In your briefing today:

📣 Scotland’s universities are “not sustainable” under the existing funding model, a bleak Scottish Government-sponsored report warns today, with “an acute and growing financial crisis” in the sector that has accelerated since the Covid pandemic.

The warning is being delivered by Professor Sir Anton Muscatelli, the economist and former Principal of the University of Glasgow, who is now chair of a body examining the future funding of Scotland’s universities.

He said the funding universities receive “is not sufficient to sustain their core activities” and has identified a £200 million funding gap - which, he warns, may be “a conservative estimate”.

“Today’s reality, for many institutions, is one of persistent year-on-year funding gaps,” he says.

Universities are increasingly dependent on fee-paying international students to cross-subsidise Scottish undergraduates, because government funding for those courses falls £288 million short every year - or £2,703 per Scottish student. (BBC) (Scotsman) (Herald)

📣 The death toll from the flash floods on the border between Nepal and Tibet has risen to at least 469, with at least 33 Britons among the 1,400 still missing. This morning there are fears that a lake created in the floods is growing and could burst, causing further devastating waves. (Guardian)

📣 Glasgow City Council’s SNP leader has warned the growing cost of refugee homelessness in the city is an “untenable threat” to “community cohesion”. Susan Aitken made the warning to Finance Secretary Jenny Gilruth in a letter sent in May, revealed now through a Freedom of Information request.

“This is an issue that is not of Glasgow’s making and which is significantly beyond our control, but which poses an immediate and untenable threat to financial sustainability, public services and community cohesion in our city,” wrote Aitken. (Daily Record has the exclusive)

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📣 The UK’s Supreme Court has been asked to intervene in the long-running investigation into Nicola Sturgeon’s handling of complaints about Alex Salmond. David Hamilton, the Scottish Information Commissioner, has asked the court to force SNP ministers to publish documents. (Mail)

📣 Donald Dewar would be “very disappointed” with Holyrood today, says his biographer. (Scotsman)

📣 BBC director-general Matt Brittin has refused to rule out closing the BBC Scotland TV channel. Speaking at the Edinburgh TV Festival, he acknowledged “concerns about the scale of value” from the channel. (Herald)

📣 Two entire streets in Coalsnaughton, the village hit by subsidence, will have to be demolished, residents have been told. (BBC)

📣 Seven people charged with vandalising Donald Trump’s Turnberry golf course have been accused of malicious damage “having a terrorist connection”. (Guardian)

📣 Masked youths set fire to cars in a “warped tribute” to a victim of the A66 crash (Mail)

📣 Donald Trump has signed an executive order to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America” (New York Times)

📣 Uefa is considering pursuing criminal proceedings against Fifa chief Gianni Infantino, over his plans to sell off the World Cup. (Independent)

📣 Video game developer Rockstar has offered fans of its Grand Theft Auto franchise a 26-minute preview, showing off the game’s graphics, gameplay and action. (🎥 See the preview - with a warning on language)

⚽️ A “mortified” Derek McInnes offered an apology and took “full responsibility” as Rangers crashed out the Conference League at the hands of Jablonec, of the Czech Republic. His side had gone into the tie 1-0 up from the first leg at Ibrox. But an insipid display saw the hosts level in the second half, then win on penalties.

One of Rangers’ worst-ever European results, it leaves them without continental competition beyond August for the first time since 2017. (BBC)

⚽️ Hibs were left heartbroken after two late goals robbed them of progress to the Conference League. (Sun)

⚽️ Motherwell’s European run ended with a bump as they sank 4-1 to last season’s Europa League finalists Freiburg. (Daily Record)

🗣️ The Economist bemoans the “Unwelcoming States of America” on its front page, with a striking image of a stars-and-stripes flag made out of barbed wire. Inside, the newspaper starts with praise for Donald Trump, who has succeeded in bringing order to the country’s border.

But that success allowed two questions to be posed: “What should the government do about the people who are already on American soil illegally? And whom should America welcome in the future?

“Mr Trump has offered a brutal answer to the first question, and a self-harming one to the second,” says a leader, which argues he went too far.

“Mr Trump is altering America’s demographic trajectory,” it continues. “Net migration in 2025 was zero. The short-term economic effects are ugly. The labour force has shrunk by 1m since January. Leave aside the $17,000-a-head cost of processing, shackling and deporting people; American builders and bars are floundering for lack of labour.”

What the country needs, it argues, is “enlightened immigration reform”, built on strong borders, that leaves the country “more open to the world’s most talented people, and less cavalier about breaking up families”. (Economist (£))

🗣️Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is taking a gamble on American relations, writes Freddie Hayward on The New Statesman, by taking a more muscular stance and publicly stating he needs to guard Canadian sovereignty.

“Part of the ‘Donroe Doctrine’,” writes Hayward, “is that the administration now thinks it has the right to control what happens across the Western hemisphere. The implication is that governments in the Americas rule at Washington’s pleasure. Its ambassadors become provincial consuls. America hovers over their national parliaments to keep China from expanding its influence on the continent. The president becomes some sort of continental emperor.

“And yet, here was the Canadian prime minister in rebellion.”

Hayward sees Carney’s position as assuming the US has permanently shifted its stance on the rest of the world, instead of only a temporary alteration while there is “an erratic man in the Oval Office”.

“Carney’s hope is that a defence of Canadian sovereignty is powerful enough to maintain national unity in the face of Trump’s onslaught. It will be a test case for whether his singular response to the Trumpian age can hold under pressure.”

Europe, says Hayward, should watch closely. (The New Statesman (£))

🗣️Claiming “good teachers are under siege” from the educational establishment - or “blob” - Michael Gove takes particular aim at Hilary Cremin, the head of the Education Faculty at the University of Cambridge, who was recently embroiled in the Jason Arday scandal.

She has written a book on her educational philosophy; he finds it packed with “idiocies”.

“The work actively rejects not just the need for discipline, knowledge and testing in schools but the very idea of our schools themselves,” writes Gove. “They are damned as embodiments of a failed neo-liberal notion of modernity built on the flawed principles of the Enlightenment.

“The book exhibits all the weaknesses of modern academia: solipsistic personal reminiscence is treated as ‘fieldwork’, spurious authority is sought by citing other works, themselves written in impenetrable jargon, statistics are deployed in an effort to prove a point but without any recognition that correlation does not equal causation.

“Professor Cremin is not a junior research fellow feeling her way to an understanding of her discipline; nor is she Titania McGrath’s woker sister. She is the woman responsible for what those who are supposed to be our best teachers are themselves taught. And yet in her major published work she doesn’t just display ignorance, she flaunts and celebrates it. By dancing on the grave of learning.” (Spectator (£))

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