In your briefing today:

📣 Dolly Parton, the country music star, actor and philanthropist, has died at 80, of cancer. The songwriter behind I Will Always Love You, Jolene and 9 to 5 is being remembered this morning for her extraordinary showbusiness career, in which she was one of the greatest singer-songwriters in country music. Her perennially upbeat public persona, dedication to her work and towering hairdos made her an icon that transcended the genre.

Beyond the glitz, there was also great seriousness to her work: she invested millions in child literacy and COVID-19 vaccine development, and used her undimming fame to support a variety of causes over the decades.

Taylor Swift told the Hollywood Reporter overnight: “She was truly the gift that kept on giving. Dolly gave us someone to look up to while encouraging us to be who we are as individuals.

“Somehow she was true grace and true grit, all in one dazzling person. She possessed the softest heart when it came to the struggles of others, and a backbone of steel to defend her own self-worth as an artist.” (Mirror)

📣 Crime in Scotland has surged to its highest level in four years, with rape, violence and shoplifting rising sharply, and murders and culpable homicides rising by 40%. Police are also dealing with a sharp rise in the number of incidents every day.

The news comes amid claims of infighting at the top of Police Scotland, and claims frontline officers are being urged “not to arrest people” because of a shortage of cells. (Mail) (Sun)

📣 If you find yourself turning off BBC Radio Scotland’s Radio Scotland Breakfast, the successor to Good Morning Scotland, you’re not alone: official figures show listenership at 8.30am has dropped from more than 80,000 a year ago to just over 50,000 now - a drop of a third in little more than six months.

The programme, relaunched late last year, has been accused of dumbing down, abandoning its Radio 4 Today-esque format for a more chatty style first pioneered at BBC Wales. The BBC has defended the programme, saying the station’s overall reach has increased over the same period. (Times)

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📣 Scotland’s independent schools will have to sell off assets to stay afloat, the head teacher of Edinburgh’s newly-merged Erskine Stewart Melville school has warned. Anthony Simpson says there has been “a cocktail of significant pressures on the sector”. (Scotsman has the exclusive)

📣 Civil servants face a crackdown on working from home and some will be offered voluntary redundancy as part of a new five-year plan from Joe Griffin, Scotland’s most senior bureaucrat. (Times)

📣 Scottish podcaster James English has been found guilty of domestic abuse, after repeated attacks on his pregnant ex-partner. (Daily Record)

📣 Firefighters are still dealing with smouldering hotspots in the Cairngorms, after around 10 square miles were burnt in this summer’s wildfires. Now the question: do “rewilded” areas require better protection against fires? (BBC)

📣 Household energy bills will rise to their highest level in three years, it has been revealed this morning. Energy regulator Ofgem revealed its latest price cap at 7am: it will go up by 4% over the current level, with the typical household paying £60 a year more. (BBC)

📣 At least 14 newborn babies have died in a fire at a hospital in Pakistan. (BBC)

📣 Labour MPs want moves towards voting reform for Westminster elections to be pushed through this year. (Guardian)

📣 Canada has hit back at the US with a set of retaliatory tariffs, escalating the trade war between the countries. (AP)

⚽️ Celtic strolled into the second leg of their Champions League qualifier against LASK with a hard-won 3-0 advantage from the meeting in Glasgow last week. They added to it with a goal in the first half last night.

And, somehow, they contrived to then throw it all away, losing 5-1 in extra time on the night for an embarrassing and costly reversal that sees the Scottish champions tumble into the Europa League, at a cost of at least £40 million.

In a crowded field, it’s one of Scottish football’s most humbling moments in European competition.

⚽️ Next up in Europe is Hearts: they take on Rapid Vienna in Austria later this afternoon in the Europa Conference League, after that cracking 2-2 draw at Tynecastle last week. Their head coach Wouter Vrancken has urged his players to “take the next step”. (BBC)

🗣️ On Monday, Andy Burnham made Kyiv his first foreign visit as Prime Minister, timing it to coincide with Ukraine’s Independence Day.

He took a gift: not a literal roll of blueprints, but something close: an announcement the UK will allow classified information about the Scalp missile system to be shared with Ukraine, so they can build their own.

The missiles are a version of the UK’s Storm Shadow: among those which Ukraine has been using to strike deep into Russian territory, bringing a little of the suffering of the front line in Ukraine to everyday Russia. They’ve brought about a profound change in the war.

As one security source puts it to Dan Hudges in today’s Daily Mail (£): “If you live in Moscow, you can’t ignore the war any more. When you walk out of your house to go to work in the morning you see a giant plume of smoke from the latest Ukrainian attack. You can’t buy petrol. The war’s now on Putin’s doorstep.”

The missiles are in addition to British-made drones, which The Sunday Times has reported were being used to strike targets deep in Russia.

Vladimir Putin is, claims UK security services, increasingly likely to want to do something about the attacks. And, with the UK now a material ally of Ukraine thanks to its supply of weapons, “something” looks a lot like some form of attack - probably indirect - on the UK, or its interests.

I pointed you, yesterday, to the Mail on Sunday’s report that Putin might offer a direct challenge to the UK and Nato “within months”, seeking to test the alliance.

The Mail builds upon that today, saying Russia is suddenly aware it miscalculated Burnham’s resolve. Russia’s embassy to the UK has warned: “London’s actions will inevitably carry consequences”.

Russia has now withdrawn its ambassador from London, with no successor in place. It is feared that action has been taken so Burnham does not have the option of expelling the ambassador after some form of Russian action. Russia has accused the UK of choosing a “path of confrontation”.

There is a sense this is all moving beyond the sabre-rattling of recent years.

In a long read on Bloomberg, Marc Champion says Burnham “isn’t ready” for how much Russia “hates the UK”. The missiles and the wider support for Ukraine “has made the UK public enemy No. 1 at a time when a more friendly incumbent in the White House has left the title vacant”.

The trouble, suggests Champion, is a mismatch between rhetoric and reality. “Britain’s effort to lead by example in Ukraine has resulted in formal recognition of Russia as the top threat to UK security,” he writes, “but successive British governments have failed to act on that by building up defenses, especially against drones, ballistic missiles and cable-cutting submarines.

“Russian propaganda, for its part, portrays Britain as a dangerous and irrational enemy that’s trying to contain Moscow by thwarting its core interests — but also as a weak, decaying former empire that simply hasn’t come to terms with its irrelevance. That, too, is a dangerous cocktail, combining a desire to punish with the ability, and therefore the temptation, to do so.”

What might Russia do? Today’s coverage, and the shadowy security figures quoted in them, offer a mixed bag of potential action. It could be a cyber-attack against the UK’s infrastructure - the health or transport system. It could be some form of sabotage. Some power cables in the North Sea, or internet cables in the Atlantic, might break.

Whatever it is, we are being warned something is coming, as a rattled Kremlin attempts to ward the UK off from offering much more support to Ukraine in an increasingly messy, protracted war that is creeping ever closer to its own homeland.

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