In your briefing today:

📣 Andy Burnham’s government has reached decision time on the Jackdaw and Rosebank fields, with opposition politicians warning it’s a “life or death” decision for the North Sea oil and gas industry, and political blowback is inevitable either way.

A public consultation on Rosebank - the largest untapped oil field in the North Sea - ends today. Another consultation on Jackdaw, a gas field, closed last week. Development on both fields, previously approved, was halted after a legal challenge by Greenpeace. (Scotsman) (Press & Journal)

📣 The BBC spends some time in Glasgow city centre and sets out in detail what many have already experienced in part, or seen on social media in recent months: areas filled with menace, drug dealing and violence.

There’s a “dispersal zone” in the centre around St Enoch Square and the “Four Corners” next door: last year, there were more than 400 violent assaults there.

“We captured people openly dealing and taking drugs, as well as thefts, arrests, and even a brawl involving young men throwing traffic cones at a man with a dog,” writes reporter Myles Bonnar.

“A taxi driver who regularly drives into the area told us so many people were off their head on drugs and that it was sometimes like the ‘zombie apocalypse’.”

It’s all the subject of a Disclosure programme, on BBC One this evening (9pm) and on iPlayer now. (BBC)

⚽️ The Scotland men’s national football team has a new manager: Sebastien Pacognoli, the 39-year-old Belgian sacked by Monaco at the end of last season. He takes over from Steve Clarke to become only the second foreign boss of the Scotland team, after the ill-fated reign of German Berti Vogts.

The Scottish FA say they have secured “one of Europe’s brightest emerging coaching talents”: we should expect a more aggressive, front-foot Scotland team, the pundits reckon. (BBC)

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📣 Trade unions are warning that plans to cut 20,000 public sector jobs will damage services. (Herald)

📣 Edinburgh is still badly constipated by the effects of the Princes Street fire: councillors are expected to call for a review of its preparations for major incidents to try and avoid a repeat. (Scotsman)

📣 Nicola Sturgeon has told a podcast she “needs therapy” after Peter Murrell’s betrayal. (Daily Record)

📣 A pipe band from Canada - the Simon Fraser University pipe band - have won the World Pipe Band championships, the first overseas winner in 16 years. (BBC)

📣 Five teenage boys were killed when the BMW car they were in, travelling the wrong way down an Irish motorway, crashed into a Hyundai carrying a family to the airport. The family of four is seriously injured. (Sun)

📣 The weather across the UK changes in the coming days: cooler, although little prospect of rain for the parched south. (BBC)

📣 Donald Trump has told the Pentagon to scale back exercises with South Korea because they were “inappropriate and hostile” to North Korea, which “has been unthreatening and respectful” during his time in the White House. (AP)

📣 Russia has installed secret bases capable of sending drones deep into Nato territory. (Telegraph has the exclusive)

📣 Former Netflix chairman Reed Hastings says AI will lead to a “great act of creative destruction” that may “consign some of today’s companies to the same fate as Blockbuster Video while faster-moving rivals build new Netflix-sized disruptors.” (Semafor)

📣 Actress Hayden Panettiere has died aged 38: the Hollywood star was best remembered for her roles in Heroes and Nashville. (Mail)

⚽️ Rangers will meet Celtic in the League Cup quarter-finals next month. (BBC)

🥇 Sprinter Amy Hunt completed an “unprecedented quadruple” by winning her fourth gold medal at the European Athletics Championships. (BBC)

⚽️ Manchester City’s season, and Enzo Maresca’s career as their manager, could have started better: they were thumped 3-0 by Arsenal in the Community Shield at Wembley. (Guardian)

🗣️ The death of Professor Jason Arday on Friday prompted fierce debate about the role of the press in his death. Many felt the media “pile-on” - a vast number of stories were published about Arday in the last month - must have contributed to what appears to be his death by suicide.

A chart by a media campaign group won a lot of attention on X. It shows the volume of stories written about Arday across multiple titles.

🗣️ Journalist and academic Seun Matiluko put the case against the media best, among those I saw, and captured many of the themes others also expressed: “The press failed Arday,” she writes in the Observer. “There were 249 articles published about him over 22 days.

“It is right to apply scrutiny to people in power. People who lie should be called out. And it does appear that many parts of Arday’s life story were questionable. He was clearly a fallible man. Questions remain for him to answer that he never will.

“But the relentless media campaign against him was out of proportion to his mis-steps.

“I know some will roll their eyes at this and say it was Cambridge that emphasised his Blackness in the first place. I agree that in the press coverage following Arday’s meteoric rise to professorship in 2023, his race was brought up a lot.

“However, headlines such as the ones we’ve seen in the past few weeks – eg How Black Lives Matter created Jason Arday, or Students told Cambridge to ‘decolonise’ before Jason Arday was hired or Cambridge’s diversity poster boy in plagiarism row – go beyond just recognising Arday’s racial background. They betray a politics of white grievance that is instantly suspicious of Black achievement as somehow coming at the expense of white people.”

🗣️ Not all commentators agreed. Another writer, Sarah Ditum, wrote on her Substack yesterday: “Jason Arday’s death is terrible. So is using it to attack journalism.”

“By Jason Arday’s own account, he experienced a lot of bad luck in his life. He had tumours (in his brain, according to his memoir Great and Unfortunate Things, which I reviewed for The Times; one in his testicle, according to the proposal for that book). He was randomly beaten up by four youths, leaving him with epilepsy (I could find no contemporary reports to corroborate this). He was hit by a car, and comatose for months (another story that was in the proposal but not the final text).”

But, she writes, “Arday’s biggest piece of bad luck, though, is unquestionable. It was a gigantic misfortune for the questions about his life and career to come to prominence in the summer, when parliament is closed and the news agenda is a vacuum.

There were other unlucky elements, suggests Ditum. “It was — and I am sorry to say this now that Arday is dead, but it is true — very funny. There was a childish brazenness to his exaggerations and inventions. Running 600 miles in six days, and 30 marathons in 35 days (some with a broken leg): obviously ridiculous.”

And it was also serious, she writes, raising questions about DEI “run-amok”, academic standards in the humanities, and police overreach and legal chill (Arday complained to police and engaged lawyers when a journalist approached him, and they pursued the journalist, pressuring him to abandon the story).

“Arday is easier to defend now he can be cast as a martyr to the cruelty of the right-wing press,” she writes. “Alive, he had become an embarrassment — in Afua Hirsch’s words, ‘the stick the right will use to beat back racial equality’. Dead, all his faults can be forgiven. He can be, once again, the high-flying black scholar who defied the obstacles of structural racism and his own disabilities. His reputation is restored. All the difficult questions he represents about university recruitment, educational standards and general gullibility can be gratefully set aside.”

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