In your briefing today:

👋 Good morning Early Liners! A service note: I'm taking a holiday. Normally, I enjoy keeping things running even when I'm away, which is why The Early Line has been uninterrupted since the New Year. But timezones and visa regulations make doing so on my forthcoming trip impossible: I'm going to the US midwest as a tourist. Your Early Line will be back, refreshed and raring to go, on Tuesday 13 October. Thank you for your understanding.

📣 Donald Trump is calling on Europe to release diesel fuel reserves to dampen down global prices, as he considers a ban on exports of the fuel from the US ahead of the mid-term elections there next month.

Trump’s comments, made yesterday, followed a similar line to his Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who said US "farmers, truckers, and businesses should not be left carrying the burden" as prices soar. Diesel prices globally have inflated because of the US-Iran war, and a ban on exports from Russia.

Diesel prices in the US are already topping $6.50 a gallon. In the UK, diesel prices are already above £2 a litre (more than £7.57 a US gallon) at more expensive filling stations. Because diesel fuels commercial vehicles and machinery, a rise in its cost has immediate knock-on effects for prices in shops. There are also more than nine million diesel cars on UK roads. (BBC)

📣 Hundreds of jobs are under threat in Grangemouth after an agricultural chemical firm said it would close its operations. Syngenta says it’s unable to make its plant "competitive" in the face of international competition, and has placed 377 roles at risk.

Economy Secretary Stephen Flynn has described the plans as "extremely disappointing".

The move is another blow to an area that’s seen huge job losses in the last 18 months: the nearby oil refinery closed, at a cost of 400 jobs, last year, and earlier this year bus manufacturer Alexander Dennis said its Falkirk plant would close, with 115 jobs lost. (BBC)

📣 There have been more dramatic revelations from aboard that flydubai aircraft that was hijacked by a member of its own flight crew. One passenger, a dentist who helped save the other pilot who had been stabbed, has shared how the attacker begged him to take his life. (Mail)

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📣 There have been nearly 500 serious incidents in Scottish maternity and neonatal units in the last three years. Incidents include scores of neonatal deaths, as well as the deaths of mothers, fetal and neonatal injuries, and numerous other incidents described by health boards as “extreme” or “major.” (Scotsman has the exclusive)

📣 Labour MSP Monica Lennon has dismissed bullying claims against her as a “work of fiction”, saying no formal complaints have ever been made. (Times)

📣 He’s hired: businessman Mike Soutar, who famously worked alongside Sir Alan Sugar on The Apprentice, is to be the next Chancellor of Abertay University, Dundee. (Daily Business)

📣 New rules in Scottish supermarkets mean that sugary soft drinks, biscuits and some breakfast cereals have disappeared from the more tempting positions on shelves, such as entrances, checkouts, aisle ends and queueing areas. (BBC)

📣 A mum has given birth to Scotland's heaviest twin babies, who have weighed in at a remarkable 17lb 11oz. (Daily Record)

📣 Talks aimed at resolving the Drumcree parade dispute have broken up without agreement. Police say the situation in Portadown remains “challenging and complex”, but despite significant tensions, there has been no violence and no injuries. (Guardian)

📣 Death row inmate Christa Pike is critically ill, but alive and receiving “life-saving medical care” following a botched attempt at execution in Tennessee that saw eight needles used in the attempt to execute her. (Independent)

📣 The US is sending a third aircraft carrier and 9,000 more troops to the Middle East as President Trump warns of new strikes against Iran. (AP)

📣 The former head of the Royal Navy has been stripped of his knighthood, more than a year after he was sacked for having an affair with a junior colleague. (Forces News)

⚽️ As the sporting world continues to digest the implications of Manchester City’s vast “sham” sponsorship scandal, Andy Burnham has performed a reverse ferret on his comments about the club’s ownership. (Times)

⚽️ Celtic fans will be delighted to hear winger Jota is making his comeback in a bounce game against Falkirk today - but boss Martin O’Neill is warning he still has work to do before he’ll be fit to play for the first team. (Daily Record)

🗣️ The Economist goes big on the idea that Effective Altruism (EA) is this century’s biggest idea. It does not say this in an admiring way - indeed, it immediately qualifies its statement by saying the EA movement is “dangerous” - but it’s a big call.

What, exactly, is EA? At its simplest, explains the newspaper, it’s “a simple assumption, that ‘suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad.’”

So far, so easy. Adherents, then, are simply trying to eradicate those bad things. As one influential blog post, quoted by the Economist, puts it, they’re daily trying to answer the question: “How can I do the most good, with the resources available to me?”

Except… except, except. It’s gone well beyond that now. EA now “combines consequentialist philosophy - judging if an action is right or wrong based on outcomes, rather than adherence to rules - with stringent truth-seeking and celestial ambition.” Followed by a small band of affluent, very clever and often technologically-minded adherants, EA has big plans for us all.

The Economist continues: “Its proponents have formed tight communities, online and offline, with social norms that include an unemotional, direct style of conversation and a fondness for polyamory, among other rejections of convention. They have built hundreds of institutions that seek to bring more people into the movement and pursue its goals. Effective altruism, in short, has evolved from a research agenda into a cause.”

Increasingly, the movement is wanting to stare long into the future, and start making sweeping decisions that could impact on future generations - even if the findings of their reasoning are counter-intuitive and bad news for humanity.

“Anyone wielding a spreadsheet and grandiose claims about the future of humanity is one step away from anointing themself as a central planner,” the newspaper notes. “Moral authority in hand, the rights, welfare and opinions of a neighbour can come to seem unimportant.” And that’s where the problem lies. (Economist (£))

🗣️ Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has a big idea to get the young working: get a job or face life without benefits. That’s the exclusive in this week’s Spectator, which goes into some depth on her rather complex plan.

To summarise: under-25s who haven’t worked six months continuously won’t have access to Universal Credit. Instead, they’ll have to take part in a Get To Work programme, for which they’ll receive an allowance. If they haven’t got a job after that, they drop down on to a subsistence allowance. “This is the nanny state with menaces; Mary Poppins with an umbrella gun,” writes Shipman.

Badenoch’s wider comments to Shipman are also of interest. She sees opportunity in new PM Andy Burnham that she did not in Keir Starmer. Burnham has a clearer idea of who he is, and that will help her define the Conservatives against him. She says: “Hearing his speech, it’s clear we are now about to have a battle of ideas. It’s given me more confidence that, even in this messy political era, the Conservatives are going to win.” (Spectator (£))

🗣️ Twenty years on from the start of the financial crisis, is it happening again? That’s the not-especially-cheery question posed by Jay Elwes. And the answer: maybe. The ingredients are certainly there, he writes: with hugely over-valued AI companies, conflict and bad leadership around the globe, inflation and high borrowing, “What seems clear is that, if you were going to create the perfect scenario for a global financial and economic crisis, it would look very much like what we see now.”

But he also notes he lived through the last crisis. “We must all hope it doesn’t happen, and no one can tell the future. I also have to remember that people who watched the 2006-8 crisis at very close range came away with a Quixotic tendency to see potential crashes everywhere.”

Maybe - hopefully - it’s just that, right? (The New World (£))

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