In your briefing today:

📣 The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are planning to return to the UK later this month, with their children - Prince Archie, 7, and Princess Lilibet, 5 - enrolled to start at a British school in September.

Harry and Meghan are expected to move to a private, non-Royal residence and will not resume any royal duties. But The Telegraph reports that the King, informed of their decision on Sunday, is said to be pleased he’ll see more of his family. (Telegraph has the exclusive)

📣 The two Scottish Labour leadership candidates clashed last night in a televised debate on STV, with Joe Fagan insisting he wasn’t the “continuity candidate” after Anas Sarwar, and Michael Marra insisting he wasn’t to blame for the party’s unsuccessful Holyrood election manifesto. (STV)

📣 Russia has unleashed missile strikes on Kiev and the surrounding region overnight, killing at least eight people and damaging apartment blocks, a children’s hospital and a school. At least 33 people were injured. (BBC)

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📣 Edinburgh City Centre saw flooded streets yesterday amid heavy rain: impressive footage on social media showed water gushing down stairways and tourists getting a soaking. (An impressive waterfall on Victoria Street) (Edinburgh Live)

📣 A case of BSE - also known as Mad Cow Disease - has been confirmed in a cow on a farm in Dumfries and Galloway. (Sky)

📣 Scottish police should use live facial recognition to tackle football violence, the HM Chief Inspector of Constabulary says. (Holyrood)

📣 Private jet users should face “punishingly high” tax when they fly in and out of Scotland, Oxfam says. Their call has been backed by Stephen Prince, the American vice-chairman of the Patriotic Millionaires group, who says travelling by private jet is “addictive”. (Daily Record)

📣 Police have named the family who died after getting into trouble off Shoreham: Hassan El-Khawas, 55, his partner, Zeina Alayn, 37 and their 14-year-old daughter, Sara El-Khawas, were Palestinian refugees who had travelled from London to visit the town. (Independent)

📣 There’s a “civil war” within Reform after a senior member, Tim Montgomerie, was suspended from the party for calling Zia Yusuf “a child” on a podcast. Nigel Farage - on holiday after the Clacton by-election - is being told he’ll have to choose between factions. Mr Yusaf is not winning friends for his abrasive style. (Mail)

📣 Oxfam is reviewing the future of its famous charity shops and the warehouses which support them. (Guardian)

📣 US national debt has topped $40 trillion, with an “alarmed” bond market forcing the US Treasury to announce it will speed up the number of government bonds it will buy back. (AP)

⚽️ Celtic took a huge step towards Champions League qualification with an impressive 3-0 win over LASK of Austria, with two brilliant Camilo Duran strikes and a Benjamin Nygren screamer all worth the watch. It could have been very different on the night, with LASK having two goals of their own chalked off; as things stand, Martin O’Neill’s men will be confident of progress. (Report & 🎥 highlights)

⚽️ Rangers have finally secured Aston Villa right-back Kosta Nedeljkovic, their eleventh signing of the summer, on a loan with an option to buy for £4 million. (Sun)

⚽️ Wouter Vrancken says Hearts must “go all in” in their final chance to secure European league phase football, as they face Rapid Vienna in their Conference League play-off. (BBC)

⚽️ Motherwell have a big night ahead too, with their own Conference League play-off against Freiburg at Fir Park. Defender Jack Girdwood-Reich says he’s ready for the pressure of a big game. (BBC)

⚽️ Hibs are away to Gent in their Conference League play-off - and Gent manager Rik De Mil says his side need to get the job done tonight, because he doesn’t want to have to rely on a result at a bouncing Easter Road next week. (Edinburgh News)

🗣️ The US national debt has just topped $40 trillion: a number so vast, the usual metaphors become even more useless than usual.

After all, does it really help to you think that 40 trillion dollar bills, stacked, would equal 11 times the distance to the moon? Or that, laid end to end, the notes would run past the orbit of Pluto?

Or how about trying to set out the enormity of paying it back? If you were doing that in instalments of $100,000 a year - roughly twice the US average salary - it would take 400 million years. That long ago, we were in the evolutionary period when the first land-based life was starting to emerge.

Still not helping, is it?

It does become a little more manageable if you consider it in the context of the vast US economy, still - by some distance (from China) the world’s largest. The debt is worth around $300,000 per household, which is roughly three-quarters of the price of a median American home.

Or, most manageably of all, it’s around a quarter of the total net worth of all American households.

Over at CNN, there’s a fun - or head-in-hands-despair-inducing, depending on your view - scrolling feature where you can try to find perspective on the debt against an ever-escalating basket of goods: the inevitable Big Mac, a year’s University tuition, the median price of that new home.

The other graphics on that page are helpful too: one illustrates how big the (annual) deficit is - more than the country brings in from payroll and social insurance taxes - and the increasing burden of interest payments, which is now the third-biggest spending line - more than health, more than defence, and only a little less than Medicare.

The words there explain why it all matters: the debt is ballooning - it stood at half the figure only 20 years ago - and its growth is accelerating. “We’re really putting our economy and our country’s future in jeopardy,” says Michael Peterson, a fiscal watchdog.

The Washington Post decries the spending that led the country to this point. “Politicians are addicted to making promises that require sources of money they don’t have,” it laments in a leader. “Their failure to control spending remains one of the biggest threats to the country.” It’s a refrain that could be repeated in the UK, or across much of the west.

The Post has also attempted to explain the debt and how the nation got to this point, which, as you scroll, makes clear the recent - and marked - unbalancing of the US budget.

What might be the consequences? Respected investor Ray Dalio, speaking on a New York Times podcast, caused a fuss in the spring when he likened the American debt situation to the building-up of arterial plaque, bringing with it the potential for a national “heart attack”.

His thesis stretched beyond national debt to take in social and geopolitical issues, and its those issues - not the debt itself - which will cause the US its problems.

He forsees - and arriving soon, after the Republicans lose the mid-term elections later this year, “an intensification of political and social conflict that’ll take place in that period, particularly between that election and the presidential election in 2028.

“I worry that those can be irreconcilable differences. I don’t know how they will go down. I don’t know how the respect for rules and law and order and whatever will keep law and order,” he said.

A country in chaos, or even simply with a political system in paralysis, isn’t likely to be seen as a good prospect to lend to - or be as capable of paying for its debt.

Why does all this matter to us? The old saying used to be that if America sneezes, the world catches a cold. We haven’t got a saying, yet, for what happens if America has a heart attack.

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