In your briefing today:

📣 British sanctions against illegal Israeli settlements have prompted a furious response from Israel, after the UK government accused Israel of turning a blind eye to the “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians by settlers.

Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband said the move represented a "new approach" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which "not only calls out injustice and suffering but acts". The UK shift comes in conjunction with 11 other nations, including France and Canada, announcing sanctions.

In a joint statement, Andy Burnham, Emmanuel Macron and Mark Carney said: “The time has come to take further action to uphold our commitment to protect the two-state solution, our interests and to stand up for our values, before it is too late.”

But Israel's Foreign Minister Gideon Saar accused Miliband of spreading an "outrageous lie" and announced countermeasures, including shutting the UK's consulate in East Jerusalem. (BBC) (Guardian)

📣 Flights are delayed and cancelled this morning across the UK, including at Scottish airports, after an air traffic control “technical failure” yesterday caused widespread disruption. At send time, departure boards were showing a number of early-morning cancellations. (Mail) (Guardian)

📣 A faulty valve on a CalMac ferry led to “a sudden and uncontrolled” release of highly flammable methane gas last summer. Enough gas to fill a four-bedroom house - 700kg - was vented from the MV Glen Sannox over 12 minutes, with some being sucked back in through a ventilation intake, setting off alarms.

Details of the incident have only been made public through a freedom of information request by the BBC. (BBC)

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📣 Two former SNP health secretaries - Michael Matheson and Alex Neil - have warned the proposed reforms to the Scottish NHS are “fool’s gold” that would end in a “shambles”. (Times)

📣 Three people have been arrested after several vehicles crashed on the A8 near Edinburgh Airport, leaving one woman dead. (STV)

📣 Calls for an AI data centre moratorium “send very much the wrong message” and could deter investment in Scotland, MSPs have been warned by Scottish Financial Enterprise CEO Sandy Begbie. (Scotsman)

📣 A researcher for AI giant Anthropic has quit the AI industry over fears the company - and its competitors - are racing to build systems they won’t be able to control, and which could go on to pose an existential threat to humanity. (WSJ has the exclusive)

📣 Food inflation in the UK is set to continue through the year, reaching almost 4% by Christmas, and peaking at 6.4% next summer, food retailers have warned. (Yahoo)

📣 Iran is taking an “increasingly aggressive” approach to its conflict with the US, as it faces a greater economic risk and a growing challenge to its stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz. (New York Times)

📣 Tickets for next year’s Glastonbury Festival will go on sale next month, after a fallow year this year. They’ll cost £408 each for the festival, which will run between 23 and 27 June. Acts have yet to be announced. (BBC)

⛳️ LIV Golf has filed for US bankruptcy protection - but has also revealed plans for 2027, with its roster of players facing an uncertain future. They are not obliged to sign up for the competition’s new incarnation. (Sky Sports)

⚽️ Scotland star John McGinn scored for Aston Villa as they won a thrilling Champions League opener 3-2 away to Club Brugge. (Report) (🎥 Highlights)

⚽️ There are some more mouth-watering Champions League fixtures tonight - the Early Line picks are:

⚽️ Rangers are left examining their striking options after the news that Lawrence Shankland will be out for months as he recovers from a hamstring injury. (Scotsman)

⚽️ Celtic face St Johnstone tonight: boss Martin O’Neill says it’s a chance for hit-and-miss winger Sebastian Tounekti to win over his doubters. (Daily Record)

⚽️ Can David Gray turn it around at Hibs? Graeme McGarry says there’s a small chance… but that the head coach may be too far gone to make it back. (Herald)

🗣️ Education expert Professor Lindsay Paterson cuts straight to the chase in his advice following the latest set of PISA results: “Copy England”, he says in the Scotsman today. Here, that’s always a controversial thing to say. But you can see where his argument is coming from.

PISA - for the uninitiated - is the Programme for International Student Assessment: a programme from the OECD, a club of mostly rich nations, asking what a sample of students in multiple countries know in mathematics, reading, and science, and what they can do with that knowledge.

Thus, it provides an international measure of a country’s education. And it does so within a framework in which it’s hard, even impossible, for a country to manipulate the numbers: nations aren’t marking their own homework, for once.

For Scotland, our performance across the three domains hasn’t shifted significantly between 2022 and 2025, with a slight decline in mathematics and science. Compared to previous performance, that’s a bit of an improvement - we’d been on a deeper slide for a number of previous cycles. But things haven’t got better either.

Moreover, some other nations have improved - especially England, which Scotland now lags. Some headlines today point out that Scotland is the equivalent of a year’s teaching behind its neighbour in some areas.

That’s not a path Paterson goes down, but he does flag other issues. Scotland, he says, “has a problem with discouraging high attainers and depressing the aspirations of middle-class children.

“The top 10 per cent of attainers in each of the three domains have stagnated. The attainment of children of well-off, well-educated parents has actually fallen in all three domains.

“That gloomy fact has allowed the Scottish government to boast that social inequality in Scotland is low by international standards. But it’s easy to reduce inequality by bashing the rich. That doesn’t help anyone.”

James McEnaney in the Herald offers one of the more upbeat assessments of the figures, claiming the test’s margin for error means “it’s not really accurate to say that pupil performance has gone up or down this year” and “we can’t really draw many meaningful conclusions by comparing the latest scores to the previous figures for Scotland”: a non-conclusion which may surprise some.

McEnaney points to the international comparison, where he finds Scotland’s PISA performance “appears to be in line with, or even exceeding, that of comparable nations”, even if “comparing Scotland directly to England paints a far less favourable picture.”

But those international numbers aren’t great, either. For The Economist (£), the suggestion is that teenagers “are getting dimmer” pretty much everywhere and becoming ever more vulnerable to disruption by technology.

And, more locally, In the Spectator (£), John O’Neill has no qualms about saying “Scotland has gone from ahead of England to behind”.

“In recent years, England and Scotland made different bets on education, and now we’re seeing the results,” he writes.

“Those consequences have been seen in the fall in high-achieving pupils.”

As Paterson puts it: Scotland has emphasised “promoting skills and enjoyment,” adding: “Enjoyment is desirable in learning, but is not enough.”

Former Scotsman editor Iain Martin may not be an educationalist, but he is a former education correspondent, and he’s furious. Writing in his Reaction newsletter, he says he’s “barely able to contain [his] anger”. He says they’re “fantastic news” for England, but “deeply troubling” for Scotland and Wales.

“The slide and inability to match their neighbours in England should prompt painful reflection from policymakers and apologies to those pupils who were let down by decades of failure to reform and improve schooling,” he writes.

“It won’t though, because anyone who has tracked the issue closely, particularly in Scotland, will know that advocates of the unreformed status quo specialise in displaying a stubborn resistance to evidence or reality.

“It is a tragedy that was avoidable and it has very little to do with money. Public spending is higher in Scotland. It is instead about bad ideas and a lack of openness to fresh thinking.”

His analysis opens up into a wider debate about Scotland’s “ruling class” and its belief in “the myth of Scottish superiority”.

That, like Paterson’s analysis, may prove a difficult read for many.

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