Russia has outlined its demands for a truce with Ukraine, including: no Nato membership for Kyiv, no foreign troops in Ukraine, and international recognition that Crimea and four partly occupied provinces belong to Russia. US envoy Steve Witkoff has landed in Moscow and will meet Vladimir Putin later today to discuss the terms. Keir Starmer has announced plans to reshape Britain’s “overcautious and flabby” state, vowing in a landmark speech this morning to remove barriers to infrastructure projects, slash government regulation and embed AI across Westminster. The prime minister has also abolished NHS England to bring management of the health service “back into democratic control”. Married men are three times more likely to be obese than single men, according to new research which found that men tended to become generally lazier and unhealthier after becoming husbands. The researchers observed no such link between marriage and obesity rates in women.

Donald Trump’s economic “shock therapy”

By tearing up free trade orthodoxy and hitting allies with tariffs, Donald Trump appears to be “fuelling inflation at the very moment when unemployment is on the rise”, says Tim Stanley in The Daily Telegraph – rejecting every metric of success he endorsed in his first term. “Has he gone mad?” Actually, no. Trump is willing to risk a downturn because he believes he “can and must” reset the US economy. His theory is that America is addicted to state spending and foreign imports, and that the stock market is at an unsustainable high, juiced by Joe Biden’s handouts. The Trump tariffs, then, are not just a foreign policy tool – to bully Mexico to police its border, for example – but also a way to raise revenue and force a long term shift from buying cheap imported goods to buying American. I don’t know if it will work, “but it is a plan”.

Oh please, says Thomas Friedman in The New York Times. Donald Trump ran for re-election not because he had some grand theory for how America can thrive in the 21st century but to avoid criminal prosecution and “get revenge” on snooty liberals. The result is the utter chaos we see today, and it’s bad for America. How can you lead an allied nation – or an international company – when, in a short period, the US president threatens huge tariffs on Mexico and Canada, postpones them (having already done so once before), doubles tariffs on China and threatens to impose more tariffs on Europe and Canada? What’s stupid is that for all Joe Biden’s faults, he left the US economy in “pretty good shape and trending in the right direction”. Too much more of Trump’s global tariff shock therapy and “our markets will have a nervous breakdown from uncertainty”.

🇺🇸 📉 Anyone waiting for the president to take note of the economic data and change course is dreaming, says Janan Ganesh in the FT. “The central fact about Trump’s second term is that he can’t run for a third.” If tariffs induce a recession and his approval rating plummets, “what exactly does he lose”? Some argue he wants to launch JD Vance or his son Don Jr as the Republican candidate in 2028, and so “mustn’t queer the pitch”. Really? Who seriously believes an “egoist of Trump dimensions” will restrain himself out of concern for another person’s prospects three years hence?