In your briefing today:

📣 US President Donald Trump has backed down from his threat to annihilate “a whole civilisation”, agreeing a two-week ceasefire with Iran overnight and moving to de-escalate the war two hours before a deadline he had set for Tehran.

The Strait of Hormuz is expected to reopen to shipping, although the precise terms of that reopening - and the details of the ceasefire agreement - are still far from clear. Global oil prices have fallen sharply overnight, while stock markets in Asia have risen on optimism resolution of the conflict is getting closer.

Negotiations between the US and Iran will now begin in Pakistan on Friday. (AP)

📣 Almost a third of CalMac’s ferry fleet is now out of action because of technical problems and planned annual maintenance, with six major vessels and four smaller ones unable to sail. The company’s chief executive, Duncan Mackison, says the operator is facing an “unprecedented scenario”. (BBC)

📣 The Scottish Conservatives launched their election manifesto, with leader Russell Findlay promising a £500 tax cut for OAPs, a cull of Scottish quangos and civil servants, and a tightening of rules around benefits. (Mail)

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📣 Scotland’s A&E waiting times for February were the worst on record, and specialists are now “crying out for help” according to the Royal College of Emergency Medicine. (Scotsman)

📣 Scottish Green Party members want an investigation in the wake of Maggie Chapman’s rise to the top of the party’s candidates’ list for North East Scotland. Guy Ingerson was due to top the list, but was dropped due to an “unresolved complaint”. But Chapman also has an outstanding complaint against her. (Herald)

📣 A corrupt policeman got a job as a train driver while awaiting trial for framing two innocent men - and then went back to his job at ScotRail after serving only one month of an eight-month sentence. (Daily Record has the exclusive)

📣 The Wireless Festival in London has been cancelled after its top act, US rapper Kanye West, was blocked from entering the UK over his antisemitic, racist and pro-Nazi comments. (Mirror)

📣 Jailed drug dealers should be treated like radical extremists - isolated and “assertively managed” - according to the head of the England and Wales prison watchdog. (Guardian)

📣 Machinations in Downing Street: Antionia Romeo, Keir Starmer’s most senior civil servant, has been given a sweeping mandate to deliver his priorities, while the Number 10 chief secretary - Darren Jones - is to focus on wider Whitehall reform. (Guardian)

📣 The wife of a US soldier has been released from an immigration detention facility after a week in custody. Annie Ramos’s detention had sparked a backlash against Trump administration’s immigration policies. (AP)

📣 Artemis II sent back some stunning images of the moon and Earth from space: see them, in beautifully large format, here. (AP)

⚽️ The Scottish Premiership post-split fixtures were published to huge excitement, with all the conspiracy theories and controversies you’d expect. The intrigue, one suspects, will go down to the wire. (Daily Record)

⚽️ Arsenal, struggling of late, had a decent night in the Champions League, bagging a 1-0 win away at Sporting Lisbon to put themselves in the driving seat for a place in the semi-finals. Boss Mikel Arteta hailed Kai Havertz’s winner as a potential “big moment” in the club’s season. (Guardian) (🎥 Highlights)

🗣️ It was language we’d never heard from a US President before, delivered in a short message on Donald Trump’s own Truth Social social media platform: unless Iran struck a deal with the US within the next 12 hours, “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again”.

From the commander-in-chief of the world’s most powerful armed forces, the man on the US nuclear button, it was a chilling threat that immediately gripped the world.

As the 93 million people of Iran, and governments around the world, grappled with what exactly he meant by the threat - nuclear or not? - his appeared to be revelling in the attention. “WHO KNOWS?” (his caps) it continued. “We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World”.

On Wall Street, notes the Wall Street Journal, “traders and executives treated the day like other Trump deadlines that have come and gone: as a negotiating tactic they largely expected to pass without catastrophe.”

But, as the New York Times says, the threat to “wipe out” Iran’s civilisation was rhetoric that went beyond bluster, “delivered with all the casual callousness that has become President Trump’s preferred style of communication,” writes Katie Rogers, a White House correspondent.

Noting his Truth Social post, it was “what passed as a normal Tuesday-morning update from the Trump White House: a warning of mass destruction and what international law would define as war crimes, blithely delivered on Truth Social, posted alongside ads for bullet-shaped pens, patriotic hats and a gala dinner at Mar-a-Lago”.

But, to his supporters, this was all part of a great game: part of “Mr. Trump’s chaotic negotiation style, intended to prompt an end to his self-inflicted conflict and persuade Tehran to open the strait."

It turned out they were correct: before last night’s 8pm deadline, Trump - and his Truth Social account - had returned to what passes for his version of diplomacy, revealing he’d agreed to “a double-sided CEASEFIRE!” and talking of the “Honor to have his Longterm problem close to resolution”.

Damage, however, has been done.

Says the NYT’s Rogers: “Even for Mr. Trump, who has a long history of comments that fly far beyond the pale, his latest comments bear the mark of an impulsive leader who is used to getting his way through coercion and unpredictability, but who is not getting his way now.”

It’s an episode, experts tell her, which damages both Trump’s and the United States’ standing in the world: appearing to be a dangerous and unpredictable bully, rather than a reliable partner, will further shift attitudes towards this US regime in most democracies around the world.

What happens next? The markets have been busy digesting the news overnight, and are broadly happy with what they see: the Strait of Hormuz will reopen, at least for two weeks, so the price of oil has fallen by around 6% overnight, and stocks in Asia have risen. Bloomberg is calling yesterday “Trump’s TACO Tuesday”, referring to the belief that Trump Always Chickens Out.

But amid the relief, there are clearly concerns. The terms of the reopening of that Strait are not yet clear. And even among those normally more sympathetic to Trump, there is a clear-eyed view of the damage done.

“It is a relief that Trump took an off-ramp tonight,” said Jennifer Kavanagh, the director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, a libertarian think tank, in a late-night Tweet quoted by Bloomberg.

“But if he was going to back down, he did so in the worst way. Raising the stakes so high beforehand, he maximized the damage to his credibility & global perceptions of U.S. power.

“This is a clear strategic defeat for the U.S.”

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