TODAY’S WEATHER

☀️The day will brighten up, despite cloudy starts in Glasgow and Edinburgh, with afternoon sun lifting temperatures to around 18 degrees. Aberdeen will remain overcast and cooler all day. London is going to hit 25 degrees. (Here’s the UK forecast).

THE BIG STORIES
Scotland faces tax-or-cut choice | Ross accuses presiding officer of bias | Trump tariffs stay for now

📣 Scots face higher taxes or spending cuts to meet the bill for a growing welfare bill and generous public sector pay deals. The warning has come from the Scottish Fiscal Commission, which says the Scottish government faces a “really challenging period” with spending on social security to do grow from £6.1 billion today to more than £9.4 billion by 2031. (Scotsman)

• Read the forecasts (Scottish Fiscal Commission)

• Council workers warn of strikes over stalled pay talks (Herald)

📣 The Scottish Parliament’s presiding officer has been accused of “blatant bias” after throwing former Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross out of the chamber. Ross, also a former assistant football referee, is far from happy: he said it was clear the former Green MSP, Alison Johnstone, was favouring nationalist politicians over unionist ones. A spokeswoman for the Parliament said Ross had been warned about his behaviour “on repeated occasions recently”. (Herald) (Mail)

📣 US President Donald Trump’s tariffs can remain in place for now, a federal appeals court has ruled, temporarily suspending a lower court’s order which said he’d overstepped his power by imposing the duties. (BBC)

• Where does the ruling leave Trump’s tariff agenda? (BBC)

IDEAS FROM THE WEEKLY MAGAZINES
How to save the NHS | Make young people read again | Trump’s mistake on students

🗣️The Economist offers a prescription to save the NHS. The key: going all-out on digital transformation. Studies on early uses of AI show one app, which transcribes patient consultations, has reduced time spent on clinical notes by 20%. Another AI app has cut skin cancer referrals in half. But to truly unlock the benefits of AI, more needs to be done with the NHS’s “trove of data” - “the NHS is unique in holding cradle-to-grave records on an entire population” - which is a potential gold mine for research. The NHS, says the newspaper, should learn from banking, which overcame a lack of standardisation in its systems to enable customers to see their bank and credit card accounts in one place. It can be done… it all just requires investment (£15 billion over five years, or 7% of the NHS budget), and coordination. (The Economist £)

🗣️ The Spectator worries that we’re losing the ability to read (although one must assume they’re not talking about their audience, or indeed you). Students at two Midwestern universities in the US were given the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, and asked to read it out loud, parsing the sentences for meaning. “Most participants were unable to elicit a scintilla of sense from Dickens’s prose,” despairs the magazine. “It’s as if, dumbfounded, they’d been confronted with Linear B.”. Worse, they were all English literature students.

“Study after study points in the same grim direction,” says the magazine of young people on both sides of the Atlantic. “Children hardly read; their tech-blinded parents don’t care; their teachers don’t have the resources; and many think that making students read ‘difficult’ books is elitist.”

What’s to be done? We need to lead children back to the joys of the bookshelf. The stakes are high. “A functioning democracy, a competent bureaucracy, a healthy, competitive market and a thriving arts and literary scene all require citizens capable of sustained, thoughtful reading; of understanding metaphor and allusion; of navigating the gaps between facts; of being a complex adult in a turbulent world. Otherwise, we are in territory primed for conspiracy theories, mis-information and division.” (The Spectator £)

🗣️ Lucy Connolly is not a political prisoner, says Hannah Barnes in The New Statesman. Connolly, imprisoned for 31 months for inciting racial hatred in the wake of the Southport murders last year, has become a cause célèbre on the right, her treatment taken as “yet more” evidence of a two-tier justice system “that disproportionately punishes white British people more harshly than others.”

“Yet, the case says far more about our criminal justice system than it does about our ability to speak freely,” says Barnes. “That one Labour MP, Mary Glindon, has publicly voiced her concerns is perhaps an indication that the case is not a culture wars issue but rather one of fairness, humanity and compassion.” (The New Statesman)

🗣️The Economist takes aim at the Trump administration’s decision to pause all visa interviews for foreign students wanting to study in America. Whatever happens next, it says, “this is another blow to a great American success story”.

