Rachel Reeves will deliver Labour’s first budget in 14 years today. The chancellor “needs to pass four tests”, says Chris Giles in the FT: she must show the public that the additional spending will fix public services, and that the tax increases are fair; convince the markets that the public finances are sustainable; and persuade everyone that her strategy will boost growth. “It will be quite a challenge.” The suspect in the Southport knife attack has been charged with a separate terror offence. Axel Rudakabana, who is accused of murdering three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in July, is also accused of owning a military study of an al-Qaeda training manual, and of producing the biological toxin ricin. The 2024 Tree of the Year competition has been won by a 400-year-old oak in the Scottish Highlands. Skippinish Oak, named after the Scottish ceilidh band that discovered it in 2009, won 21% of the public vote, ahead of the Darwin Oak in Shrewsbury and Lincolnshire’s 1,000-year-old Bowthorpe Oak.

Don’t be fooled – Putin is in a pickle

Last week’s summit of non-aligned Brics nations has been portrayed as a “triumph” for Vladimir Putin, says Dominic Lawson in the Daily Mail. But the Russian president has little to celebrate. The revelation that his forces in Ukraine are being bolstered by 1,500 North Korean troops went down badly: China’s Xi Jinping pointedly called for “no escalation of hostilities”. And the war itself isn’t going as well for Putin as many commentators make out. In the past two months, Russia has captured just 300 square miles – about one-fifth of the area of Essex – at a cost of 60,000 troops dead or wounded. The Kremlin’s need for reinforcements is so dire that it is now allowing anyone facing trial, not just prisoners, to buy their freedom by going to the front line.

Putin has previously managed to stay popular by keeping the economy ticking over. But Russia’s income from oil revenues has halved because of post-invasion sanctions, and its supposed buddies China and India have been “ruthless” in negotiating down the cost of what they do buy. Domestically, the economy is not far off the “structural militarisation” that drove the Soviet Union into “penury and partition”. Its once-thriving arms export trade has all but capsized, for the simple reason that it needs all its weapons, and more, for its own use. And while the inflation rate is officially 9%, the Russian Central Bank last Friday raised its basic interest rate to a whopping 21%. Look again at those pictures of Putin from last week. Is that a genuine smile, or “a grimace masquerading as a grin”?

If people feel let down by today’s budget, Labour only have themselves to blame, says Matthew Parris in The Times. It was clear very early on that they were going to romp home in July’s election. That gave them something extremely rare in politics: a “risk-free chance” to be honest with voters. They could have warned the country that there would need to be both tax rises and spending cuts, still won handily – and now be in a better position politically to do what they think needs doing. “Time and again the lie returns, knife in hand, to confront the liar. But still they do it.”

In the online game Which Way Round, players are presented with an object that gets concealed in a box and rotated. You have to figure out which way the object will face – from a choice of three – before the box is opened again. After each round, both the object and the possible answers are rotated again. Give it a go here.

Sorry, chaps, self defence is no joke for us women

I don’t expect “stone-cold truths” from a chatshow, says Marina Hyde in The Guardian, but Saoirse Ronan delivered one last Friday. The actress was on The Graham Norton Show alongside fellow stars Eddie Redmayne, Paul Mescal and Denzel Washington. Redmayne was recounting how, during self-defence training for his role in The Day of the Jackal, he was told to use his phone as a weapon if attacked. He and the lads found this “quite the hoot”. Mescal riffed on the absurdity – “Who’s actually going to do that, though?” – Norton chimed in and Denzel laughed along. Ronan, having been “honked over” once, eventually managed to cut in with a line that stopped the boys dead: “That’s what girls have to think about all the time.” The agonising silence that follows, and the looks of horror on the men’s faces, are “mesmerising”.

I know, they’re just joking around. But there’s a reason this clip (watch it here) has gone viral around the world. It’s because every woman has been in a similar conversation. Not just having to decide whether to bother interrupting some “self-styled comedy gold” to say something which actually matters. But also wanting to remind men of what it’s like to be “literally any woman, in any place, walking home after dark”. Because yes, after a lifetime of knowing you could be “prey”, you do have to think about how the likes of phones and keys might prove handy. This isn’t to single out the guys on the show. But men should remember that this stuff is sadly no joke to women. We really do live with a “forever hum of fear”.

People need to “stop pretending” the war against coal has been won, says Javier Blas in Bloomberg. As global demand for electricity rises faster than renewables can increase supply, the world is turning back to the “dirtiest” of fossil fuels. The most recent annual World Energy Outlook review quietly revised upwards its long-term estimates for coal use. By the end of this decade, consumption is expected to be 6% higher than it was last year – an increase equivalent to the entire consumption of Japan, the world’s fourth-largest coal burner. Levels aren’t set to drop to a meaningful level – where they were in 2000, say – until “well beyond 2050”.

The website Nameberry has analysed social media trends to predict the top 30 baby names for next year. Top categories include “Safe Haven Names” for parents scared of the news (such as Arcadia, Eden and Oasis); “Femininomenal Names”, which are apparently girly monikers with an “overall grittier quality” (Amaryllis, Circe, Salome); “Otherwordly Names” that may appeal to younger parents obsessed with the Metaverse (Aura, Cosmo, Mars); and the aptly titled “Baby Names, Literally” (Bash, Blossom, Suede). See the full list here.

It’s the MV Ruby, a Russian-linked cargo ship packed with “explosive fertiliser” that has been forced to dock at Great Yarmouth, says The Daily Telegraph. Dubbed the “floating bomb”, the volatile vessel had been bound for the Canary Islands with 20,000 tonnes of ammonium nitrate when it was damaged in bad weather. The ship was denied mooring in Norway and Lithuania over safety concerns, but granted safe harbour in Norfolk. The dockworkers will need to be careful: MV Ruby is carrying seven times more ammonium nitrate than the stash that caused the 2020 Beirut Port explosion.