In your briefing today:

📣 The Met Office is warning that the El Niño event developing over the Pacific Ocean is likely to be the strongest since the 19th century, with profound implications for global weather through the rest of this year, and into next.

El Niño is a natural climate phenomenon that happens every two to seven years, lasts around a year, and pushes up temperatures while increasing the risk of extreme weather.

The strength of the developing event, combined with climate change, has led forecasters to warn it is “very likely” next year will be the hottest on record.

El Niño is also likely to lead to a wetter, stormier autumn this year in the UK. (BBC)

📣 Prince William is adamant there can be “no way back” from his brother Harry to re-join the Royal Family, as the Duke and Duchess of Sussex make plans to return to the UK. (Mirror)

📣 Big job cuts are on the way at BBC Scotland. “People were ashen-faced”, reports the Times, after meetings at its Pacific Quay HQ where they were told of a raft of cuts and redundancies - thought to amount to around 60 roles - across its operations.

Across the UK, the national broadcaster is seeking to make £500 million in savings over the next three years, as it struggles with reduced licence fee payments and inflation.(Times)

📣 Police Scotland faces a legal challenge over its refusal to open an investigation into the SNP’s finances. (Times)

📣 Scottish Reform leader Malcolm Offord says he was diagnosed with prostate cancer on the day of the Scottish elections this year, and has undergone surgery. (Mail)

📣 Former world snooker champion Graeme Dott has said allegations that he abused two children are “disgusting”. He’s currently on trial accused of lewd, indecent and libidinous practices and behaviour, which he denies. (Sky)

📣 Scottish civil servants have insisted they’re not “skivers” amid a row over the Scottish Government’s under-used collection of buildings. (Herald)

📣 Attempts by the US Treasury to cool the bond market are not going well, with interest rates rebounding yesterday despite the announcement of a $4 billion bond buyback programme. (AP)

📣 Israeli settlers have returned to Kadim in the West Bank, two decades after it was evacuated as part of a “Disengagement Plan” that saw settlers removed from Gaza and other West Bank settlements. (BBC)

📣 The USS George Washington has arrived in the Middle East to relieve the USS Abraham Lincoln from a record-breaking deployment, which is now being dogged by claims of poor living conditions and low morale. (Guardian)

📣 A former car salesman has been named a Belgian prince, after the brother of the nation’s king formally recognised his secret child. (Independent)

⚽️ Rangers secured a 1-0 win over Jablonec but not without a struggle: Ryan Naderi’s strike rescued them after a muted performance that was marred by Cammy Devlin’s red card only minutes after he’d come on as a substitute. (BBC)

⚽️ It was a dramatic night at Tynecastle, where Hearts and Rapid Vienna battled out a 2-2 draw that leaves qualification wide open. Teenager James Wilson scored a screamer to put the Jambos ahead - a late equaliser denied them the win. (BBC)

⚽️ Hibs will also fancy their chances after holding Gent to a 0-0 draw in Belgium. They even missed a penalty, although the hosts created the best of the chances. (BBC)

⚽️ It was a tough evening for Motherwell, however, who took an early lead against Freiburg before last season’s Europa League runners-up showed their class, and came away from Fir Park with a 3-1 win. (BBC)

🗣️ Mathias Döpfner says there’s still time to “save the West”, but acknowledges the absurdity of the demand in his first paragraph. “Why is this even up for debate?” he writes. “That we must explain and justify ‘the West’ at all indicates just how weak it has become. It would be better if it did not need strengthening at all, but the truth is that the West has become an invalid.”

He goes on to explain and justify the West in a long essay, starting with a geographical description that I suspect will rile some Early Line readers: “The idea of the West rests on four pillars: Athens - where democracy was born. Rome - the cradle of the rule of law. Jerusalem - where Judeo-Christian values placed the inviolable dignity of the individual at the centre. And finally, the Enlightenment - whose great thinkers in London, Paris and Königsberg anchored humanism, individual civil liberties, the separation of powers and the division of church and state.”

No, Edinburgh doesn’t get a shout.

Döpfner goes on to argue that China, Russia and Islamism have a shared strategy of dividing the West, with Taiwan a coming test. Internally to the West, he says, a “reckless, runaway migration policy” has fuelled surging anti-Semitism, and “the woke movement” has become the “Trojan horse” of self-abolition, investing Western values.

His only hope is that crisis provides the stimulus for renewal, before the tyrants win. “That would be the best-case scenario,” he writes, “that just in time we finally grasp what is at stake and realise that the alternatives are far worse.” (Spectator (£))

🗣️ Could AIs become conscious? That’s the intriguing question The Economist poses on its cover. And it is clear that whether they achieve anything like it or not, to treat them as if they do would be an enormous mistake.

The newspaper notes Pope Leo’s drawing of a line between humanity and bots in his encyclical in May. But, it says, “Pontifical clarity is blurring with alarming speed,” as young people form friendships with chatbots.

“As sophisticated AIs rapidly become a bigger part of human lives, their makers will engineer them to display a simulacrum of consciousness - perhaps even to gain consciousness itself. The intuition that they are just machines will become harder to sustain. A dangerous trap is being set for the human species.” (Economist (£))

🗣️ Matthew d’Ancona has been reading US Vice-President JD Vance’s book Communion, about his return to Christianity, and admits: “I thoroughly enjoyed it”.

But he also concludes: “There’s no way this guy can win the presidency”.

The problem, says d’Ancona, is that Vance is “compulsively self-reflective. Donald Trump, in contrast, has rarely, if ever, paid a visit to the dark interior of his own tangerine-thatched head.

“All of which is to say that I think Vance totally lacks the instinctive showmanship and demotic touch required to unite the Republican Party, let alone to become the 48th president.”

Except… “Vance has a crack unit working covertly on his behalf,” says d’Anonca: the Democrats, who “have decided instead to dump the boring old ‘administration-in-waiting’ stuff for the behaviour of a campus sit-in and Maoist ‘struggle session’.” (The New World (£))

🗣️ Kate Mossman spends time with Heston Blumenthal at his home in France to produce a noteworthy, touching and at times troubling profile of the superstar chef.

He’s recovering, she writes, from a mental breakdown in 2023 that led to a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. Medicated and in recovery now, “he makes no attempt to hide how unwell he has been – though in print, the long gaps and cautious speech are somewhat disguised,” she writes.

“The Blumenthal empire at present is in a somewhat diminished state,” she writes. “The Dubai branch of his restaurant, Dinner, is temporarily closed because of the US-Iran war. His 12-year deal with Waitrose – which in 2010 gave us the viral Hidden Orange Christmas pudding – ended in early 2023, and his contract with the Mandarin Hotel at Hyde Park, home to the UK branch of Dinner, will finish in January 2027. I ask him why he does not have a restaurant in France, and he says, ‘I have no desire to open a restaurant anywhere!’”

But, really, this is a tale of a man who appears quite vulnerable now, and his recovery, and the genius that led him through an extraordinary period of creativity. (New Statesman (£))

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