In your briefing today:

📣 Activists in Iran say the death toll there has now topped at least 544, as the Islamic Republic continues a brutal crackdown targeting demonstrators. US President Donald Trump has threatened to strike the country over its attacks on protests: he says Iran has proposed negotiations. (AP)

📣 After the snow… the floods: there are flood warnings across Scotland as the weather warms, a little, and snow melts rapidly. (STV News)

📣 Awards frontrunner One Battle After Another took the big prizes overnight at the Golden Globes, while the Shakespeare drama Hamnet won best film and best drama. Adolescence swept the TV awards. (AP)

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📣 Scotland’s Social Justice Secretary, Shirley-Anne Somerville, says the Scottish Budget will contain “hard choices” and would focus on “priorities such as improving the NHS further”. The budget will be delivered by Finance Secretary Shona Robison tomorrow. (BBC)

📣 Scotland’s space industry has become a global leader in producing tiny satellites, and is on the verge of becoming an integrated industry able to make satellites through to launch and manage the data they produce. (FT £)

📣 Glaswegians are rallying against Reform, as Nigel Farage’s puts the city in its sights ahead of the Holyrood elections. (Guardian)

📣 There’s nothing quite like visiting a place to get the lie of the land… so, in the day job, we dispatched Daily Record chief reporter Mark McGivern to icy Greenland to speak to locals about Donald Trump’s threats to take the place over. They had some pretty blunt responses. (Daily Record)

📣 London’s homicide rate has dropped to its lowest level in more than a decade. Sadiq Khan says a “public health” approach to combat youth violence has succeeded: deaths among young people have fallen dramatically, despite far-right claims to the contrary. (Guardian)

📣 A US official has warned the UK against a “Russia-style” ban on the X social media platform, amid concerns about its AI being used to create deepfake images. (Independent)

⚽️ League leaders Hearts notched up a 1-0 win over Dundee in the toughest of circumstances - a man down for the entire second half, it took a stunning save from substitute keeper Craig Gordon to secure all three points.

It’s being called the save of Gordon’s career - I’ve seen him do similar, but at 43 years-old his dive low to the left to stop a header close in was quite something, and certainly save of the season so far. (BBC report & highlights)

⚽️ No such dramas for Rangers at Pittodrie: an outcome which, in itself, is a story: Danny Rohl’s side navigated blustery conditions to get their three points without many concerns, and remain three points behind Hearts. (BBC report & highlights)

⚽️ In England, it was a weekend of utter FA Cup madness. Crystal Palace put the cherry on top: the holders managing to secure an unwanted record in losing to Macclesfield - the biggest upset in FA Cup history.

But before then, Wrexham had beaten Nottingham Forest on Friday night, in what will make an entertaining episode of their Amazon Prime documentary.

Less surprisingly, Manchester United were dumped out by Brighton, and Manchester City put 10 past Exeter City. (See highlights)

🗣️ In some ways, the US civil war has already started, wrote Camilla Long. To read anything about Renee Nicole Good’s shooting in Minneapolis is “is to be dragged, with full force, back into the depths of America’s culture war,” she writes.

“It is to be flooded with videos of these agents - a newly expanded praetorian force that’s now been told it can arrest anyone it suspects of being an illegal immigrant - screaming at people, pushing them to the floor, arresting them, bloodying them, marching them around, dragging pregnant women along the street, just because they think, sometimes on sight, they shouldn’t be in America.

“But — how do I put this? — it is also to be brought, once again, face to face with the country’s screeching victimhood and paranoia.” (Sunday Times £)

🗣️The chief of publicly-funded ferry operator Cal Mac left his role with a package of £175,000 as part of a severance package kept confidential for nearly two years, wrote Martin Williams. The Scottish Government’s guidelines on severance say payments in public bodies should be capped at £95,000.

Opposition MSP Edward Mountain said the confidentiality around the payment, “and the fact that neither the government nor Transport Scotland will answer questions on it, suggests they have something to hide."The Herald on Sunday)

🗣️There’s a “staggering disparity” in staffing levels between Scotland’s benefits agency and its UK Government counterpart, wrote Catriona Stewart.

“In some cases, staff numbers in Scotland are 5200 per cent higher than equivalent offices at the Department for Work and Pensions, with claims the difference shows a ‘disregard’ for taxpayers money at a time the Scottish Government has pledged to cut its civil service headcount.”

That’s not a straight headcount disparity, of course: there’s some adjustment for population, because the DWP in England serves a far bigger population. And Social Security Scotland defends its staffing on the grounds of the quality of service it offers.

But opposition politicians say it’s “another example” of the SNP’s “total lack of desire to rein in the ballooning costs of their government”. (Scotland on Sunday £)

🗣️Not unrelatedly, Polly Mackenzie was musing on “How to afford the state we want” on her Substack. “State capacity is the issue of our age,” she notes the Economist as saying, amid a broader realisation that the state is not delivering all we want it to.

But she notes that much of the argument about the state is around its effectiveness, when the bigger constraint is, in fact, what we can afford.

“Everyone knows it, but no-one running for office wants to say it: we want more from the state than we are willing to pay for in tax,” she writes. “Voters rationalise this (if forced to) with the belief that the state could be more efficient, and/or that someone other than them should be taxed.

“Both are inconveniently slightly-true: neither nonsense that can be dismissed, nor answers big enough to meet the challenge.”

There are, she says, better ways to run things - through better public service design that transfers some work away from the formal state - to offer some services. Some of her ideas may sound distantly similar to Steve Hilton’s “Big Society” of more than a decade ago - but don’t let that put you off. (How to Run a Country)

🗣️Ruth Michaelson offered a useful catch-up on what’s been happening in Iran. “What began as protests about the slow-motion collapse of Iran’s economy soon morphed into demands for the end of the Islamic Republic, she wrote.

“By the end of the week, crowds of thousands took to the streets in the capital, Tehran, and cities across the country, buoyed by a call to protest from the country’s exiled crown prince, Reza Pahlavi.”

Threats from Donald Trump to intervene have had an impact, one expert tells Michaelson. Iran’s leaders “believe this is an existential threat to them, but so are unrestrained protests.

“That’s the dilemma: if they bring down the iron fist, that might invite an American attack, but if they don’t, the protest movement might become too threatening to the regime.” (The Observer)

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