Downing Street is braced for a leadership challenge after allies of Wes Streeting told The Times and BBC he is preparing to resign and trigger a leadership election as soon as tomorrow. The Health Secretary’s spokesman refused to deny reports that he told confidants he is “going to go for it” after his 16-minute confrontation with Keir Starmer at No 10 this morning, before the King’s Speech. Britain will deploy drones, fighter jets and a warship as part of a multinational mission to re-open the Strait of Hormuz. Defence minister John Healey said the UK would dispatch autonomous mine-hunting equipment, Typhoon jets and the HMS Dragon, capable of shooting down ballistic missiles, to secure freedom of navigation in the waterway. Our taste for vegetables may begin before birth. Researchers from Durham University gave mothers either kale capsules or carrot capsules during their final months of pregnancy and found that the resulting children were more likely to react positively to the vegetable they had been exposed to in the womb.

Britain has a “masterpiece new entry” for the dictionary of political quotation, says Marina Hyde in The Guardian. As a Labour MP said of the party’s leadership options: “We have to face up to the fact that every single one of them is f***ing useless.” Endless repetition of the catchphrase “I get it” means the “only thing people will be interested in many of this lot getting is hantavirus”. Then there’s the talk of Keir Starmer’s “exit timetable”, when what they really want is the “spreadsheet King Lear” on the “first train to Eff Off Forever”. But what’s the alternative? The shop-soiled Andy Burnham, veteran of two failed leadership bids, losing to Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn? People say: “different times”. Same guy though.

What’s alarming, says Stephen Pollard in The Spectator, is that all the candidates, bar Wes Streeting, favour policies that make Liz Truss look like a “model of good economic sense”. Consider the bond market: the interest rate on 30-year government borrowing has hit a 28-year high of 5.81%, “simply at the thought of what will likely replace Starmer”. But hey ho, say Starmer’s challengers, in the new “post-Starmer magical realist world”, global bond markets will just have to “fall in line”. What? Short of stealing from bond traders – thus turning the UK into a banana republic – or discovering an “actual magic money tree”, it will be interesting to see how they manage this. And any future leader will dance to the tune of barmy Labour MPs, who refused to shave a paltry £5bn off our £334bn welfare bill, believing, quite madly, that the bill is “not big enough”. Dire as Starmer is, he is the dam holding back “utter insanity and economic meltdown”.

American state visits to China have often provoked culinary curiosity, says Jessica Karl in Bloomberg. Richard Nixon transformed Americans’ limited view of Chinese food – fortune cookies and stir-fried vegetables – when he was seen expertly wielding his chopsticks and navigating a lazy Susan full of delicacies including shark’s fin soup and spongy bamboo shoots in 1972. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen accidentally ate hallucinogenic mushrooms in Beijing in 2023, while the menu for Donald Trump’s first visit in 2017 was full of more “understated” dishes, such as beef steak in tomato sauce.

Eleven years ago today, says Andrew McDonald in Politico, Keir Starmer posted a picture of himself sitting in the House of Commons for the first time, with two fellow Labour MPs. One was Catherine West, who threatened to trigger a leadership contest last week; the other was Wes Streeting, who is said to be planning a coup to replace the PM. “How times change.”

Two weeks before the election that returned Donald Trump to the White House, says William McGurn in The Wall Street Journal, he promised to free the pro-democracy publisher Jimmy Lai, who is now serving an effective life sentence in Hong Kong. “A hundred percent, I’ll get him out,” Trump said. “He’ll be easy to get out.” The US president has repeatedly renewed his promise, saying Lai’s freedom was “on my list”, holding a private meeting with the 78-year-old’s son, Sebastien, and, as recently as Monday, re-iterating that “America wants this man freed”. Now, as he travels to China for his summit with Xi Jinping, “the pressure is on”.

There’s a clear precedent. After the 1989 crackdown on protesting students in Tiananmen Square, dissident astrophysicist Fang Lizhi sought refuge in the US embassy in Beijing, much to the ire of Deng Xiaoping. Richard Nixon wrote to the Chinese leader, arguing that as long as Fang remained holed up in the embassy, he would be an impediment to Chinese objectives. Two months later, he was freed. Today, Trump can make the same case – leaving Lai locked up, to the horror of the wider world, makes him a “stumbling block” to China’s global ambitions. The stakes are high. Earlier this month more than 100 members of Congress – Republicans and Democrats alike – signed a letter urging Trump to press Xi on letting Lai go. If he manages it, the US president can take a well-earned victory lap. But if he fails, his reputation as a “brilliant negotiator” will be shot, confirming him as “just another politician who makes promises he cannot keep”.

The latest horticultural trend is “chaos gardening”, says Alexander Nazaryan in The New York Times, and it’s a breeze: “First, get a bunch of seeds. Then throw them at the ground.” The results are great. TikTok is blooming with before-and-after videos of people turning patches of dirt into thriving mini-meadows and talking about how free they feel now they’ve given up trying to get planting exactly right. “Chaos gardening is the way forward,” wrote one commenter. “I see people putting little seeds in their individual pots. Nah, no time for that mate.”

Crafty kids looking to find a way round the new age verification checks for adult websites have come up with a new hack, says Zack Whittaker in TechCrunch: drawing on a fake moustache with an eyebrow pencil to make themselves appear older. The online safety organisation Internet Matters found that 46% of children said that the age-checks recently imposed by the Online Safety Act were easy to bypass, while 32% admitted to having done so. Other tricks have included simply entering a fake birthday or using someone else’s ID card.

It’s a new fine dining restaurant in Lyon that caters specifically for dogs, says David Chazan in The Times. Canine customers at Dogstronomy stand at stainless steel platforms set with pretty bowls of food as their owners look on. Menu items include a birthday cake filled with meat or fish (from €17); Sunday brunch, such as eggs benedict on an oat biscuit or chicken pancakes with a blueberry sauce (€16); and a simpler weekday menu consisting of meat, veg and a carbohydrate (€6). Chef-owner Ornella Del Prado says she wants the dogs to enjoy a “real restaurant experience”.