In your briefing today:

👋 Good morning Early Liners! Apologies for a slightly curtailed Early Line, which was completed on an iPad today thanks to issues with the email tech. For us all, but especially my thumbs, I hope normal service will return tomorrow 😊

📣 The diplomatic row over the crisis in Ceuta is growing, with the leader of the Spanish enclave breaking ranks with Madrid to call the border crossings an attack on Spain’s territorial integrity that was “if not orchestrated, at least encouraged or permitted by Morocco”. An estimated 69,500 people who had crossed the border last week returned to Morocco in recent days, with around 2,500 more still in the tiny Spanish enclave.

Analysts have suggested Spain’s recent warming in relations with Algeria, Morocco’s arch enemy, could have triggered actions that led to the crossings. (Guardian)

📣 Greek authorities are continuing to investigate possible motives for a 26-year-old Afghan man accused of killing Scottish charity worker Elisabeth-Jane Ross. The man - a champion boxer who co-ran a refugee charity - admits hiding the body, but denies killing her. (Guardian)

📣 It’s Scottish exam results day today: good luck to all the candidates and, of course, their families. More than 148,000 people will start getting their results from 8am this morning, many delivered via SMS these days rather than (only) the post.

For many Early Line readers, I suspect, we get to relive the horror of exams with the added weight of being able to do nothing to help, other than brew cups of tea and - we hope - maybe uncork some fizz, or go out for a celebratory meal, later on. (BBC).

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📣 A man has been arrested after the death of a nine-year-old girl in a Scottish town in the early hours of Monday morning. (Mail)

📣 Nicola Sturgeon attacks John Swinney’s election strategy in a new foreword to the paperback edition of her memoirs. She says the campaign lacked “vision or big-picture thinking” and said the wider campaign was “detached from the big issues bearing down on people’s lives”. (Mail)

📣 A far-right thug who marched on the now-notorious “Protect Our Women and Kids” protest last month was, it turns out, convicted of beating up his own mum. (Daily Record)

📣 Three children were among seven holidaymakers killed by a Ukrainian drone attack on a popular Russian Black Sea beach. (Times)

📣 NHS criteria for screening women under 50 for breast cancer are missing up to 95% of those at higher risk, researchers have warned. Current guidelines focus only on inherited genes - not on other factors, such as lifestyle. (BBC)

📣 That horrific outbreak of cyclospora in the US, which gives victims “explosive” bowel movements and has spread to 20,000 people, has claimed two lives in Michigan, one of the worst-affected states. (AP)

📣 Andy Burnham is blocking the early release of rapists and some sex offenders as part of an early-release scheme in England and Wales, intended to release pressure on prisons. (Independent)

📣 Rod Liddell, the Sunday Times and Spectator columnist, has died aged 66 after a brief illness. He’s remembered as a talented, often highly provocative, journalist. (Times)

⚽️ Celtic got there in the end: they continued their handsome record of opening day wins with a 1-0 victory over Dundee last night, with a Benjamin Nyerere header in the second half to thank. Other than that, the champions had been wasteful in front of goal. (BBC)

⚽️ Scottish clubs have learned their opponents in the next round of European competition.

🗣️ Scotland is being peppered with bids to build data centres. Such is the volume and scale of plans, they’re threatening to set up a collision between a pro-growth economic agenda being led from London, and more environmentally-oriented Scottish politics baulking at the costs - in water, energy, environment - of the vast developments.

The arguments for and against, however, are a thicket of claim and counterclaim. Even as the planning applications pour in across Scotland, on some important issues it’s hard to know who’s got the facts on their side.

On one side of the argument: an increasing number of activists who see halting new data centres as vital for their quality of life, and the environment.

Marissa MacWhirter, writing in the Herald, paints a picture: “In May, ILI submitted plans for a 600MW data centre campus outside Auchtertool, a village of around 200 homes in Fife,” she writes. “The site would be the size of 100 football pitches, with up to six massive data halls.

“The bland concrete buildings would loom over the town like half a dozen tower blocks tipped on their sides, consuming the equivalent electricity of half of Scotland’s households and as much water as the village itself.

“Fife Council ruled no environmental impact assessment was even required, prompting 200 local residents to pack out a meeting at the Village Hall demanding answers.”

So far, so dystopian.

Protestors also point to developers’ sales pitches, which can be far from convincing. Uncovered documents show that another Scottish project has “no prospect” of meeting its public promise to be entirely self-powered by 2030. It would need to connect to the grid… and there’s already a waiting list for those connections.

So the “anti” movement is shifting from protest to trying to shape policy. Last month, the SNP’s national council passed a motion to freeze all new datacentres in Scotland. The motion comes after a rash of planning applications across Scotland.

On the other side of the argument: business leaders and the developers themselves. This is the future, they say. A halt would be a dangerous thing, they argue.

Robert Eadie, data centre director at Rimkus, a consultancy, told Project Scotland: “A moratorium on hyperscale data centres would send a concerning signal to the market that Scotland is stepping back from supporting the infrastructure that underpins the modern economy.”

The answer, says Eadie, is strategic infrastructure planning rather than halting developments.

Why do we need the centres? Primarily, the inward investment, they say. That controversial Fife, development, for instance, says it would create 120 permanent jobs, hundreds more short-term roles, and more than £60 million a year for the economy.

Some also say campaigners’ claims on water and energy use are overblown. Centres could used “closed loop” cooling that hardly uses any new water once started. That said, the question of water use is not a simple one to answer. As a baffled Atlantic piece puts it, “Does AI waste a ton of water? Not necessarily. Sometimes. It really depends.” There’s not much accurate public data, it seems.

The issue of energy is no more straightforward. We do know that, in 2025, Britain spent more than £1 billion paying wind farms not to generate electricity - with most of the wind farms in question here in Scotland. An excellent “De-noiser” explainer in The Ferret delved into some of the background to that.

Scotland does generate far too much electricity for its own needs.

The trouble is what to do once we’ve made it, because demand is not where electricity is generated - it’s in the south east of England, not rural Scotland. Britain’s ageing national grid is being upgraded, but slowly. In the meantime, two powerline bottlenecks stop a lot of Scottish electricity reaching a ready market.

We could build energy-intensive industries nearby, though. And that was a part of the logic in the UK government’s plan to cluster AI data centres in more rural locations.

Amid all this vagueness and contradiction, and you might say it’s not (just) data centres, yes or no: it’s whether Scotland is able to write planning conditions that satisfy the communities that have to live with new data centres, while sorting out the National Grid’s plumbing issues and getting the buyers to pay for the work.

The prize, it seems clear, is worth even more than the billion paid to not generate power last year. What’s not clear is if it’s something our political leaders - or the communities they represent - think is worth the candle. And it’s likely we don’t even really have the data to know for sure.

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