Chinese president Xi Jinping unveiled laser weapons, robot wolves, nuclear ballistic missiles and giant underwater drones at a landmark military parade in Beijing this morning, in front of more than two dozen heads of state, including Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un. The North Korean leader – joined by his young daughter and likely successor, Kim Ju-ae – told Putin it was his country’s “fraternal duty” to continue helping Russia’s war effort. Under-16s in England will be banned from buying energy drinks like Monster and Red Bull, the government has announced. Health experts, dentists and teaching unions have all welcomed the ban, says The Guardian, with schools complaining that the highly caffeinated drinks left children “bouncing off the walls”. One minute of vigorous activity a day could add years to your life. A new study tracking 3,300 older Americans who did no structured exercise found that those who managed 60 seconds of energetic “incidental activity”, such as lifting heavy shopping, had a 38% lower risk of dying over the following six years compared to those who did not.

It was somehow apt, says Marina Hyde in The Guardian, that Keir Starmer’s “No 10 hokey cokey” on Monday wasn’t quite the full-blooded reshuffle many were expecting. Less shuffling the deckchairs on the Titanic; more “restructuring the deck crew and announcing that some fresh faces will enable the team to work with new focus towards their ultimate goal of reshuffling”. Downing Street officials say the personnel changes demonstrate that the PM is focused on “relentless delivery”. Sorry, what? This government has delivered pretty much nothing, and all Starmer ever does is relent. “Doing a monthly U-turn is the only thing he hasn’t U-turned on.”

Underlying all this is the looming autumn budget. It was only nine months ago that Rachel Reeves insisted, “I’m really clear: I’m not coming back with more borrowing or more taxes”. Spoiler alert: that’s exactly what she’s going to do. In a development “both clearly predictable and clearly predicted”, Labour’s promise not to raise any of the three biggest taxes – while somehow still giving Britain a far better lifestyle than that to which it has become “angrily accustomed” – has not come off. So voters are angrier now, and will be a whole lot angrier still when Reeves goes back on her word. “It’s extremely difficult to see how she survives that.” She and the PM have only themselves to blame. They must have known their pre-election promises didn’t add up – a form of economic populism “almost as corrosive” as the right-wing populism they say they disdain. And if they didn’t know, they’re “even more incompetent” than they’ve so far appeared. A truly terrifying thought.

For all the talk of Britain’s economic travails, says Chris Giles in the FT, our public finances are “objectively better placed” than those of other G7 nations. Net debt is still below 100% of GDP, much lower than in Italy (127%) and Japan (134%). France’s government “hangs by a thread” because its parliament cannot agree a cost-cutting budget. Britain’s borrowing is only two-thirds of US levels. Yes, the UK pays higher interest for long-term debt, but mainly for arcane reasons: the sunsetting of defined benefit pension funds; the inflated importance of the unreliable Office for Budget Responsibility. On numbers alone, Britain is “a fiscal saint, not a sinner”.

The left-wing favourite Zack Polanski secured an “emphatic victory” in the Green Party leadership race yesterday, says Dominic Penna in The Daily Telegraph. And as you might expect, the 42-year-old London Assembly member has a rather colourful past. In 2013, when he was a Harley Street hypnotherapist, he tried to help a reporter from The Sun increase the size of her breasts using the power of her mind. She claimed the process worked – her 32in bust apparently grew to 36in for 10 days – but Polanski later apologised, emphasising that hypnotic breast enhancement was “not a service I charged for”.

I’ve lamented Britain’s “authoritarian turn” for years, says Brendan O’Neill in The Spectator. Yet even I was shocked by the news that Graham Linehan had been arrested by five armed police officers over a few tweets. The once-beloved comedy writer – creator of classics like Father Ted and The IT Crowd – is suspected of “incitement” for writing that if a “trans-identified male” refuses to leave a female-only space, you should “punch him in the balls”. Linehan is not having his collar felt because anyone is likelier to get punched after his tweet, but because he dares to demur from the “post-truth lunacies of our morally lost elites”. He believes, shockingly, that men are not women. “He believes in science.” What kind of country deploys its police as the “armed wing” of toxic, radical activists? “Not a very democratic one.”

Linehan is “obsessive and offensive” on this issue, says Helen Lewis in The Atlantic. But he’s no criminal. And his arrest is “totalitarian, absurd and a waste of police time”. It’s also symptomatic of a “wider chill on free speech” in Europe, where the “selective deployment” of badly drawn laws concerning hate speech, offence and incitement has turned police into the “enforcers of progressive values”. In Munich this spring, JD Vance cited police action against a silent anti-abortion activist in Britain and a man who burned a Quran in Sweden to argue that free speech is “in retreat” across Europe. The US vice-president’s closeness to Donald Trump gave sceptical Europeans an excuse to ignore him, but he’s right that parts of Europe have, with the good intention of protecting minorities, enacted “extremely illiberal” hate-speech and harassment laws. Linehan is just the latest victim.

Whenever you think you’re having a bad day at work, says Jonn Elledge on Substack, just remember Betty Lou Oliver. She was working in the Empire State Building on 28 July, 1945, when a US Air Force bomber accidentally flew into the skyscraper. Oliver suffered severe burns and bone breakages but survived. She was placed on a stretcher and loaded into a lift – whereupon the cables snapped, plunging her 75 storeys down to ground level. Incredibly, she survived: a combination of the compressed air in the airtight shaft and the snapped cables piling up at the bottom cushioned the fall. “She only died in 1999.”

Europe is considering adding a new element to its “defensive shield” against Russia, says Politico: peat bogs. One reason the Russians failed to reach Kyiv in February 2022 was because the Ukrainians blew a hole in the Kozarovychi Dam, flooding a vast river basin that had been drained in Soviet times. Russia’s tanks got stuck in the mud and eventually had to turn back. Today, Finland and Poland are actively exploring “bog restoration” to create similar natural barriers on their borders, with the added benefit that peat-rich bogs are excellent stores of carbon. As Tarja Haaranen from the Finnish environment ministry says: “It’s a win-win.”

It’s Chloe Malle, who is replacing Anna Wintour – sort of – as the new editor of American Vogue, says Jessica Testa in The New York Times. The 39-year-old is technically “head of editorial content”, but Wintour will remain her direct boss as Condé Nast’s chief content officer – “she isn’t even moving out of her office”. Malle, who previously ran the fashion magazine’s website, says she is a “proud nepo baby”: her father was the Oscar-nominated French film director Louis Malle; her mother is actress Candice Bergen, who happened to play a Wintour-like fashion editor in Sex and the City.