In your briefing today:

📣 Iran is eyeing military targets in Europe that it could attack if Donald Trump escalates the conflict in the Middle East, according to people close to the regime in Tehran.

Iranian military planners have looked at attacking US assets in south-eastern European countries including Bulgaria. There’s a suggestion that Cyprus - where a British military base was hit by a drone in March - was also among potential targets.

“The threats reflect the defiant mood in Tehran, where many within the regime increasingly see a resumption of the war as a matter of when, not if,” reports the FT. (The FT has the exclusive (£))

📣 Three people from the same family have died in the sea off Shoreham in West Sussex. A teenage girl and her two parents died after getting into difficulty in the water: a younger daughter is still in a critical condition.

Investigations into the tragedy are continuing in an attempt to understand the circumstances: the weather was said to be windy and the water choppy, and one bystander suggested a swimmer became caught in fishing nets. (BBC) (Sun) (Mail)

📣 A former Ukrainian defence minister has called for wartime elections in the country, in what is being seen as the biggest challenge to Volodymyr Zelensky’s presidency since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Ukraine has been under martial law since then, meaning elections are suspended.

"Democracy cannot be held hostage by Russia," said Fedorov, 35, in a video posted to YouTube. Fedorov was unexpectedly sacked from his role in July, only six months after he was appointed, sparking protests across the country. (BBC)

📣 The Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society is undertaking a strategic review after venue bosses said the society had become “bloated”. (Scotsman)

📣 An “urban hunter” from Northern Ireland who sets his dogs on foxes for sport is one of a group of far-right men who are travelling over from Northern Ireland to attempt to inflame race tensions in Scotland. (Daily Record has the exclusive)

📣 An away day at the seaside for civil servants cost the taxpayer £10,000, with the head of the civil service in Scotland taking seven senior colleagues to Fife for a workshop, refreshments, lunch and snacks. (Times)

📣 Prime Minister Andy Burnham has promised £100 million to end street homelessness in England by Christmas. Campaigners have welcomed the move, but warn more will be needed to tackle the longer-term problem. (Guardian)

📣 One person has died, and more than 200 have been left ill in a UK-wide salmonella outbreak that has been linked to people eating imported eggs. The UK Health Security Agency is leading an investigation into the outbreak, which has affected people aged from one to 90, and includes six cases in Scotland. (Guardian) (STV)

📣 Donald Trump has paused imposing the 50% tariff on Canadian goods which had threatened to spark a trade war between the neighbours. (WSJ)

📣 The United Nations is no longer “fit for purpose” and is at risk of going the way of the League of Nations, the head of the UN in Ukraine has warned. (Telegraph)

📣 Is Vinted losing its human touch? The online marketplace for second-hand goods is accused of banning thousands of users for no good reason. Given my own experience of the platform lasted only hours before I, too, was banned, for reasons I don’t understand… I’m inclined to believe the frustrated sellers the BBC meets… (BBC)

⚽️ Celtic embark on their European journey tonight with a crunch Champions League qualifier against LASK. They’ll want to try and erase memories of their unhappy exit this time last year to minnows Kairat Almaty. (BBC)

⚽️ Kosta Nedeljkovic is still not quite a Rangers player: his loan move from Aston Villa may happen today. (Sun)

⚽️ Another huge name has left England’s Premier League: Spanish World Cup winner Rhodri has completed a £65 million move from Manchester City to Barcelona. (BBC)

⚽️ The lack of top-class Scottish managers is a problem that needs to be urgently addressed by the SFA, its chief executive Ian Maxwell says. (Mail)

🗣️Kenny Farquharson is unimpressed by the Scottish Labour leadership contest. It’s now down to two men - Monica Lennon didn’t make the final cut, despite her “rare combination of political talents”.

But, reflects Farquharson, “it may well be that Lennon was too much of a left-winger to win the prize. Scottish Labour has lost many of the lefty members attracted to the party during the Jeremy Corbyn era. Its centre of gravity has shifted, and not to Lennon’s advantage.”

Who’s left? “Neither Michael Marra nor Joe Fagan has so far shown a surfeit of charisma. Neither of them is fielding interview calls from Vogue or GQ. Not even the People’s Friend is interested. They have yet to provide a compelling narrative about where they want to take the party and why.

“Lennon’s removal from this contest must not mean the absence of the big, structural questions she would have raised. At hustings, it is incumbent on Labour activists to shape the leader their party needs. Marra and Fagan need to be challenged and, if necessary, pushed into more radical positions than they currently seem prepared to countenance.” (Times)

🗣️ An anonymous refugee charity worker in Glasgow is unhappy with the BBC’s Disclosure documentary about violence in the city’s centre, broadcast on Monday night.

“It brought together drug dealing, homelessness, sexual violence, antisocial behaviour, asylum seekers, and far-right activity, but offered no analysis of structural inequality, poverty, housing, long-term austerity, racialised neglect, or the erosion of Glasgow’s social infrastructure,” they write.

“We were particularly disturbed by the prominence given to the emerging far-right group Scots Active. Why were they given a primetime BBC platform as a credible voice on crime and migration, rather than investigated as part of the rise of the far right?

“One of the most disturbing sequences came when their “spokesperson” talked about cultures not aligning and a ‘race war’.

“The programme then moved directly into narration about Glasgow taking large numbers of asylum seekers and the money spent on refugee homelessness. You cannot place far-right rhetoric about racial and cultural conflict directly alongside asylum seekers and refugee homelessness and present that framing as neutral.” (The National (£))

🗣️ Stephen Daisley takes aim at John Swinney for urging the Prime Minister to let Chinese corporate giant Ming Yang build a wind turbine project at Ardersier, near Inverness. “Swinney is seldom called upon to muse on matters of national security,” reflects Daisley, “and that is probably just as well”.

Swinney’s support for the project has drawn “withering” criticism from some. Daisley quotes Ian Williams, a “veteran China expert and author of the book Vampire State”, who says: “The risk is incredibly profound and to open the doors to this sort of technology, to effectively hand over a decarbonised grid to the control of the Chinese Communist Party is staggering and it is enormously naive to dismiss these national security issues.”

“Ming Yang is a private company, and there is no suggestion it has behaved improperly in the UK or elsewhere, but when it comes to national security the expectations are heightened,” writes Daisley.

“The Chinese government’s military-civil fusion strategy has dissolved many of the barriers between the state and private enterprise.” (Daily Mail (£))

🗣️ Jenny Lindsay sometimes wishes she’d been a more conservative teenager, she writes: a bit like Bella Ramsey was, perhaps. Ramsey is the Game of Thrones star - she’s been in it since she was aged 11 - who recently said the opposite of Lindsay: that she wished she’d taken more advantage of being a teenager.

“I can understand the loss she may feel at having never been sick in a park with a bunch of fellow dirtbags, or getting away with staying out all night in the company of a moody, raven-haired beauty, serenading you with dark love songs, like some people have,” writes Lindsay.

As for her own rebellious teenage years… she could have toned it down. “If I hadn’t become smitten with every guy who liked The Cranberries, or learned how to roll my own cigarettes at the age of 15; bunked off school to watch zombie films with a stoner boyfriend – at my worst I had 56 per cent attendance across a four-month period – then maybe I’d have managed to scrape more than four Bs across two years of Highers,” she reckons. (Scotsman)

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