In your briefing today:

📣 It’s not yet clear who was ultimately behind the attempt to crash a flydubai aircraft flying to Tel Aviv, but it’s clear the actions of an Indian pilot, stabbed during the incident, averted a disaster. Some are saying he prevented “Israel’s 9/11”.

Captain Smit Machchhar, from Mumbai, was hailed a hero by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who wrote on X that Machchhar had “showed immense courage and an unwavering resolve to protect the lives of others.”

Passengers told of horrific scenes aboard the aircraft as two pilots fought on the flight deck, with one stabbing the other, and passengers intervening to subdue the aggressor. (Times) (AP)

📣 Plans to cut the number of health boards in Scotland should be scrapped, according to the head of the doctors’ union, the British Medical Association.

The BMA says it favours some sort of reform. But, under new chair Dr Nóra Murray-Cavanagh, the BMA has voted to oppose the proposals to reduce the number of Scottish health boards to only two, on which it had not been consulted.

“It’s staggering to think that a proposal to balance 14 sets of accounts is to take all those 14 sets of accounts that don’t balance individually and then to say that with a magic wand, we can turn that number into two and make it work,” said Murray-Cavenagh. (Times).

📣 US death row inmate Christa Pike has been taken to hospital after surviving two lethal injections during her execution. Her legal team filed an emergency motion to halt the convicted murderer's execution as it was happening, saying: "Ms Pike has lost consciousness and still has a heartbeat and is audibly snoring." (BBC)

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📣 Scottish Labour MSP Monica Lennon is accused of bullying by multiple former members of staff who have spoken to a team of reporters at The Scotsman. Lennon describes the allegations as “completely untrue and defamatory”. (Scotsman)

📣 A £500 million plan to boost offshore wind is at risk of failure, Audit Scotland has warned. It says ministers may fail in their plan to boost the supply chain for the industry, and say there’s “no clear plan” for the project beyond 2028/29. (Scotsman)

📣 Developers want to build a vast new data centre on the site of the former Chapelcross nuclear plant in the south of Scotland. The £16.5 billion development would create 500 jobs, but would consume more energy than any data centre in the world. (BBC)

📣 Staff at Glasgow Caledonian University are on strike today, over proposed job cuts. (BBC)

📣 The Mail travels to Lamb Holm, the deserted island once used to house prisoners of war during the Second World War, and which still houses the beautiful white-washed chapel they built. (Mail)

📣 Dame Esther Rantzen, host of hit BBC show That’s Life! for 21 years and founder of the charity Childline, has died with lung cancer aged 86. She has been remembered for her remarkable life, hailed by the Prime Minister as someone who had “changed countless lives”. (BBC)

📣 MI5 has issued a warning about Chinese spying to UK universities, warning that a Chinese research organisation maintains “very strong ties” to China’s intelligence service. (Independent)

📣 Hundreds of prisoners in England and Wales are being released today under a scheme intended to free up prison space. (BBC)

⚽️ Senior football figures want Manchester City punished this season for their vast, multi-year breach of Premier League rules. City, found guilty of all charges relating to breaches of financial regulations between 2009-10 and 2017-18, continue to deny their guilt. (BBC)

⚽️ Some very welcome upbeat Scotland news: our under-21s swept Azerbaijan’s aside 5-2 at Rugby Park in Tony Docherty’s first game in charge. (BBC)

⚽️ Scotland head coach Sebastien Pocognoli has urged his senior players - and, by extension, fans - to remain calm amid his losing start to his reign, and Scotland’s worst goalscoring run in 55 years. (Scotsman)

🗣️ There’s an angry salvo from Calum Steele, the former head of the Scottish Police Federation, as he writes about Scotland’s drug deaths. The problem is, he says, nobody cares about junkies - “they don’t vote, are economically inactive, commit a disproportionate amount of crime, and make terrible social media content.”

He is adamantly against the state-funded safer drug consumption facility in Glasgow, and wants to see a bigger role for policing and the justice system in stamping out illegal drug use. “The state-sponsored stupefaction of some of its most chaotic and dysfunctional members is horrific,” he writes.

“Lest you think I’m being gratuitous here,” he writes, “no less than the First Minister himself was telling us all that he wanted to decriminalise possession of illegal drugs for personal use – a sure-fire way of ensuring the professional executives of Giffnock and Bearsden can score their weekend lines of cocaine without having to worry about their professional registration in the unlikely event they were ever pulled over by the polis. Got to look after those voters after all!” (Herald)

🗣️ Scotland should look to the English academy system if it wants to raise standards in schools, according to Magnus Linklater.

Ten years ago, he says, then education secretary John Swinney and First Minister Nicola Sturgeon proposed sweeping changes to school management since the abolition of the 11-plus, allowing head teachers - free from local authority decision-making - to make choices on critical issues such as staffing, curriculum and closing the attainment gap.

Eighteen months on, the plan was effectively shelved, writes Linkater. “This must surely count as a low point in the record of this SNP government.”

He urges Mhari McAllan, the current education secretary, to take a trip to London and visit the Michaela Academy, “a state school where strict and traditional teaching is employed.

“Described variously as ‘brilliant’ or ‘brutal’, its results are widely acknowledged to be outstanding. It instils something too often lacking in the Scottish educational system — ambition, the ambition to succeed, to achieve the best possible results, to do better. (Times)

🗣️Katy Gordon, writing about the Scottish Government’s plans for local government reform, cites Mark Twain, who once said: “There’s no such thing as a new idea”.

“If you look at what the Scottish Government is suggesting in its local authority overhaul, you’d have to take his point,” she writes. “Because anyone over the age of around 40 will remember that we had regional councils, with smaller district councils.”

The trouble, writes Gordon, with Deputy First Minister Jenny Gilruth’s back-to-the-future plan is that, as a starting point for discussion, nobody has much to go on.

“Even if the Scottish Government has more concrete ideas, it doesn’t seem to want to let the rest of us in on them.” (The Courier)

🗣️Joe Goldblatt contrasts two experiences of hospitality - one in the US, one in Scotland - and finds we have a little to learn from our American cousins. Turning up for dinner at the sort of Edinburgh restaurant that charges £21 for a main course, he was asked to fetch his own tap water from across the restaurant, rather than have it brought to him.

He compares that with an experience checking in at a New York Hotel - where an enthusiastic receptionist turned what might otherwise have been a tricky interaction into one that left him “genuinely surprised and delighted”, and points to the lesson learned.

“A wise business leader told me many years ago that it only takes a little extra service to retain a customer in the future, and it only takes a small mistake to lose a customer forever.” (Scotsman)

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