In your briefing today:

📣 The man accused of opening fire at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner railed against Trump administration policies and called himself a “Friendly Federal Assassin” in writings sent to family members minutes before he launched his attack. Cole Tomas Allen, a 31-year-old California tutor, remains in custody after his attack on Saturday night. (AP)

📣 Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar has hit out at “systematic failures” in women’s healthcare after figures emerged showing more than 5,000 women have spent more than a year on an NHS waiting list for gynacology treatment. His criticism comes ahead of the launch of the party’s women’s manifesto later today. (Herald)

📣 Chancellor Rachel Reeves is planning a fresh push for growth after the May elections next week, which will involve further tightening of “fiscal discipline” - which may be interpreted as cuts by others - along with closer ties with the EU, and reforms to the planning system.

Reeves is also planning speeches for mid-May and June to set out “responsible” plans to help households and businesses through the energy crisis that is expected to strike amid continued conflict with Iran. (The FT (£) has the exclusive)

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📣 A six-year-old girl has died and another child taken to hospital after they were hit by a car in Paisley on Saturday afternoon. (STV)

📣 The SNP’s Mairi McAllan says “too few” migrants are coming to Scotland and that migration is “good and necessary” for the economy. (BBC)

📣 Firefighters tackled a series of wildfires across Scotland over the weekend, after an extreme warning was issued towards the end of last week. That alert remains in place after grass fires at Loch Lomond, the Isle of Skye and near Lochinver. No injuries were reported. (BBC)

📣 A man has been arrested on suspicion of arson after a fire tore through a packed LGBT+ club in Milton Keynes in the small hours of Sunday morning. Remarkably, there were no reports of injuries. (BBC)

📣 Police will question Downing Street officials over the theft of Morgan McSweeney’s phone. (The Telegraph has the exclusive)

📣 Britain’s health is going backwards: people in the UK are spending less of the lives in good health than a decade ago. (Guardian)

📣 Benjamin Netanyahu’s biggest rivals have merged as they attempt to overthrow his coalition government. Former Prime Ministers, the right-wing Naftali Bennett and the centrist Yair Lapid have formed a new party called Together. (Sky News)

⚽️ Hearts took another step towards that league title they so covet with a win over Hibs - perhaps surprisingly narrow, given their opponents went down to nine men - as rivals Rangers fell to a 3-2 defeat to Motherwell at Ibrox.

⚽️ In England, the sponsors and broadcasters will be happy the FA Cup underdogs were dispatched this year, delivering a blockbuster Manchester City v Chelsea final. The London side booked their place with a determined display against Leeds United: as Phil McNulty points out, if ex-Blues manager Liam Rosenior was watching, he may wonder where that fight was when he was leading them. (Report & highlights)

🎱 Ronnie O’Sullivan and John Higgins will conclude their thrilling World Championship last 16 tie today after the Scot staged a comeback that left O’Sullivan punching the table in frustration. (Daily Record)

🗣️ Keir Starmer insists he’ll fight the next general election in an interview that was rather lost in the noise of events in Washington on Sunday morning.

The Sunday Times’ Josh Glancy spent two days on the road with the Prime Minister last week, and found him “doggedly compartmentalising and stubbornly determined to continue in the job.”

He’s deeply frustrated by Westminster’s “obsession” with the Mandelson affair, and “views a political-media class that only wants to talk about vetting forms and not about the Strait of Hormuz as fundamentally unserious.”

(And, in case you missed it, Early Line readers are, mostly, supportive: two-thirds of you don’t think he should resign over the affair). (Sunday Times)

🗣️ Is John Swinney planning big budget cuts after the election? We’ve already read a lot of criticism that no party is offering especially plausible budget numbers in their manifesto: now, a “silence” over plans for a new Monklands Hospital, when a decision had been due before parliament was dissolved, is raising concerns it might not get a green light at all. (Sunday Mail)

🗣️ The BBC is “biased” and BBC Scotland a “branch office” of its London headquarters according to Professor Catherine Happer, “Scotland’s leading academic” on the media, who speaks to Neil Mackay ahead of a new book being published by the University of Glasgow’s highly regarded Media Group.

The publish shares that view, it reports, a facet of what’s fascinating and important in here for those of us who care about the Scottish public’s relationship with the media. A resulting disengagment, powered in part from fallout from the independence referendum of 2014, has had serious consequences.

“The lack of knowledge of Scottish politics was really quite shocking in the last round of focus groups,” she says. “Happer says she’s ‘absolutely not’ claiming people who lack trust are stupid, reports Mackay. “They’re disaffected from the political system,” she says.

It’s a failure that strikes at the heart of the Scottish state. (The Sunday Herald)

🗣️ It took less than two hours for Kenyan Sabastian Sawe to win the London Marathon: an astonishing time that was fuelled, it was revealed later, by the world’s lightest running shoes, 150 miles of training running every week, and a breakfast of bread and honey. Some new carbohydrate gels may have helped, too. (Guardian)

🗣️ Tom Gatti’s interview with author Mick Herron, creator of Slow Horses, is a delight: it opens with the pair taking a look at the location for the grimy London HQ of his band of failed spies, a spot so perfect the producers of the Apple TV series found it unimprovable.

That means that, rather than build a more accessable alternative on a set, “they have, every year since 2020, pitched up on Aldersgate Street, dressed up the cafe as Lamb’s favourite Chinese, and scattered the pavement with rubbish and rain. (The Observer)

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