In your briefing today:

📣 A US judge has ordered Meta, owners of Facebook and WhatsApp, to pay $567 million into a child mental health fund because of its failure to warn the public about the dangers its platforms posed to children.

Judge Bryan Biedscheid compared Meta to a factory, with advertising and content as its product and “the psychological harm and sexual exploitation of children to be the pollution that must be abated”.

The new order comes on top of $375 million in fines already due from the case, and takes the company’s total payout to $942 million. It is the largest ruling against the company over child safety. (BBC)

📣 The Afghan boxer accused of killing Elizabeth Ross in Greece was charged after his wife gave “key” details to police. Sharif Ahmadzai, 26, has been charged with homicide with intent alongside robbery and weapons offences. (BBC)

📣 The health of the UK’s political parties has been laid bare with the SNP seeing its membership fall by 5,000 last year, and UK Labour shed 68,485 members over the year. No figures were available for Scottish Labour.

The SNP also ended the year with a surplus of almost £510,000, and has removed from its accounts the notorious camper van bought by convicted fraudster Peter Murrell, “to reflect the fact the vehicle did not belong to the party”.

Reform UK made the biggest surplus of any UK party - £10.2 million. (Holyrood)

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📣 Scotland’s richest man, Danish billionaire Anders Holch Povlsen, has been given approval to develop a pub on the shores of Loch Ness into a cafe/bakery and shop. (STV)

📣 The leader of the motorbike gang attacked on the M74 last weekend has quit, fearing his family will be caught up in violence. (Daily Record)

📣 The Edinburgh Festival Fringe starts today - and is set to be the biggest in its near-80-year history, with more than 4,000 shows to pick from. (Scotsman)

📣 At least six people have died in a school shooting in Thailand, with another 15 injured. The suspected shooter - a 14-year-old male student - has also been found dead. (BBC)

📣 Academics at the University of Cambridge are calling for an independent inquiry into Jason Arday’s appointment as a professor, saying the University’s leaders are responsible for the “grotesque racism" unleashed in the aftermath of investigations into his claims. (Guardian has the exclusive)

📣 The Conservatives plan to bar foreign nationals from social housing. (Independent)

📣 A big power failure on the rail network left thousands stranded in the North West of England yesterday: more disruption is expected today. (BBC) (Network Rail)

📣 The US air regulator has ordered checks on hundreds of Boeing 737 Max jets, amid fears of cracking in the fuselage that could weaken its structural integrity. (CNN)

📣 Gary Glitter, the former pop singer whose real name is Paul Gadd, has appeared in court charged with sex offences dating back to 1978. He denies the charges. (BBC)

⚽️ Rangers reverted to old habits - and standards - as they lost 2-1 away to Jagiellonia Bialystok in the Europa League qualifiers. Manager Derek McInnes damned the performance as “a lot tonight of what I thought Rangers were last season". (BBC)

⚽️ Hearts were embarrassed 6-1 away to Benfica, with the crushing defeat meaning Wouter Vrancken remains without a win as Hearts head coach after four attempts. (BBC)

⚽️ Motherwell managed a creditable 1-1 draw with HJK Helsinki, putting in an excellent second-half performance to leave them favourites to progress. (BBC)

⚽️ Hibs secured a 2-1 win against North Macedonian side Shkendija, but will have their work cut out in the second leg. (BBC)

🗣️The Economist warns “AI is breaking the British state”. Disgruntled citizens, pissed off by the poor deal they get from authorities, are turning to AI to file objections and appeals with those in power.

“The resulting deluge of complaints, and demands,” warns the newspaper, “will overwhelm bureaucracies built for the age of the post and the telephone. Too little is being done to prevent the state from drowning.

“While worries about AI dwell on the threats to safety and jobs, the backlog in employment tribunals has quietly risen by 55% in a year, in large part due to AI-fuelled claims,” it notes. “Demand for emergency injunctions has surged 100-fold. And the AI tide has only just begun to come in.

“The prospect is of a doom-loop of complaints and worsening services,” it says in a leader. “More and more people may come to believe that the only way to get a result is to pull strings or cheat. Amid the inevitable anger and discontent, populism will thrive.”

The only answer, the newspaper says, is rapid deregulation and clearer systems. (The Economist (£))

🗣️This summer has proved some people “would rather watch things burn than inconvenience capitalism”, argues Richard Seymour in The New Statesman.

The wildfires that have ravaged parts of Europe this summer “are not natural disasters,” he argues. “At every step they are the predictable result of decisions usually made for profit.

“It is because these runaway wildfires are in no way natural that the ideological response of the right is constant denial and displacement,” writes Seymour. “The universal tendency is to blame arsonists, much as the right reacts to extreme heatwaves by deflecting the conversation onto air conditioning.

“In France, even the inept centrist prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, leaned into this idiocy, highlighting the number of arrests for deliberately starting fires. It would be remarkable if the number and distribution of arsonists just happened to closely track global warming, declining summer rainfall, and more frequent heatwaves.(The New Statesman (£))

🗣️ The Spectator mourns its columnist Rod Liddle, who died this week. “Whatever people’s politics, background or other interests,” reflects current editor Michael Gove (£), “to be a Spectator reader was to love Rod. Rod did his best, of course, to be unlovable. At least in print.”

For Boris Johnson - the editor who signed him to The Spectator after he left the BBC - “Rod came to occupy a crucial position in journalism, and indeed in our country as a whole.”

Kemi Badenoch worked at The Spectator in 2015, and speaks warmly of her first encounter with Liddle, who she didn’t want to like because of his many infidelities.

“Somewhere during the conversation, he looked me up and down and said: ‘I suppose you think I’m some racist old bigot, don’t you?’ I laughed, we drank, others joined in,” she writes. “Rod was outrageous, dark, rude and extremely funny.”

🗣️Nigel Farage won’t appear on The Rest Is Politics, says Alastair Campbell - co-host of the podcast, and diarist in The New World.

Campbell thinks that, once, Farage would have leapt at the opportunity, and that refusal is a sign that there’s a new version of Farage “who, for all the bravado, and the talk of one day being prime minister, is less confident, less up for the fight than he once was.”

What happened, and why? “I think it may have coincided with the point at which it was becoming a conventional wisdom that he was destined for Downing Street,” reckons Campbell. “Hubris is a terrible thing for a politician.” (The New World (£))

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