📣 Thanks, everyone, for the lovely words about Crystal Palace, and yesterday’s newsletter. It was a wonderful couple of days.

In your briefing today:

📣 Nicola Sturgeon says she was “deceived, betrayed and lied to” by Peter Murrell, her estranged husband who admitted to embezzling hundreds of thousands of pounds from the SNP.

The former first minister told an audience in Ireland she was having “probably the worst week” of her life, and coming to terms with being married to someone she “did not know at all”, and acknowledged people would have questions.

“This is a long-winded way of saying I am not OK”, she said, but insisted, “I will be OK, I am a strong, resilient person.” (Guardian)

📣 US and Iranian negotiators are close to an agreement to extend their ceasefire by another 60 days and start a new round of talks on Iran’s nuclear programme. But - despite reports that a deal, albeit tentative, had been reached, Vice-President JD Vance says there’s still some work to be done on sticking points. (BBC)

📣 A Russian drone has crashed into a Romanian apartment block, wounding two people and starting a fire. The drone was part of an attack on Ukraine, and the incident was described as an “irresponsible escalation” by authorities in the NATO-member country. (Guardian)

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📣 It’s been a tough couple of weeks for a community in Clackmannanshire, where 60 homes have been evacuated because of ground movement. The problems started, they said, when they spotted new cracks in their homes and heard strange noises. More streets could yet be evacuated. (BBC)

📣 Parents have expressed alarm after Erskine Stewart Melville, a private Edinburgh school, announced plans for a US-style lockdown practice to take place this morning. (Scotsman)

📣 A Scot who tried to smuggle migrants in a dangerous small boat has been jailed in France. (Times)

📣 Youth unemployment is costing the UK £125 billion a year, according to Alan Milburn’s well-trailed review of Britain’s youth jobs crisis - a figure higher than the country’s education budget, and twice what it spends on defence. (Guardian)

📣 Andy Burnham has accused Sir Tony Blair of failing to acknowledge that life for millions of Britons is much harder than it used to be, leaving a “gaping hole” in the former Prime Minister’s critique of modern Labour. (Independent)

📣 A Blue Origin rocket blew up on a launch pad at Cape Canaveral overnight, during testing. Nobody was injured in the vast explosion: the video is spectacular. (🎥 BBC)

📣 Are “heat spikes” becoming more common? One climate scientist says the sudden increase in temperatures seen in parts of the UK this week is “emerging earlier, intensifying faster and occurring across a much warmer background climate”. (BBC)

⚽️ Ian Maxwell, chief executive of the Scottish FA, has come out swinging at the organisation’s many critics. He says VAR is going nowhere despite a season pockmarked with fan anger about its accuracy. “VAR is working,” insisted the former footballer, who said anger about its effectiveness in Scotland was down to “the colour of your shirt your team is wearing”. (Daily Record)

⚽️ FIFA is facing legal action in at least three US states over claims it pushed up World Cup ticket prices by limiting supplies and switching ticket categories. (Sun)

📣 This weekly collection of the news magazines’ leading pieces does not generally form a theme… but this week’s does, by chance, as the Economist, New Statesman and Spectator alight on a similar subject: a world that is changing rapidly, dangerously, while western (especially British) political classes are utterly bemused by it all. All are worth your time.

🗣️”Covering British politics today is to be trapped somewhere between despair, horror, outrage and intrigue,” writes Tom McTague in The New Statesman. Britain has chosen delusion over reality about its position and the world around it, he writes.

He finds parallels with the 1840s, “that time of radical unrest, political, economic, social and technological”, with a parliament gripped by “surging tempers […] combining to overwhelm successive governments”. He also sees, today, a Westminster detached from a world that is rapidly becoming more dangerous, and a Whitehall utterly unable to respond to those changes.

Disraeli delivered a remarkable speech on “the Irish question” in February 1844, he notes, “exposing the extent of his radical imagination” and concluding that “If the connection with England prevented a resolution and a revolution was the only remedy, England logically is in the odious position of being the cause of all the misery of Ireland.”

So much of it translates, he suggests. He sees a crisis which is simple, and profound. “It is not the UK which is in the odious position of immiserating the people of this country, but the British state managing its affairs.” (New Statesman (£))

🗣️The Pope has written the political document of the year, reckons Spectator editor Michael Gove, taking on AI - “the greatest challenge of our times”. Despite being born into a Presbyterian culture - “Politically, I’m more Orange than Donald Trump’s skin tone,” says Gove, “today I am on my knees giving thanks to the Pope.

“AI will transform our economies and societies massively and irrevocably; it will change what it means to be human; it may even mark the end of humanity itself,” writes Gove. “If it takes the Pope to alert us to this revolution then perhaps the Reformation wasn’t such a good idea after all."

“In this debate we need politicians who are capable, in Gramsci’s terms, of pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will,” he says.

“In the UK, precious few politicians have even begun to enter this debate beyond uttering banalities and bromides.” (Spectator (£))

🗣️Boomers have screwed Europe, thinks the Economist’s Charlemagne. Where once poverty used to be largely geographic - rich west vs poorer east - now it’s generational, where youngsters struggle to move out their parents’ home, and 30-somethings pay vast taxes to fund the pensions of “of oldies who retired in their prime”.

“In most other rich places, including America, Japan and South Korea, over-65s derive most of their income from working a bit and drawing on private pensions they funded during their careers.

“Europeans quit their jobs early, live long and expect the state—ie, current taxpayers—to pick up the tab for their retirement plans.” And all this has political implications: “an older society is one that caters to the immediate present, not the future,” it says. (Economist (£))

🗣️A revolution in “smart” battlefield technology is making war a dumber choice, reports the Economist. The arrival of sensors, satellites, AI and drones has transformed combat and brought two new truths: “Technology has made it harder for any army to advance on the ground. It has also made it easier for weaker powers, when attacked by stronger ones, to cause havoc,” it says.

A huge shift is in how exposed soldiers are on the battlefield. “Sensors and satellites can see them; small, cheap drones can kill them,” it notes.

Tech has also spread very quickly: innovations from Ukraine have spread to Lebanon, to be faced by Israeli soldiers, and if China were to invade Taiwan, notes the newspaper, it would be met by a “blizzard” of drones. Western armies, lagging behind, need to train, adapt, and build their own tech to “blind, disrupt and elude” the devices.

The newspaper also has a chilling warning: the laws of war are under strain, and that should concern us in a world of long-range drones and missiles. In future wars, “Western civilians will not enjoy the sanctuary they have come to take for granted”. (Economist (£))

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