TODAY’S WEATHER

☀️ Much better: a bright sunny day in Glasgow, with Edinburgh and Aberdeen only a little behind. London will be dry too, although overcast this morning. (Here’s the UK forecast).

THE BIG STORIES
Labour’s nuclear push | Trump sends in Marines | U-turn on winter fuel payment

📣 The UK Government is to announce the biggest nuclear programme in a generation later today, as part of this week’s spending review.

It will spend £14.2 billion on a new power station at Sizewell in Suffolk, and also encourage the construction of small modular reactors around the UK to provide “baseload” energy to balance more intermittent supply from renewable sources.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves will announce the investment at the GMB Congress today, saying it will create 10,000 jobs.

Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, said a “golden age” of nuclear investment was necessary to achieve net-zero goals. (Guardian) (FT £)

📣 Donald Trump has sent 700 US Marines, and another 2,000 National Guards, to LA as immigration protests continue in the city, and a political row rages nationally about the President’s show of strength. (BBC live coverage)

• President Trump and California Governor Gavin Newsom have traded insults over the military deployments to LA. (AP)

• We take a look at what’s going on, through the eyes of observers in the US, below ⬇️

📣 Three-quarters of pensioners will now get a winter fuel payment after the government U-turned on its unpopular decision to scrap the payments for most. Everyone who qualifies for the state pension on incomes of £35,000 or less will now get the payment. Critics say it’s not clear how the move, which will cost £1.25 billion, will be paid for. (Independent)

• John Crace: Reeves struggles to explain the genius of Labour’s fuel payment U-turn (Guardian)

• Sam Coates: The five considerable problems with the Chancellor’s U-turn (Sky News)

IDEAS
What’s really happening in Los Angeles?

🗣️ What appeared to be relatively small-scale, if sometimes violent, protests over immigration enforcement in Los Angeles have mushroomed in significance over the past four days.

US Marines have been deployed to the city, ostensibly to protect federal buildings, joining National Guard troops already there. It’s a further escalation by President Trump - the first time in more than three decades that Marines have been sent to a US city to quell civil unrest. Both deployments have been over the head of - indeed, in the face of protests and now a lawsuit from - California governor Gavin Newsom.

There are concerns the trouble will continue to escalate: the last time Marines were deployed, it was for the 1992 LA riots, after four police officers were acquitted in the beating of Rodney King.

Ken Klippenstein is an independent American journalist: he notes “one voice has been missing: those of the actual protestors,” in his latest newsletter, dispatched in the wee hours of this morning. He, like many of us, has watched the political row, and the burning cars, but has heard less from those on the streets protesting.

“I’ve scoured the mainstream and social media as well as YouTube looking for people on the streets speaking in their own voice,” he writes. “I’ve pulled together the interviews I could find and a surprising theme emerged: the protests are not just about immigration. They are also an outcry about American society, how ICE and its compatriots have impinged on people’s daily lives.

“The more interviews I watched, the more I began to realise that people are just as upset by the imposition of the national security state into daily life as they are about people being deported.”

Many will argue, however, that there are burning cars. There is unrest. And most people in the US (as in the UK) tend to dislike violent mobs.

The widespread counter to that - and it’s coming from both left and right of the political spectrum - is that, first, disorder is far from widespread. If you were in LA right now, you’d find most of the city very quiet (or as quiet as it ever gets). Many argue that Trump has been seeking this opportunity, looking for a chance to demonstrate force to back up promises he made on mass deportations while on the campaign trail last year.

“For years, President Trump has dreamed of mobilising the military against protesters in the United States,” writes Judd Legum, another popular indy journalist. “On Saturday night, Trump made it a reality”.

The Wall Street Journal, at the other end of the political spectrum, found voices to agree: “As is so often the case, Donald Trump’s opponents are playing into his hands,” Republican pollster Whit Ayres tells the newspaper (🎁 gift link). “This is exactly the kind of fight that Donald Trump loves, with his opponents carrying Mexican flags past burning cars.”

Those images are powerful for Trump, and damaging for Democrats, continues the WSJ. “The Republican Party’s House campaign arm summed up Trump’s argument in a single line Monday: ‘One word to describe the Democrat Party: Lawlessness.’”

All this raises yet more concerns, for some, about American democracy itself. In The New York Times (🎁 gift link), columnist Michelle Goldberg sounds a note of despair, and calls for US civic society to speak up about the administration’s “authoritarian overreach”.

She concedes some protests have been violent, branding each burning taxi and smashed storefront as “an in-kind gift to the [Trump] administration”. But the need for soldiers on the streets “is pure fantasy”.

“Administration officials like Stephen Miller are pushing the idea that Los Angeles is ‘occupied territory,’ as evidenced by the foreign flags some protesters are carrying,” she writes. “Americans who still have hope for democracy should be saying, as loudly and as often as they can, that this is an insultingly stupid lie to justify a dictatorial power grab. Maybe it will turn out that the truth is no match for right-wing propaganda, but if that’s the case, we were already lost.”

AROUND SCOTLAND

📣 A group of medical professionals and executives has warned Scotland’s health and social care system is “unsustainable”. “The health of the nation is deteriorating and health inequalities are widening. Reform is urgent and critical,” the group says. (Scotsman) (See the letter at Enlighten, the think-tank)

📣 Police are investigating potential links between two vehicles deliberately set on fire in Edinburgh and the ongoing gang war which erupted in March. (STV)

📣 An SSE executive who thought he was safe to drive the day after drinking for 13 hours has been banned after he crashed into a garden. Peter McKessick, from Perth, was five times over the limit 19 hours after he had stopped drinking. (The Times £)

AROUND THE UK

📣 There’s been serious disorder in Ballymena, in Northern Ireland, close to where a teenage girl was alleged to have been the victim of a serious sexual assault at the weekend. Police have appealed for calm after at least two houses were set alight. (Belfast Telegraph)

📣 Foreign Office staff who raised concerns about UK “complicity” in Israel’s conduct in Gaza have been told to consider resigning if they profoundly disagree with government policy. (BBC)

📣 Eurostar says it wants to run trains direct from the UK to Germany and Switzerland as it looks to fend off rivals’ interest in running services under the channel. But the new services might not arrive until the early 2030s. (Guardian)

AROUND THE WORLD

🌎 British people “better learn to speak Russian” if Sir Keir Starmer fails to increase defence spending, the Nato secretary general has warned. But Mark Rutte said he was “really impressed” by the UK defence review, unveiled last week, even as he called for a far bigger increase in spending to 5% of GDP. (Independent)

🌎 Activists aboard Greta Thunberg’s “freedom flotilla” arrived at Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport early this morning, ahead of being deported, Israel said. (Mail)

🌎 Robert F. Kennedy has removed every member of a scientific committee that advises on vaccines and pledged to replace them with his own picks. Kennedy has been an outspoken anti-vaccine activist since the pandemic. (AP)

SPORT

⚽️ Striker Che Adams bagged a perfect hat-trick - left foot, right foot, header - in Scotland’s 4-0 win over Liechtenstein. Motherwell’s Lennon Miller also made an impressive full debut. (The Scotsman)

• Manager Steve Clarke confirmed that his assistant of five years, John Carver, will be leaving the national setup this summer. (Herald)