“There is some truth to MAGA criticisms of elite universities,” the newspaper concedes. “Some have indeed been too soft on antisemitism and too dismissive of conservative viewpoints. But that hardly justifies the cudgels the administration is wielding against the entire college system.

“In the global war for talent, America’s universities have long been its most persuasive recruiters, with huge benefits for American science, business and arts. Mr Trump’s policies will make them less attractive.” (The Economist £)

AROUND SCOTLAND

📣 A 15-year-old girl has been raped by a masked man in Edinburgh city centre. The girl was approached on Princes Street around 5am on Sunday morning. (BBC)

📣 A fraudster tricked luxury hotels and stores into buying “Scottish-grown tea”. Thomas Robinson, also known as Thomas O'Brien or Tam O' Braan, was behind “The Wee Tea Plantation” brand. He claimed his teas had been grown on farmland in Perthshire. Instead, he’d imported and repackaged teas, at huge mark-ups, in a £550,000 scam. After a three-week trial, jurors found him guilty: he will face sentencing at a later date. (BBC)

• From 2019: Scottish grower accused of faking 'world's best tea' award (Herald)

📣 Scottish Cup winners Aberdeen could be poised to launch fresh talks over building a new seaside stadium for the club. The project has been stalled for years because of its cost, and questions about who should pay. (The Press and Journal has the exclusive £)

📣 The Scottish Jazz scene is mourning the death of pianist Brian Kellock, who has died aged 63. Mr Kellock, regarded as one of the UK’s leading jazz musicians, was described as “legendary” in a joint statement from friends and colleagues yesterday. (Scotsman) (UK Jazz News)

AROUND THE UK

📣 A father of three and former Royal Marine will appear in court today facing multiple charges of causing, and attempting to cause, unlawful and malicious grievous bodily harm with intent, as well as one of dangerous driving and two counts of unlawful and malicious wounding with intent. The charges against Paul Doyle, a 53-year-old businessman, follow the Liverpool parade crash, in which 79 people were injured. (BBC) (Mail)

📣 A video of shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick challenging fare dodgers on the London Underground has gone viral. (🎥 Sky News) (Guardian)

• Jenrick may be getting mocked, by some, for his conversion to tube fare vigilante. But almost one in 20 Tube passengers are dodging fares, at a cost of £130 million a year, and there’s been a surge in violence against staff trying to stop them. (Independent)

📣 Which, the consumer organisation, says the UK’s vet complaint process is often “stacked against pet owners,” with the industry’s complaints system “not fit for purpose”. (Guardian)

AROUND THE WORLD

🌎 A post-mortem on Elon Musk’s time in Washington: he came to Washington wielding a chainsaw. He leaves behind upheaval and unmet expectations. (AP)

• Musk returns to a “bruised” business empire, with each of his five companies at vital stages in their development - and facing headwinds. (🎁WSJ - free to read)

🌎 Poland’s presidential election run-off, taking place on Sunday, could have far-reaching implications for its place in Europe. (Guardian)

🌎 There’s been a vast flow of military aid from North Korea to Russia, including at least 100 ballistic missiles. (Independent)

🌎 London and Edinburgh do well in a global ranking of the greenest cities, snagging joint third and fifth place in the list. Time Out’s guide is based on survey responses from travellers: Medellin, Columbia’s second-largest city, comes top. (Mail) (Time Out).

SPORT

⚽️ Another name has entered the mix for the vacant manager’s job at Rangers: former Ajax boss Francesco Farioli, who oversaw the club’s dramatic collapse in their championship challenge this month. Davide Ancelotti remains the front runner, with former Southampton boss Russell Martin also in the mix. Steven Gerrard has ruled himself out. (Daily Record) (The Sun)

🏉 Glasgow Warriors face the Stormers at Scotstoun tonight in their URC play-off: they’ve been boosted by the return of Josh McKay and Henco Venter. (The Offside Line)