In your briefing today:

📣 A wave of youth crime is hitting the centres of Scotland’s two biggest cities, with business owners complaining of “untouchable” child shoplifters causing chaos in their stores, and warning that it’s only a matter of time before a shopkeeper is seriously injured.

📣 The head of MI5, Sir Ken McCallum, has warned that AI is “supercharging” the threat to Britain from biological, radiological and chemical attacks. He also said there had been a “significant” increase in extreme right-wing terrorism, linked to the migrant crisis. (Times)

📣 Pope Leo XIV has been diagnosed with lung cancer and has had the lower lobe of his right lung removed in an operation in Rome. The type of cancer has been identified as Pulmonary adenocarcinoma, which is common and is regarded as a less aggressive form of the disease than others. (CNN)

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📣 Scotland’s ethics watchdog has defended its decision to shred documents related to freedom-of-speech cases after only 12 months, after it was found to have acted unlawfully in a misconduct case against a Glasgow councillor. (Herald has the exclusive)

📣 More than two-thirds of Scots back a “pragmatic” approach to new North Sea oil and gas development, alongside investment in renewables. (Holyrood)

📣 Scotland’s national orchestra is facing a financial crisis, having posted its first losses in more than a decade. The chief executive of the RSNO said stagnant grants were endangering the organisation, despite redundancies and more expensive tickets. (Scotsman has the exclusive)

📣 Donald Trump has sacked the US Ambassador to Greece, former Fox News star Kimberly Guilfoyle. The Wall Street Journal goes inside her final days in the job, as she tried to claim incriminating text messages appearing to ask for $100,000 from a Trump donor were, in fact, generated by AI. (WSJ)

📣 The family of the man who was killed by a tiger after he entered its enclosure at a wildlife park have described him as a “bright, warm and engaging” man. (BBC)

📣 Another AI safety warning: Anthropic warns we are only months away from AI models that could become self-replicating and capable of worming their way into internet-connected devices, such as smart fridges. (Guardian)

📣 The man convicted of organising the murder of rapper Tupac Shakur has been sentenced to 40 years in prison. (NBC)

⚽️ Scotland’s women recovered from a tough start to win 3-2 against the Czech Republic in their World Cup qualification play-off, recording a comfortable 5-2 aggregate win and setting up a tough clash against Sweden. (Report & 🎥 highlights)

⚽️ Manchester United went down 2-0 to Atletico Madrid last night, and defender Lisandro Martinez wasted no time in launching an attack on the club’s hierarchy for failing to strengthen the side over the summer. (BBC)

⚽️ There’s more Champions League action tonight - the pick of the games include:

⚽️ Chris Sutton thinks Celtic’s misfiring striker Kasper Hogh is ready to “come good” against Benfica tomorrow night. (Daily Record)

⚽️ England’s football regulator, David Kogan, says he’ll resign if he faces political pressure over the Manchester City case. (Guardian)

🗣️ Andy Burnham has promised to explore options to replace first-past-the-post elections for Westminster, which could catapult the SNP to the heart of UK-wide power, notes Kenny Farquharson.

Had we had proportional representation since the 1990s, “no party would have won a majority in any of the past eight elections. Even Tony Blair’s landslide in 1997 would have left Labour 53 seats short. Multi-party alliances would have been required for power every single time,” research shows.

Farquharson does not believe Burnham has fully thought through the implications of PR for Westminster. And nor, he suggests, has the SNP.

“Is the party psychologically prepared to play a central role in the daily life of the British state? Is it politically ready to join a centre-left governing alliance in the United Kingdom, and to do so on a semi-permanent basis? I think the answer to these questions is no,” he says.

“Put simply, SNP members did not sign up to become an instrumental part of the governance of the British state. If such a function is indeed to become a key part of the SNP job description, it will require quite a shift in mindset.” (Times)

🗣️ The BBC is losing Scotland and doesn’t seem to know it, thinks Pat Kane. Amid hefty cuts across the BBC’s operations, driven by former Google boss Matt Brittin, the Corporation’s new director general, the BBC Scotland channel will likely face the axe, with its content moving online only.

“From a Scottish perch (and certainly for the indy-minded), the ‘future of the BBC’ is always a complex affair,” writes Kane. Non-payment of the licence fee is higher in Scotland than elsewhere in the UK, he notes: “it’s difficult not to conclude that there’s an additional reduced legitimacy to the BBC in Scotland, post indyref.”

Yet he “always felt there was a cart-before-the-horse aspect to past agitations about “Scottish Sixes”, or dedicated Scottish channels.

“Did we really expect that having a prime-time TV news show – mixing together Scots, British and global stories – would help bring about a state?

“With macroeconomics and geopolitics excised from Scottish relevance, what was there to anchor the social and cultural reporting?

“Like so much of the channel, whenever I tuned in, it seemed the Nine’s subtitle was ‘Scottish Lifestyle News’. To be honest, there was a howling vacuum where the apparatus and affairs of an independent state should have been.” (The National)

🗣️ Euan McColm is unimpressed by plans from SNP MSP Hannah Mary Goodlad to hire an artist-in-residence for £11,000 between November and February. “No artist with a shred of integrity will apply for this role,” writes McColm. “It is a refuge for a talentless hack, willing to take their ‘inspiration’ from another’s ideology.”

There’s been a “predictable” backlash from opposition parties to Goodlad’s plan. And even a fellow SNP MSP, frustrated at the row during a cost-of-living crisis, tells McColm: “I’ve got enough on my plate without having to explain to constituents why it’s absolutely fine for Hannah to hire an artist to commemorate how amazing she is.

But the minister for public finance is unrepentant, describing her critics as “trolls”. “I wouldn’t be hiring for the role if there wasn’t a need,” she said in a video defending the job. (Mail (£))

📣 Vicky Allan and her partner drove the NC500 route in an electric car, and wrote a feature earlier in the week about the anxiety of driving through rural Scotland entirely reliant on public chargers.

In her Winds of Change column, Allan reflects on the wider fuel poverty she witnessed during the trip. There aren’t many EV drivers that far north, she notes. And, for locals largely reliant on diesel, it’s a hunt for cheaper options as costs sail beyond the once-unimaginable threshold of £2 a litre.

Heating oil is a huge cost in that part of the world, with so many homes off-grid. “Almost half of the Highlands households experience fuel poverty, double the 24% that experience it across the whole of Scotland,” writes Allan.

“What was also mentioned often on our tour was how, at the same time as feeling the sting of these costs, many of them are witnessing the development of large-scale energy infrastructure like wind farms or grid upgrades on their doorsteps, and feel they see none, or few, of the benefits.

“A resident of Kinlochbervie told me how she had paid £1500 for 1000 litres of oil to heat her home. ‘Why is it that all this energy is everywhere and a lot of the people who live here are living in fuel poverty?’” (Herald)

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