In your briefing today:

📣 Prime Minister Keir Starmer has met Chinese President Xi Jingping, with Starmer calling for a “more sophisticated” relationship with the superpower.

After an hour-and-a-half meeting with Xi in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing he said it had been “too long” since a British prime minister had visited China, which he described as a “vital player on the global stage”. (Independent)

📣 Chinese wind turbine producer MingYang has a “plan B” that could see it take its £1.5 billion plan for a new factory to a site in continental Europe should the UK Government continue to delay making a decision on its first-choice location in the Scottish Highlands.

The warning follows the revelation that the Prime Minister, who was expected to announce the factory while in Beijing this week, has delayed a decision due to national security concerns. There have been warnings that the lack of a decision is holding up not only MingYang’s plans, but other big developments in the region. (Scotsman)

📣 There’s been a big increase in sex attack and harassment cases at Scottish universities with more than 600 reports over the last five years. The highest number of complaints was made at Edinburgh University, with 127 filed, followed by 109 at Glasgow University and 85 at St Andrews. (The Daily Record has the exclusive)

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📣 Pupils at Fettes College in Edinburgh were "wholly failed" by the private school, where abuse flourished over four decades, the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry has found. Inquiry chairwoman Lady Smith found children were sexually, physically and emotionally abused from the 1950s until the 1980s. She said it is "shameful" that children were not protected from abuse, which has left some still suffering decades on. (Mail) (STV)

📣 Scotland’s Accounts Commission has warned that councils must “fundamentally reconfigure” the way they operate if they are to become financially sustainable. (Scotsman)

📣 Clunky, old IT systems across the NHS in Scotland, some of which take 20 minutes to start up, are putting patients at risk, according to GPs. (The Herald has the exclusive)

📣 A train crash in Aberdeenshire would likely have had a better outcome if the set involved had been built to modern safety standards, an inquiry has heard. (BBC)

📣 “Swift bricks” will be installed in all new buildings in Scotland after MSPs decided to offer endangered cavity-nesting birds more places to nest. It’s a move that has been resisted across the rest of the UK, to date. (Guardian)

📣 Newly-discovered videos show an altercation between Minneapolis nurse Alex Pretti and federal officers 11 days before he was killed. (Guardian)

📣 An assisted dying bill for England and Wales stands little chance of becoming law this year, a campaigner has warned, amid objections in the House of Lords. (BBC)

📣 Consumers blaming weight-loss jabs for eye strokes, ruptured colons and vomiting are launching lawsuits against some of the world’s biggest drug manufacturers. (Independent)

⚽️ Last night’s Champions League produced one of those stunning moments people will talk about for days to come: Jose Mourinho’s Benfica, needing not just to beat Real Madrid but by a couple of goals to continue in the tournament, won a free kick in the last minute of time added on.

Up stepped goalkeeper Anatoly Trubin to join the attackers in the box… and send a bullet header into the net. "A fantastic goal, a historic goal, a goal that nearly brought the whole stadium down - and I think it was very deserved for us," Mourinho said. (BBC: Report & highlights)

⚽️ In the Europa League tonight, Celtic host Utrcht needing a win. (BBC)

⚽️ Hibs’ Kieron Bowie looks set to leave the club after Hellas Verona came back with a £6 million bid for the striker. (Daily Record)

🗣️ If it feels like President Donald Trump’s rhetoric has suddenly escalated when it comes to relations with the country, that’s because it has.

Yes, he had plenty to say during the protests across Iran at the start of the year. In early January, Trump threatened Iran should it start shooting protesters, prompting Iran’s Foreign Minister to warn Trump of a “red line” should US forces attempt to “rescue” protesters, as Trump had suggested.

Trump continued his rhetoric over the next 10 days, as state forces were clearly - and very brutally - putting those protests down. But by January 15, he was asserting that “the killing in Iran is stopping”: Middle Eastern leaders had “strenuously” lobbied against military strikes on Iran because they would lead to "certain” Iranian counterstrikes on their countries, according to the Guardian.

While the US and its allies discussed what to do, Iran continued to quell the protests with its own violence. The vast scale of death from those operations is unclear: official figures of around 3,000 fatalities would be horrific enough, but continuing tallies by human rights organisations - all, it should be noted, inevitably based outside Iran - are now suggesting numbers north of 30,000.

Trump was then distracted by his own problems: the anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis and the row with European countries over Greenland took up his attention. But with reports of that soaring death toll getting louder, a week ago today he revealed a group of ships based around the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln was being sent to the Middle East.

According to CBS News, “The USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier and its escort ships were in the Indian Ocean as of Friday morning, according to defence officials. The carrier strike group brings about 5,000 sailors and Marines with squadrons of fighter jets, helicopters, and electronic attack aircraft.”

Will it be put to use? As the Wall Street Journal reports today (🎁 gift link), it is a formidable force. But Iran is still capable of a deadly response - not necessarily directly at the US, but certainly at allies, including Israel. A particular concern is its arsenal of 2,000 long-range missiles that could strike as far as Israel, or hit ships in the Gulf, or Straits of Hormuz. Up to 40,000 US troops are also stationed within reach of Iranian missiles.

It’s also not clear what impact a strike on Iran would have on the regime there, or the chances of it being toppled. The Chatham House think tank set out the quandaries two weeks ago: “Trump’s threats should be taken seriously, but Iran is not Venezuela – it’s a nation of 90 million people with a resilient regime that can still wreak havoc both at home and abroad.

“Decapitating the Maduro regime is one thing. Decapitating the theocracy in Tehran is another. Does Trump, who has championed an America-First foreign policy, have the appetite to launch what could be an open-ended war against Iran, or deal with what most probably will be a messy day after?”

Trump’s latest warnings - telling Tehran “time is running out” to negotiate a deal on its nuclear programme, and referring to that "massive Armada" that is "moving quickly, with great power, enthusiasm, and purpose" - sound troubling, but they may also suggest there is still a negotiated way out of armed confrontation. It could be that neither the Iranian regime nor the White House particularly wants an armed confrontation, and that they will - eventually - de-escalate. And there is always the rule of TACO.

But it is clear that the arrival of the task force within range of Iran will give Trump a choice to make, with the need to weigh up the potential costs to the US - and Middle Eastern countries - against the chances of a strike managing to achieve meaningful change.

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