In your briefing today:

📣 A quarter-century on from the 9/11 attacks, the head of MI5 has warned Britain faces greater and more complex terrorism threats than it did in 2001. Sir Ken McCallum says there are also multiple state threats on top of the dangers from Islamic extremism.

He quotes former CIA director James Wooley, who talked of the West slaying “a large dragon” after the Cold War. Sir Ken writes: “We now face the worst of both worlds: dragons are back, but snakes persist.”

Those “dragons” are, principally, Russia and China. The “snakes” are ongoing radical Islamic extremists. (The Independent has the exclusive)

📣 The legalisation of assisted dying in England and Wales could move a step closer today with a vote in the House of Commons, although it’s far from clear which way the vote will go, amid high-profile endorsement of Lauren Edwards’ bill and - in opposition - concern from medical groups and churches. (BBC)

📣 Former Education Secretary Michael Gove has - mischievously, one thinks - offered to work with the SNP to reform Scottish education after the latest PISA league tables showed young people here falling behind their English peers. (Times)

Over 4 million people have had the same lightbulb moment.

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📣 The Scottish Government is being taken to court over its decision - made without reference to Edinburgh City Council - for a 544-bed “super hostel” in the city’s West End. (Herald)

📣 Edinburgh’s councillors have voted to extend the city’s tram network south to the city’s Royal Infirmary, but put on hold controversial plans to extend to the North after an outcry over the planned route, and a lack of funding. (Edinburgh Live)

📣 An anti-immigrant group called the Pink Ladies has been criticised for supporting misogynist influencer Andrew Tate, who faces trafficking and abuse charges. (Daily Record)

📣 Comedian and broadcaster Hardeep Singh Kohli is to stand trial for rape and sex offences against five women. He has denied 20 charges. (BBC)

📣 US Vice President JD Vance has taken the “unusual” step of calling military commanders directly to hear their “unvarnished” assessments of the Iran war. What they have said does not concur with what he, President Trump and others have been saying publicly. (New York Times has the exclusive)

📣 AI company Anthropic says it has blocked “malicious use” of its systems that could have been used to develop biological weapons. (BBC)

📣 The UK’s electricity grid needs an urgent upgrade, or bills will go up and economic growth lost, the National Audit Office has warned. (Guardian)

⚽️ Plenty of goals last night in the Champions’ League:

⚽️ Football tonight: Hearts travel to Stenhousemuir in the first of the League Cup quarter-finals of the weekend. (7.45pm, Premier Sports 1)

🏉 The head of World Rugby thinks this weekend’s staging of South Africa v New Zealand in Baltimore this weekend could lead to a Six Nations match being played in the US in the future. (Scotsman)

🗣️ The passage of time makes some memories of 9/11 a little less sharp. But some perceptions become more acute, such as Matthew D’Anonca’s opening line in a rangy essay on the implications of that terrible day.

“We began our conversation in one era, and ended it in another,” he writes: in other words, he began a lunch with a contact in the old world order, and emerged into the post 9/11 world. That is only clearer now we’re 25 years on. How many of us around at the time think back on how the world pivoted on those moments?

The rest of his essay tries to explain what the new era has meant. D’Ancona’s piece is laced with a despair that, to his eyes, we - the West - have yet to really understand what we ran up against that day. “To this day, progressive politicians have failed abjectly to get the measure of Islamism and to acknowledge the sheer, resilient force of the theocratic ideology driving these relentless attacks”, he writes.

None of it “was sufficient to persuade many on the left that Islamism was more than pseudo-religious cosplay, beneath which lay the familiar rebellion of the powerless”.

“They” were preparing for years, maybe even decades in some senses, for 9/11 and what has followed, says D’Ancona. Even now, we aren’t even especially sure, still, who “they” are, he suggests. But we continue to feel the impact of their violence a quarter century later. (The New World (£))

🗣️ Britain has lost its mind to shopping addiction, thinks Kate Mossman, who suggests she’s part of the problem as she shamefacedly rifles through the parcels left at her local corner shop delivery point.

There are lots of “dead” parcels, she notes: parcels that the buyers have no intention of picking up, because they didn’t really want them in the first place. The peak dopamine hit came days ago when they hit the order button. Eventually, they’ll be sent back.

Her weakness is Vinted, the used clothes platform, thanks in part to a clever interface which algorithmically suggests new items to you, tells you how much you’ve made from selling but never how much you’ve spent and - just like an online bookie - stores your money in an online account, rather than sending it to you.

“I have never had a compulsive relationship with alcohol, cigarettes or drugs, and I have no social media accounts – yet Vinted dominates my life,” she writes. (New Statesman (£))

🗣️ Scratch those worries about an AI jobs apocalypse. It’s postponed, says The Economist. An AI jobs boom is here, instead.

First, the caveats: some companies and workers are being disrupted by AI. Bad news, professional and business service workers. Sorry, tech workers at Microsoft and Meta, and even those at smaller firms as they “replace people with bots”.

But… “AI-related layoffs get lost in a churning jobs market where employers shed roughly 1.7m workers in a typical month,” the newspaper notes. “And the evidence so far is that AI is already creating a lot of jobs to replace those it has destroyed” - construction and infrastructure workers for data centres, while AI startups are “hiring like there is no tomorrow”. (Economist (£))

🗣️Amol Rajan, who has just stopped presenting BBC Radio 4’s Today programme in order to spend more time with his podcasting, offers the Diary in this week’s Spectator, offering to present his Views now he’s unencumbered by the BBC’s impartiality rules.

And so we learn he thinks “the system” (the civil service) isn’t up to the demands of the modern world, the big challenge of the day is (thus) the gap between what people need and what politics delivers, and that he’s worried about the national debt.

“You will have noticed,” he ventures, “that all these strong opinions are simply common sense,” apparently unaware that most people think this of their Views.

I hope the desire to speak his mind wasn’t what drove him out. (Spectator (£))

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