THE BIG STORIES
University’s “darkest day” | Ukraine accepts ceasefire plan | Rainforest highway for green summit

📣 It was the University of Dundee’s darkest day, according to the city’s newspaper The Courier: more than 600 people, or 20% of the workforce, are at risk of losing their jobs as the University restructures to plug a £35 million hole in finances. Around 200 academics will lose their jobs, the rest from the university’s professional services ranks. The university will be restructured from eight schools to three faculties, with cuts to teaching and research. (Guardian)

• Talking to the Courier, the University’s interim principal said the institution could have bounced back from managerial mistakes had it not been for higher education's structural funding problems. (Dundee Courier)

• An external investigation has been launched to find out “what went wrong” at Dundee. (The Scotsman)

📣 Ukraine has accepted the terms of a US-brokered 30-day ceasefire, which is now being put to Russia. There are doubts Putin will accept but, in the meantime, the US has started sharing military intelligence with Ukraine once more. (Reuters)

• The agreement between the US and Ukraine over a proposed temporary ceasefire represents a remarkable change of course. (BBC)

📣 File under “you couldn’t make it up”: A four-lane highway is being built for the COP30 climate summit in the Brazilian city of Belém, cutting through tens of thousands of acres of protected Amazon rainforest. (BBC)

IDEAS
Schadenfreude is painless, up to a point

🗣️ Like all good columnists, Alex Massie managed to articulate something yesterday that, until I read it, had only been lurking in the back of my mind. “Schadenfreude is not an especially ennobling sentiment but it remains irresistible,” he wrote in his excellent newsletter.

“The tanking of the American stock market, spooked by the new president’s bone-headed enthusiasm for tariffs, is an expensive pleasure for many of us,” he continued. “Expensive because many of our pensions are to one extent or another keenly interested in the Dow Jones Index; a pleasure because comeuppance is a dish to be enjoyed at any temperature.”

Indeed so. It turns out Alex had, also, been taking a grim pleasure in watching Tesla’s TSLA ( ▲ 3.8% ) stock take a dive, powered by Elon Musk’s nasty little interjections in American and global politics. I’m not sure Musk cares much about what we think, but I think he’ll care passionately if his cars become as ruinously popular as he is.

(It may be that Trump sacks Musk soon, anyway - do read Edward Luce’s column on Musk (£) if you have a FT subscription: it contains a number of astonishing morsels I’d not read elsewhere, including Trump’s request that his desk be disinfected after Musk brought his young son into the Oval office).

The question that taxes me, however, goes beyond whether a love of others’ comeuppance is one of my worst traits. It lies in whether those vandals in Washington will take the rest of us with them. Massie is right to note many of us have an investment, indirectly or not, in the fate of Wall Street. Even if we didn’t, if America caught a cold we’d all suffer.

The Economist shares that concern. “With his aggressive and erratic protectionism, Mr Trump is playing with fire,” it wrote last week (£), before this week’s stock market storms. His tariffs on Mexico and Canada were destroying one of the world’s most integrated supply chains, it wrote: it would make everyone poorer.

The biggest concern is that Trump’s decisions are far less bounded than expected. Investors had expected him to act in their interest: he is not. Nor are more reasoned voices around him being heeded. That’ll harm them, it’ll harm America’s trading partners, and it’ll harm Americans because, for instance, “protecting America’s 1.9m farms from competition will inflate the grocery bills of its nearly 300m consumers.” Expensive food was one of the reasons Trump got elected.

But of course the Economist, famously liberal, is against Trump’s tariffs. What about more likely bedfellows - such as The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board? Even they’re getting cold feet. In a leader asking “Will there be a Trump recession?” (£) they suggest there might only be a “slowdown”… “But the higher costs and uncertainty caused by his tariffs are hurting the economy now. If Mr. Trump wants to quiet recession alarm, he would be wise to put his tariff plans on the shelf.”

I doubt the President they backed will hear them now. The trouble is, reading this as I read Massie’s, I can’t help but think we’re all strapped in for an unpleasant ride.

AROUND SCOTLAND

📣 Anti-alcohol campaigners have seized on a report which concludes allowing football fans to drink inside Scottish stadiums would bring “increased risk” to fan safety and public order, as well as run counter to Scottish Government policy to reduce the availability of alcohol. (Daily Record) (Read the report)

📣 Plans to force homebuyers to switch to greener heating soon after their purchase have been scrapped by the Scottish Government. They had been drawn up by the Scottish Greens when they were in government: the SNP now says they would “make people poorer”. (BBC)

📣 Billy Joel has rescheduled his Murrayfield gig, due for this summer. He’s recovering from heart surgery, so has put the event back to June 2026. (Edinburgh LIve)

📣 Good news for Argyll and Bute: a £70 million growth deal for the area, which will fund various projects, including the renovation of the Grade A-listed Rothesay Pavilion. The money is coming from both the UK and Scottish governments. (Business Insider)

AROUND THE UK

📣 The captain of one of the ships involved in Monday’s North Sea collision has been arrested on suspicion of gross negligence manslaughter. His ship, the Solong, collided with an oil tanker. One crew member remains missing, presumed dead. (STV)

📣 An emotionally charged sentencing for misogynist killer Kyle Clifford heard him handed a whole life order for murdering Carol, Hannah and Louise Hunt. Clifford was told “the screams of hell” await him by BBC broadcaster John Hunt, father of Louise and Hannah and husband to Carol. (Guardian)

📣 Children under eight shouldn’t be given slushies, parents are being warned: an ingredient can leave them unwell. (Metro)

AROUND THE WORLD

🌎 Trump’s 25% tariffs on steel and aluminium go into effect today. The U.S. president has also imposed separate tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China, with plans to also tax imports from the European Union, Brazil and South Korea from early April. (AP)

• Europe will impose counter-tariffs on $28 billion of US goods, “from boats to bourbon” and other items as-yet undecided. The UK is not yet planning counter-tariffs. (Reuters)

🌎 Europe’s €150 billion defence fund should be spent on European weapons, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said, calling for Europe’s defence industry to be built up as the continent rearms. (Semafor) (Read von der Leyen’s speech)

🌎 Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said he would not negotiate with the U.S. while being threatened, telling President Donald Trump to "do whatever the hell you want". (Reuters)

BUSINESS & ECONOMICS

💰 It’s not just the economy that is worrying Wall Street - it’s a concern about the AI-related stocks which have boomed in recent years. (Yahoo Finance)

💰 Brewdog has another new Chief Executive: James Arrow has stepped down after only 10 months in the job, with CFO James Taylor taking over. Arrow replaced founder James Watt in May last year. (Daily Business)

💰 STV Group’s new boss has hailed the media company’s performance despite “a challenging market backdrop”. (The Scotsman)

SPORT

⚽️ Liverpool tumbled out of the Champions League last night, losing to PSG on penalties at Anfield. Arsenal and Aston Villa take commanding leads into their last 16 ties tonight. (BBC)

⚽️ Scotland manager Steve Clarke has announced the Scotland squad for the Nations League play-off games against Greece. There are two surprise additions, both youthful: Lennon Miller of Motherwell, and James Wilson of Hearts. (The Scotsman)

• Clarke said he was “75% sure” this would be his last big tournament in charge of the national team. (BBC)

⚽️ Manchester United has unveiled a remarkable plan for a 100,000-seater stadium to replace Old Trafford, featuring vast external public spaces and three towers which would be visible for miles. The club claims the £2 billion stadium could be built in only five years, using the Manchester Ship Canal to ship prefabricated parts to the building site. (🎥 See the video)