In your briefing today:

📣 Has Donald Trump “blinked first”, as the Daily Mail puts it this morning? He has certainly made strenuous efforts over the last 24 hours to talk up the state of negotiations between the US and Iran, despite multiple sources saying those discussions are indirect, so far, and at a very early stage.

There is speculation that pressure from allies, who have warned Trump his threatened strikes on Iranian power plants risked disaster, as well as soaring oil prices, encouraged the US President’s change of heart.

📣 UK security agencies are investigating potential links between Iran and an arson attack on four ambulances belonging to a Jewish charity in north London. (Guardian)

📣 A former teacher accused of abuse by scores of former pupils at Edinburgh Academy and Fettes College through the 1960s and 70s has been found guilty of indecently assaulting a former pupil in South Africa. (BBC)

📣 The Scottish Government has been accused of “burying” a recommendation to criminalise football pitch invaders, made after the ugly scenes which followed the 2016 Scottish Cup Final between Hibs and Rangers. (Daily Record has the exclusive)

📣 An Iranian man and a woman charged after allegedly trying to enter Faslane nuclear base have been released from court, and will not face further proceedings. (STV)

📣 Keir Starmer is so weak he could give in to demands for a second independence vote if the SNP win a majority in May, Scottish Tory leader Russell Findlay has claimed. (Mail)

📣 The UK Government has pledged £9 million to help hundreds of workers who lost their jobs when the Mosmorran chemical works closed last month. (STV)

📣 Glasgow Central Station will fully reopen from tomorrow, two weeks after the devastating Union Corner fire. (BBC)

📣 Air traffic controllers desperately tried to stop a fire engine from entering a runway moments before it collided with an aircraft, recordings of the incident have revealed. (Sky News)

📣 There’s an army of “sickfluencers” online who are coaching people on how to “lay it on thick” to claim disability payments, research has found. (Mail)

📣 A vast explosion at an oil refinery in Texas sparked a huge fire and widespread alarm - but was likely caused by a faulty industrial heater. (Mail)

📣 Disgraced newsreader Huw Edwards has hit out at Channel 5 over its drama about his downfall, claiming it was inaccurate. (Independent)

⚽️ Former Celtic striker Chris Sutton - not a man used to holding back - says Martin O’Neill knows Celtic are crap, and has accused Kelechi Iheanacho of being “lazy”. (Daily Record)

⚽️ Scotland and Bologna star Lewis Ferguson has talked of his disappointment at missing the Euros because of a serious knee injury - and how that will make the World Cup all the sweeter. (Herald)

🗣️ It’s a mark of where we are that when Donald Trump made claims of talks with Iran yesterday, in an unusually sugary set of comments spread through the day, the reaction of many onlookers was to - metaphorically - ask for the receipts. His remarks didn’t quite pass the smell test.

Scepticism only mounted when the Iranian Speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, initially dismissed Trump’s claims as “fake news” designed to get global oil and gas prices down.

The timing of Trump’s first remarks reinforced that view: an initial post on his Truth Social account appeared just before US markets opened. Sceptics were quick to suggest he was trying to head off another desperate day on the markets (there was, indeed, a subsequent “relief rally” on Wall Street).

Trump later spoke before boarding Air Force One at an airport in Florida, and went “on the rounds” of US business TV channels, to repeat his claims of “great conversations” with Iran.

So what is actually going on? Reporters around the world are trying to figure it out.

The signs are that there has been some form of communication: attempts to find a way to stop the conflict. The New York Times reports that President Trump “seized” on those initial contacts as a way to back off from his threats to strike power plants in Iran. That set off a flurry of diplomacy “by a number of nations seeking to nurture the talks”, reports the title.

Where did all this start? The Wall Street Journal reports that foreign ministers from Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan had met early last Thursday morning to discuss “finding a diplomatic off-ramp to the war in Iran”. The trouble is, they’ve struggled to find an Iranian counterpart to negotiate with. “Earlier that week, Israel killed Iran’s national security chief, Ali Larijani, who had been considered a viable partner who could engage with the West,” the title reports.

But Egyptian intelligence services had managed to open a channel with Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guards, and put together a plan for a five-day halt to hostilities, preparing the way for a more formal cease-fire.

The Journal says there was then “a series of closed-door discussions - through Middle Eastern intermediaries” that gave US officials hope a deal could be done.

That’s what laid the ground for Trump’s announcement from his Mar-a-Lago club early yesterday morning.

The Guardian’s Patrick Wintour picks up the story with a little more detail at this point: it points out that Egypt’s Foreign Ministry had tweeted that conversations between Donald Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, and the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, were underway on Sunday.

But the title points out that there’s been some confusion around the discussions - “thought to be well short of negotiations” - with more than one mediator wanting to claim the credit. Pakistan may also have played a role, and could become the venue for further talks, Wintour suggests.

All of this, then, offers clear evidence of diplomatic efforts to end the war, and that has certainly helped markets. But things will quickly deteriorate if the conflict takes another turn for the worse: what is Trump’s goal here?

The Economist thinks Trump really wants to climb down, now: he prefers short, dramatic conflict, not protracted wars. The trouble is, the junior partner in the war - Israel - wants regime change in Iran. It has been frustrated that, despite assassinating much of Iran’s senior leadership, there are no signs of the regime collapsing, and Iran remains able to launch daily barrages of missiles at its neighbours.

Trump wouldn’t mind regime change… but may be more concerned with keeping the oil flowing. If his view prevails, warns the newspaper, Iran may emerge battered but defiant, still able to inflict damage on the region and wider world.

In short: there have been talks, but heavily mediated and at a very early stage. Trump, motivated by warnings of the war becoming a disaster, its costs, and by the convulsions of stock and energy markets, seized upon them as a way to bring hostilities to a swift end. And we now find ourselves staring at another deadline - Friday - for them to produce something more substantive. The world watches, and waits.

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