In your briefing today:

📣 Donald Trump is unhappy with Iran over its handling of the Strait of Hormuz, complaining it is being “dishonourable” over allowing oil tankers to pass through. His comments cast further doubts on how long the ceasefire between Iran and the US will last, with continued strikes by Israel on Lebanon also creating tensions.

📣 Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar insists the election “is not over” after an opinion poll found his party trailing the SNP by 24 points. (Daily Record)

📣 Melania Trump apparently wrong-footed her husband with an unexpected statement saying she “didn’t know” Jeffrey Epstein and was not his victim.

The First Lady issued her statement, in person, in a White House press conference: the reason for the statement wasn’t clear, as there has been no recent reporting linking her to the disgraced financier.

President Trump said he “didn’t know anything about” the statement either. (Mirror)

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📣 Former Scotland rugby captain Stuart Hogg, a convicted domestic abuser, has again been banned from contacting his ex-wife. (BBC)

📣 The manager of Scotland’s only alcohol-free bar has been banned from driving after crashing his car while five times over the legal limit. (Aberdeen Live)

📣 A new £3 million “homeless village” has been opened in South Lanarkshire: the social enterprise behind it, Social Bite, hopes the supported living community - its second - is a model that can be repeated elsewhere. (Big Issue)

📣 The Government should already be backing new North Sea drilling licenses, Sir Tony Blair’s think tank says. (Scotsman)

📣 Andy Murray’s Cromlix Hotel will open with two new restaurants next month: the Dundee Courier has artists’ impressions of the new rooms, and an interview with one of its managers to learn more. (The Courier has the exclusive)

📣 Sir Keir Starmer has said the UK must become more resilient to deal with a “volatile and dangerous world”. (BBC)

📣 Russia ran a submarine operation over vital cables and pipelines in waters north of the UK, Defence Secretary John Healey has said. A warship and aircraft were sent to deter the “malign” activity, he said. (BBC)

📣 Russia and Ukraine have agreed to a ceasefire ahead of the Orthodox Easter. (Independent)

⚽️ Six games to go: the Scottish Premiership remains a three-way fight, with Hearts in the box seat, and their boss Derek McInnes is urging his team to finish off the job. “We’re that close,” he says, although his side have won only half their last 10 league games. They face Motherwell this weekend in Edinburgh. (Daily Record)

⛳️ In the Masters, defending champion Rory McIlroy is off to a “great start” (The Scotsman)

⚽️ Scotland legend Andy Robertson will leave Liverpool at the end of the season, the club has announced. (The Herald)

🗣️ It is, says Will Dunn, a silent coup: artificial intelligence has “captured” Westminster, with political speeches and pieces of legislation being drafted by chatbots, government departments - barely qualified to use or understand the technology - squabbling over who gets to regulate its use, politicians largely blind to the moral, political and security questions around its widespread use.

None of this, of course, is likely to be news to regular readers of The Early Line, where we’ve featured the rise of AI, its power, and the issues around its use regularly. But the government machine is unprepared, says Dunn.

“This is not a story about how AI works,” he writes. “It’s not about whether it is going to become sentient, make us rich, or redundant. It is a story about power. It is about how politicians became distracted by a shiny new thing, and failed to understand – or chose not to ask – what it might cost. It is not about whether AI will help itself to your job. It is about whether the people who make AI are helping themselves to your country.”

At the heart of Dunn’s thesis: all the AI being used in government is made elsewhere. The “UK’s one globally significant AI company, DeepMind” was acquired by Googe lin 2014.

And if AI is being used heavily, then the thinking of government is being done by the machines - based elsewhere - too. “Reading is thinking, and writing is thinking, and thinking is power,” he says. If AI is doing the heavy intellectual lifting, who is in charge? (New Statesman (£))

🗣️ Britain is, says Michael Simmons, a “freeloaders’ paradise”: those on Universal Credit (UC) get an extraordinary range of benefits, within a lifestyle that is carefully protected by the government.

That means - for instance - a family of four on UC can visit the Tower of London for £4 (usual price £107). Once there they can enjoy half-price food. Who pays for that? Everyone on a full-price ticket: Historic Royal Palaces, which runs the Tower, talks of adjusting “the admission income yield to ensure overall income isn’t reduced”.

It’s the same across countless other tourist attractions and state-subsidised leisure centres. And, says Simmons, although the UC benefits themselves are not that generous by European standards, when you mix in the additional health-related benefits many also qualify for, and consider the terms of those benefits (they don’t taper away, for instance, like many European countries’ equivalents), the British system becomes more generous.

“To take home the same amount as a three-child family with combined benefits would require a salary of roughly £71,000 before tax – rising to £90,000 to match the benefits of a family of five children,” he says. It is a system, he argues, of “extreme generosity” to those on benefits, and “punishment economics” for everyone else: one which could prove impossible to sustain in the long run. (The Spectator (£))

🗣️Donald Trump is the war’s biggest loser, says The Economist in a leader. “The conflict has set back his chief war aims and revealed the shallowness of his vision for a new way of wielding American power,” it says.

That does, at least, offer some hope for the “desperately fragile” peace which exists - to a point - today. “The best reason to think Mr Trump will not return to war is that he now grasps he should never have started it. His abhorrent chest-beating posts threatening to destroy Iran look like attempts to dress his climbdown in Kevlar,” it says.

Iran also has good reason to hold back: its leaders “keep being killed”, notes the magazine, while the wholesale destruction of power and transport networks makes the country harder to govern. “America cannot permanently keep its troops poised to attack. If war breaks out again it will be because Iran overplays its hand.” (The Economist (£))

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