In your briefing today:

📣 Scotland could move to legalise assisted dying today, in a first for the United Kingdom.

New laws would allow a terminally-ill, mentally-competent adult, resident in Scotland for at least 12 months, to ask for drugs that would end their life. If two doctors approved, the patient would self-administer the drugs.

The Scottish Parliament vote, which is free vote for MSPs, is viewed as “too close to call” this morning, after a series of debates and hundreds of proposed amendments. (BBC)

📣 European countries have ruled out offering help to the US to reopen the Straits of Hormuz, rejecting Donald Trump’s call for them to send arms and troops to help in the region. Foreign ministers, who met yesterday, were unwilling to commit ships and troops when the US itself has yet to do so. (Politico)

📣 An entertaining dispatch from The Wall Street Journal, which travels all the way to… St Andrews, to interview all the American students there. And there are a lot.

“Holly Govan left New York ready for an adventure abroad at the University of St Andrews in a cobblestone-street town 3,000 miles from home,” the title reports. “Instead, the Upper East Sider got paired with a roommate from lower Manhattan.

“‘Practically every person you hear sounds American,’ Govan says.”

Indeed, there are 2,200 of them - 20% of the student population, so enough for Superbowl parties and Thanksgiving dinners, alongside the more usual St Andrews traditions. (WSJ - gift link)

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📣 Decisions on new housing will be fast-tracked under Scottish Government plans for a new national housing agency. (The Scotsman has the exclusive)

📣 Rangers and Celtic took too long to condemn the disorder after their Scottish Cup quarter final, First Minister John Swinney has said. (Times - gift link)

📣 Glasgow City Council says there is “no timescale” on when the Union Corner building will be fully demolished. (STV)

📣 Lecturers at four Scottish universities go on strike today in separate disputes over pay. (Daily Record)

📣 Concerns are growing about a meningitis outbreak in Kent which has killed two young people and seen others placed in induced comas in hospital. Health authorities waited until after the weekend before alerting the public about the outbreak. (Mail)

📣 The U.K. government is to abandon controversial plans to reform copyright law that would have seen creatives forced to “opt out” of having their work used by AI. What’s not clear, yet, is if smaller-scale changes - also criticised by the creative sector - will go ahead. (Politico)

📣 Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will visit the UK tomorrow, as defence secretary John Healey reaffirmed UK support for Ukraine. He told the House of Commons the world faces “two conflicts on two continents, supported by an axis of aggression with similar tactics and similar technologies”. (Independent)

📣 Millions of people in Cuba have been left without power after the national electric grid collapsed on Monday. (BBC)

⚽️ Scotland manager Steve Clarke has yet to be offered a new contract by the Scottish Football Association, so doesn’t know what he’ll be doing beyond the World Cup. (Daily Record)

⚽️ Former Rangers manager Russell Martin has spoken for the first time about his disastrous spell at Ibrox - and says he has no regrets. (BBC)

⚽️ Chelsea have been fined £10.75m and given a suspended transfer ban after making secret payments to unregistered agents and third-parties over transfers between 2011 and 2018. (BBC)

🗣️ How, exactly, does the war against Iran end? To understand that, we’d have to understand the war’s purpose - and, since the first missiles flew more than three weeks ago, it’s been far from clear what the Trump administration wanted to get from its campaign.

Andrew Roth, writing in the Guardian, caught the confusion perfectly at the weekend. There have simply been no clear explanations about what the US would call victory.

While, militarily, experts tell Roth that things have gone well thanks to “stellar” planning (that’s despite an accidental strike on a girls’ school, killing 175 people), a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute resorts to industrial language to describe the political strategy, which is “increasingly looking like a cluster f**k,”.

Normally, military planning follows the political rationale. This conflict appears to be a set of strikes seeking a purpose.

The Independent echos many people’s thoughts today, when it says in a leader: “what has been obvious from the outset remains true now. There is, in fact, no military solution to the very genuine problem of Iran’s nuclear ambitions.”

But… could there be? Could a high-stakes raid, like something out of a straight-to-Netflix drama, emerge as the post-hoc plan for the final act? In a press conference yesterday, according to the New York Times, “Trump returned to the topic of stopping Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon with some of his strongest language yet.

“‘You can’t let the most violent, vicious country in the last 50 years have a nuclear weapon, because the Middle East will be gone. Israel will go first without question,’ he said, ‘and they’ll certainly take a shot at us before we get our act together.’”

Reporter David E. Sanger added: "The statement was notable because Trump is considering a risky operation to send forces into Isfahan, a city of two million people in the centre of the country, to recover 970 pounds of near-bomb-grade uranium.”

That sort of operation was mooted in Axios 10 days ago, and would be fraught with danger. The Isfahan nuclear facility is in the heart of Iran: the country’s military would have to be so defeated they were unable to defend the site. And even if the US could secure the facility, it would have to dig for the nuclear materials, which are thought to be buried under rubble since last summer’s US bombing.

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal - traditionally more friendly to Trump - has delved into the history of Iran’s nuclear programme to offer a rationale for that sort of mission.

“So much of today’s media framing of the Iran war relies on a mythology of what came before,” says its Editorial Board in a leader (gift link). “The gist is that Iran was contained by Barack Obama until Donald Trump mucked it up, and now the regime will really pursue nuclear weapons.

“Naive is too kind a word for this deceptive, partisan history. The real history is worth rehearsing because it shows that Iran’s regime has been relentless for decades in its quest for the bomb, which is why President Trump is weakening it by force.”

It would, of course, be unevidenced and cynical to suggest the WSJ’s editorial board is deliberately preparing public opinion for a dangerous ground operation. But this sort of leader could be indicative of where thinking in senior Republican circles has reached.

It could even add, through the right lens, some clear purpose to this most chaotic of conflicts. “Mr. Trump chose to act instead, after his predecessors didn’t, and that is a service to the world,” the Journal suggests.

It would - if it was successful - at least add a tangible point, and a plausible full stop, to the war.

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