👋 Good morning! It’s Saturday 10 January 2026. I’m Neil McIntosh, editor of The Early Line, and it’s great to have you here.
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🥶⚠️ Weather warnings for snow and ice cover most of the UK today, and most of Scotland tomorrow. Glasgow will see a little rain late morning and late evening today, with much heavier rain all day tomorrow. Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Inverness will be dry today, wet tomorrow, with rain potentially falling as (more) snow in the north tomorrow. London will be largely dry, but cold. (Here’s the UK forecast).
SIX THINGS TO TALK ABOUT
The mayor who finds his city on the front line, again | Ban X? | Vanishing bistros | BBQ Christmas disaster | STV Radio sounds bright | Big house, or London flat?
🍸 There is no light to be found in this week’s grim events in Minneapolis, where Renee Good was shot dead by an ICE agent and then wildly traduced by the vice president, JD Vance, as a leftist “domestic terrorist”.
But we can, at least, salute the sight of a lesser-known politician, the city’s mayor Jacob Frey, stepping up to the plate and telling ICE to “get the f*** out” of the city at a press conference broadcast live on network TV.
Later when challenged later for upsetting Republicans, who said his swearing was escalating tensions, he responded: “I'm so sorry if I offered their Disney princess ears, but here's the thing: if we're talking about what's inflammatory, on one hand you got someone who dropped an F bomb and on the other you have someone who killed somebody else.”
The Wall Street Journal (🎁 gift link) doesn’t like the escalating tensions but can’t bring itself to land unequivocally on the side of the victim, either: it finds “uncomfortable reality” in knowing both that the ICE officer who shot Good felt in fear of his life, and that Good also had no intention of harming him. That limp both-sides-ism, of course, ignores the fact one person had a gun, and the other died. The stakes, the burden of responsibility, and the outcome, were hardly equal.
Frey, meanwhile, continues to lead with an op-ed in the New York Times, which is worth a read. He reminds us George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis, too. “Cities are on the front lines of this dark hour in our national politics,” he writes. “But after we weather this moment - and we will weather it - it will be on us to light the way forward.” (New York Times - 🎁 gift link)
Upgrade to read the full Party Line, with news of an outcry over France’s vanishing bistros, a truly disastrous Christmas BBQ, and the beautiful Ayrshire house that’s on the market for the price of a slightly disappointing London flat.
PLUS: find top TV, film and sporting picks for the weekend.
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