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?

Denmark’s state-run postal service, PostNord, is ending all letter deliveries at the end of this year, after a 90% decline in volumes since 2000. While Britons still send around three times more letters per head than Danes, the trend in the UK is almost exactly the same, says Charles Arthur in The Overspill. With Royal Mail now in private hands, “when will the tipping point come”?

In 1828, an American painter named Sarah Goodridge painted a miniature portrait of her breasts and gave it to the statesman Daniel Webster after his wife died. It’s “one of the earliest cases of someone sending nudes”, says the Messy Nessy newsletter. Based on its miniature format – Beauty Revealed measures just 6.7cm x 8cm – it was “likely intended for his eyes alone”. Webster later married someone else, but his family held on to the perky portrait until the 1980s, when it was auctioned at Christie’s for $15,000.

Don’t ban the far right – beat them

Whatever happened to the idea that, faced with the enemies of democracy, we should fight their ideas at the same time as defending “their right to express them”, asks Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s former finance minister, in UnHerd. The answer is that it “died an ignominious death” on Sunday, when Romania’s Central Electoral Bureau – with the full support of the EU’s liberal establishment – banned far-right candidate Cǎlin Georgescu from running for president. I detest Georgescu and the “Nationalist International” of which he is a part, but I cherish my right, “and duty”, to defeat them at the ballot box. “And I shall challenge to my last breath the liberal totalitarians who deny me.”

Romania’s electoral watchdog justified the ban by accusing the candidate of violating the “obligation to defend democracy”. How preposterous. Standing for election is an “unearned right automatically afforded to anyone with the correct passport and the capacity to breathe”. What is by definition anti-democratic is when some judge or commissioner tries to limit that right. And before you call me a “useful idiot” or “naïve liberal”, remember: I grew up under a fascist totalitarian regime in Greece – “I know ultra-Rightists better than most”. I watched them beat my mother, abduct my father and imprison my favourite uncle. And what I learnt is that nothing reinforces their promise to the masses that liberal democracy is failing ordinary people more than the spectacle of “liberal totalitarianism at work”. Those fretting that Georgescu is a “Kremlin plant” must see what a “magnificent gift” his banning is to Putin. And how smart was it for the EU, weeks after JD Vance caused widespread horror by accusing Brussels of dissolving Romanian democracy, to vindicate him?

Volkswagen sold more sausages than cars last year, says Cantillon in The Irish Times. The German carmaker started producing its own currywurst – sausages topped with ketchup and curry powder and served with chips – in 1973, and after the dish proved popular in its staff canteens, they began hawking the sausages to other companies and supermarkets. Last year it flogged a record 8.5 million currywurst “units”, compared to a measly 5.2 million vehicles. Guten Appetit!

It’s the Johnnie Walker Vault in Edinburgh, where deep-pocketed whisky lovers can now create their own bespoke blend, says Jonah Flicker in Robb Report. The company’s “master blender”, Emma Walker, guides customers through a selection of 500 different whiskies, then creates a personal concoction for them based on individual preferences including their favourite food, music and season. The “Private Blend” experience isn’t cheap – £50,000 per head – but they do at least throw in a tour of the Diageo Archives and a stay at Gleneagles Hotel. Book here.