year. And while only around half of new claims result in payment, there are plenty of “anxiety coaches” on TikTok, with hundreds of thousands of followers, to show you exactly how to cheat this “most cheatable of systems”. It’s enough to give any taxpayer “acute anxiety”.

🏄‍♀️💃 Some of the scammers beggar belief. Catherine Wieland, a 33-year-old from West Sussex, was given a suspended sentence last month after claiming £23,000 for an anxiety disorder she said was so acute she couldn’t leave her house. She was found to have made 76 beauty appointments and 60 visits to the pub, and was pictured “surfing and zip-lining in Mexico”.

Former Nato secretary-general George Robertson’s attack on Keir Starmer yesterday, accusing him of “corrosive complacency” on defence, highlights the PM’s parliamentary quandary, says John Rentoul in The Independent. Starmer could have set out a plan to increase defence spending to 3%, funded by tax rises or welfare cuts. But because he’s so afraid of his backbenchers, he took a “middle course” that lacked any real commitment to defence and satisfied no one. It’s typical of his premiership: the language of “absolute conviction” contrasted with the “actions needed to get him through the day”.

100 Jumps is an extremely simple and extremely addictive online game. You control a small, squishy square and have to jump across 100 platforms, each with a different width, height and distance from the previous platform. The length of the leap is controlled by how long you hold down the button; getting three consecutive “perfect” landings earns you an extra life. Give it a go here.

“Pity JD Vance,” says Edward Luce in the FT. Having advised Donald Trump against the Iran war, he was sent to Islamabad to fix it. En route to that doomed cause, he stopped off in Hungary to endorse another: the re-election campaign of the now-ousted Viktor Orbán. By the end of that diplomatic whirlwind from hell, Vance had secured the lowest approval rating ever for a vice president at this point in their term. The 41-year-old made his own bed: he was selected precisely for his “pugilistic loyalty”. But defending policies that turn 180 degrees overnight – from vowing to “destroy a civilisation”, say, to announcing a “new golden age” – requires serious acrobatics. Henry Kissinger would have struggled. “Vance is flailing.”

The vice president is no longer Trump’s obvious successor. While Vance was in Pakistan failing to secure a deal with the Iranians, his main 2028 rival, Marco Rubio, was living it up in Miami with the president. This is a sharp reversal. The “firebrand neoconservative” Rubio had previously been “co-opted and tamed” by Trump, who Vance endorsed because he didn’t start any wars in his first term. “That was a bad call.” Trump has ordered strikes on seven countries and now teases Vance at public events. And even if he somehow made his way back into Trump’s good graces, Vance has no base of his own. The only election he has won alone is the Ohio Senate race in 2022, where he was dragged over the finish line by huge spending from Silicon Valley titan Peter Thiel. Vance believed backing Trump would get him closer to the Oval Office. It’s looking more and more like a “poisoned chalice”.

Volodymyr Zelensky claims his troops have for the first time seized a Russian position using “robots alone”, says Antonia Langford in The Daily Telegraph. The Ukrainian president said a combination of drones and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) had forced the enemy troops to surrender, releasing video of them emerging from their hiding place with their hands in the air. UGVs are used for a range of tasks on the battlefield, including evacuating wounded troops, clearing mines, and spearheading “assault operations”. Kyiv aims to produce more than 20,000 of the wheeled or tracked robots this year, up from only a few hundred in 2024.

A shocking 20% of UK schoolchildren are registered as having “special educational needs”, says Kristina Murkett in UnHerd, “five times higher than the EU average”. Strikingly, the figures are worst among summer-born boys, nearly half of whom have received a diagnosis at primary school, whereas only 16% of autumn-born girls have received special educational needs support. All this highlights an overlooked point: kids here go to school too young. Children in almost every European country don’t start learning stuff in classrooms until they’re six or seven, compared to four or five in Britain. And studies show they can read and write just as well as those who start younger, but have far fewer behavioural and educational problems.

It’s Fatou, the world’s oldest gorilla in captivity, who has just turned 69. The pension-age primate celebrated with a “lavish feast” at Berlin Zoo, says The Independent, chowing down on cherry tomatoes, beets, leeks and lettuce. Fatou – who is said to have been brought from Africa to France in the late 1950s by a sailor, who then traded her to settle a bar bill – has now lived almost double the average lifespan of a gorilla in the wild. Her keepers say she has lost her teeth and experiences some arthritis and hearing loss, but remains friendly, “albeit a little stubborn”.