In your briefing today:

📣 The SNP’s Mairi McAllan came under fire last night during the Question Time debate, the latest leadership hustings in the Scottish election campaign. It was being held in Aberdeen, and oil and gas workers accused the SNP of “not fighting our corner” over permission for new fossil fuel drilling.

McAllan appeared to concede, under pressure, that there should be more “evidence-led” drilling in the North Sea. (BBC) (The Scotsman)

📣 The US has “total control over the Strait of Hormuz”, Donald Trump has claimed again, as two container ships were seized by Iran and a US report warned it could take six months to clear the strait of mines. (Guardian)

📣 A BBC investigation claims Jeffrey Epstein housed victims of abuse in London flats after the Metropolitan Police had decided not to investigate Virginia Giuffre’s 2015 allegations that she had been a victim of trafficking to London. (BBC)

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📣 A wildfire warning has been issued for large parts of Scotland, with firefighters having to tackle a large grass fire in Aberdeen just hours after the alerts were issued. (BBC)

📣 Two boys were hospitalized after a group of school children allegedly through fireworks at each other at a Glasgow school yesterday. (STV)

📣 A Ghanaian man who gained fame last summer for leading a self-styled “tribe” in a Scottish Borders woodland has been deported, the Home Office has confirmed. (BBC)

📣 There are calls to ban sharing of medical data with China after the - anonymized - medical data of 500,000 Britons were put up for sale on a Chinese website. (Times)

📣 A US soldier has been charged with using classified information to win $400,000 on a prediction market bet involving the military operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, in which he took part. (AP)

📣 The US Navy Secretary staged a forlorn vigil in the lobby of the West Wing for more than an hour on Wednesday night, waiting to see if Donald Trump would save his job. He did not. (WSJ)

📣 Ukraine claims 12 Russian FSB officers were killed in a “drone swarm attack” on a Russian command centre. (Independent)

📣 The Mount Everest climbing season is under threat because a huge glacier is blocking the main route up. (Independent)

⚽️ With an Edinburgh derby looming large this weekend, the BBC has somehow managed to find two celebrity Hibs fans - Sir Andy Murray and Josh Taylor - who want to see a Hearts title win this season. I can only say the BBC’s research has been more effective than mine: all the Hibees of my acquaintance would love to see their side throw a huge spanner in the works of Derek McInnes’s title tilt this weekend. (BBC)

⚽️ Celtic captain Callum McGregor has issued a subtle warning that he’ll be off this summer unless the clubs shows some ambition in the transfer market. (Daily Record)

⚽️ The BBC’s Football Focus is being axed after 52 years, amid poor ratings and tough competition online. (The Sun)

🗣️The New Statesman’s Ailbhe Rea profiles the leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, Zack Polanski, finding a young politician who’s wildly popular with a left-wing, idealistic and similarly young crowd: for them, a beacon of hope amid the despair of Starmer’s Britain.

An interesting parallel the piece half draws: Polanski fulfills the same role for those supporters as Nigel Farage does for his older, right-wing backers.

“Both have turbocharged their movements by focusing on party membership […] Both are experiencing poll surges and have inflicted bruising by-election defeats on the Labour Party. Now they are facing the increased scrutiny and expectations that come with such growth.

“The Greens are also finding that they can dip into the “Reform-curious” voter pool in a way that Labour struggled to, once Brexit began to divide the electoral coalition that was starting to build under Corbyn. Polanski […] is finding he is competing with Farage for voters. (New Statesman)

🗣️ The Economist takes stock of iPhone maker Apple, in the week CEO Tim Cook decides to step down. The numbers it reels off are astonishing: Mr Cook, it says, put the iPhone in 1.5 billion pockets, “making the Apple logo ubiquitous from San Francisco to Seoul.

“Apple’s market value has grown 11-fold on Mr Cook’s watch as, counting everything including dividends, he has stuffed some $4.6 trillion into the pockets of Apple’s shareholders. That is over $850 million for every day of his long tenure,” the newspaper reports.

But if he made the iPhone as evocative of the zeitgeist “as big hair was of the 1980s”, will it be enough for an AI-dominated near future? It’s a dilemma incoming CEO John Ternus will have to navigate.

“The danger is that ai and trade wars make Apple a bet on the past,” it notes. But it also says “many elements of the globalized, consumer-centric world” Cook’s Apple helped create are worth keeping. “With luck, they will endure,” it concludes. (The Economist)

🗣️ Tim Shipman’s Spectator cover story on the Mandelson affair zooms in on the Civil Service turning against the Prime Minister. It’s worse than Boris, they say: a higher body count than anything since Thatcher, they add.

The most noteworthy aspect of the story is the collection of bitchy, if anonymously delivered, quotes from civil servants. We have one “Westminster veteran” saying: “I hope this will finally kill the absurd ‘Keir Starmer is a decent man’ narrative. He’s a shitweasel whose sole political talent is blaming others for his own failings.”

A “former mandarin” on Starmer: “This guy delegates to a fault. He is becoming very well-known in Whitehall as the man who wants to avoid taking responsibility for decisions. He’s the man with invisible fingerprints.”

A “former colleague” on Cat Little, the permanent secretary at the Cabinet Office, who took more than a week to inform Starmer about Mandelson’s vetting: “‘I wouldn’t use her to prop open a door, unless I definitely wanted the door to shut.‘ (Her aides say she has a ‘brilliant record’.)” (The Spectator)

🗣️Waterstones, the bookseller, shows there is still life in the British high street, reckons The Economist.

It’s well run: in trouble 15 years ago, obsessed by controlling costs, it brought in James Daunt - the independent bookseller - to sort things out. He closed some stores, and invested in the rest, giving staff autonomy to make recommendations and arrange their shops as they saw fit. That brings local touches, and an environment that encourages browsing.

“Waterstones proves that sticking to what Mr Springham calls ‘the fundamentals of retailing’ can go a long way,” the newspaper says, approvingly. (The Economist)

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