In your briefing today:

📣 Israel has rejected Donald Trump’s peace Gaza peace plan, saying Israeli troops will not withdraw from the enclave until Hamas is fully disarmed.

The US President had previously said Israeli forces would withdraw while the disarmament of Hamas was underway.

Benjamin Netanyahu told an Israeli cabinet meeting that negotiations on the future of Gaza are continuing with the US. (AP) (Independent) (BBC)

📣 Repairs to the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital will cost taxpayers £170 million, after a series of scandals hit the £1 billion development.

Managers at the hospital conceded, earlier this year, that contaminated water in the building was likely linked to serious infections in young cancer patients, and there have also been concerns about the building’s ventilation system, leaks and mould. (Mail)

📣 A Green MSP’s claim that “rape is a spectrum” has sparked outrage and demands for the party to act. Q Manivannan made the remarks last year before becoming list MSP for Edinburgh & Lothians East.

Manivannan, who uses the pronouns “they/them”, also said the idea of “monster rapists” was a “myth” and appeared to suggest rapists should not be “demonised”.

Women’s rights groups have responded with anger to the comments by the MSP, the comments display an “utter ignorance of the trauma and violation of rape”. (The Times (£)) (Mail)

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📣 Consultation on the Jackdaw gas field closes today: a similar process on the Rosebank oil field closes in a week. Pressure on Andy Burnham over the developments -from industry, pressure groups and his own party - is growing. (Herald)

📣 Police are investigating four firebomb attacks in nine days in Lanarkshire, with cars destroyed in each attack, all of which took place within a two-mile radius. (Sun)

📣 Former Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar still thinks the House of Lords should be abolished - despite being granted a peerage himself. (BBC)

📣 One of CalMac’s newest ferries is having a tough start to life: Isle of Islay’s capacity has been reduced by faults, at the height of the tourist season. (Scotsman)

📣 East Kilbride MP Joani Reid has said she has faced a “rough few months” after her husband was arrested on suspicion of spying for China. (Daily Record)

📣 Daniel Kinahan - the alleged leader of the Kinahan organised crime group - has been extradited from Dubai and flown to Dublin, marking the end of “a global game of cat and mouse”. He has now been charged with directing organised crime. (Guardian)

📣 Andy Burnham will promise to tackle “rip-off” subscriptions in a cost of living push, as he begins a summer tour of the UK. (Independent)

📣 Another victim of the Travelodge key scandal has told the BBC of how she was attacked in her room after hotel reception staff gave a man the key. (BBC)

📣 A massive storm in China has led to the evacuation of more than one million people from their homes in the east of the country. (BBC)

⚽️ Rangers may have got themselves a new manager and millions of pounds of new playing talent, but for now they look just as bad as before. To the delight, it must be said, of the travelling band of Hibs fans who watched their side snatch a 2-1 victory yesterday at Ibrox, deep into stoppage time. Derek McInnes is left awaiting his first win as Rangers boss. (Report & 🎥 highlights)

⚽️ Celtic fans, meanwhile, may be feeling a little better about the world after their side’s comprehensive 5-1 win over Kilmarnock, with new boy Kasper Hogh bagging a first-half hat-trick on Rugby Park’s freshly laid grass pitch. Shaun Maloney managed the hoops as Martin O’Neill recovered from “a small procedure” in hospital last week. (Report & 🎥 highlights)

⚽️ Hearts fans will also be enjoying a chuckle - both at their own side’s revival - 4-0 winners against Dundee United yesterday - and their former manager’s woes at the other end of the M8. The Jambos offered the perfect response after their own drubbing away in Portugal midweek. (Report & 🎥 highlights)

⚽️ Motherwell and Falkirk played out a 0-0 draw that was less drab than the scoreline looks, and ensured Alfred Johansson’s excellent start as Motherwell manager continues undefeated. His side should really have won. (Report & 🎥 highlights)

🗣️ Nicola Sturgeon returned to Scotland for the weekend, offering up plenty of newsworthy lines in her two appearances on Saturday.

Scotland on Sunday picked up on her earlier performance at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe that day, when she told an audience she should not visit her estranged husband Peter Murrell in jail or speak to him ever again.

She said she’d felt like a “mug” for worrying about him during the police investigation into the SNP’s finances, and that he had been lying to her “right up to the day he pled guilty”. She complained that she felt the media had given him an “easier bloody ride than I’ve had”.

She also said author JK Rowling was “obsessed with me” and was scornful of political rival Joanna Cherry’s own autobiography (“what would I spend my time on that shit?”).

She travelled to Eastwood later for an on-stage interview with Graham Spiers, the journalist. As Kevin McKenna relates, she may have said fewer memorable things at that performance, before what he calls an audience largely made up of “her acolytes and travelling fan-club”, but a feisty heckler brought some drama to that event too.

That interruption came, ironically enough, after Sturgeon had explained the nature of social media abuse. “You know, the people who hurl abuse on social media don’t have the guts, frankly, to say what they say on social media to somebody’s face.”

🗣️ In mountaineering circles, there has been bafflement: why did celebrity climber Nirmal Purja decide to go up Broad Peak, when there had been heavy snow and high winds - creating ideal circumstances for an avalanche?

It was an avalanche that claimed Purja’s life, along with five other Nepali climbers: an avalanche at close to 7,000 metres that, reports the Observer, flung the group off their feet and down the mountain with such force a victim was found with the sort of injury more often found after a high-speed car crash.

“The disaster has hit hard in Nepal, home to six of the 10 victims,” reports Simon Usborne. “The stature of many of the victims, including Purja, added to the shock. The former Gurkha, who served with Britain’s elite Special Boat Service before moving into mountaineering, was a major celebrity there, particularly after a hit 2021 Netflix documentary, 14 Peaks, about his quest to summit all the 8,000-metre peaks in record time.”

But did that fame contribute to a poor judgement of the risk on that peak? “In the world of mountaineering,” writes Usborne, “Purja was earning a reputation for pushing the limits too far. Several leading figures in the industry […] told me that they expected Purja’s luck to run out. They also questioned his ability to balance his personal goals with the needs of a group.” (The Observer)

🗣️ The scandal of Jason Arday has come as a gift from the Gods for many: what we, in the trade, call “a good talker” - the sort of story we know will get our readers swapping thoughts and theories, and tuning in for more.

The tale of the now-former Cambridge University academic’s disgrace appears to have so many foibles, ancient and modern, stitched through it: a photogenic central character apparently falling from huge professional heights, undone by his ambition and his dishonesty, aided and abetted by an academic “lanyard class” exposed as acting in ways both stupid and apparently venal.

For the right, there is the apparent exposure of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) as a fraud. For the left, there is betrayal and sombre talk of lessons needing to be learned.

Yet my favourite read on the whole scandal came from an advertising guy, Ian Leslie, whose The Ruffian newsletter is an excellent weekly read. He happily admits to finding this “insanely compelling story” “endlessly fascinating”, and devotes much of his latest newsletter to a deep dive, especially for those who have been distracted by “more important matters like the war in Iran or which beach to go to today”.

He looks at Arday himself, what is alleged to have happened (Arday continues to insist upon his innocence, we should make clear), his lies, his work, and the implications.

It’s on this latter point that Leslie’s at his strongest. “Is this comedy or tragedy?” he asks. “I think both”. Leslie is also humane: “Even though the academy was unforgivably gullible and then unforgivably defensive of him, I can see why most people believed him. Most of the time, people don’t tell crazy lies!”

That also explains the fascination. (Ian Leslie’s The Ruffian (£))

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