TODAY’S WEATHER

🌦️ After a damp start in Glasgow and Edinburgh, the day will settle down to be a cloudy one with sunny spells. Aberdeen and London will bright and dry all the way through. I’ll be mild everywhere, and hot in London, reaching 26 degrees. (Here’s the UK forecast).

THE BIG STORIES
Use the military to stop migrants, says Trump | Comics protest at Kimmel silencing | Ross makes “assult” claim

📣 President Donald Trump has urged Keir Starmer to consider using the military to stop small boat crossings, and warned that illegal immigration is destroying Britain “from within”.

Speaking on the final day of his State visit to the UK, Trump also said Britain and the United States had a “relationship like no other” and hailed the £150 billion technology partnership, signed during the trip, as a deal that would help the US and UK “dominate the future of artificial intelligence”. (BBC) (Guardian) (Times £) (Telegraph £)

• Six takeaways from the Starmer / Trump press conference (Independent)

• Beth Rigby: “For a prime minister who has perhaps had his hardest two weeks in office, Donald Trump became the unlikely elixir of a tough political run. It's not a sentence I imagined writing in the run-up to this state visit.” (Sky News)

• The New York Times: “Flattery and flourish for Trump. For his UK hosts, relief at avoiding strife.” (🎁Gift link)

📣 In the wake of the censorship of US late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel, taken off-air for making remarks about Trump’s reaction to the assassination of far-right activist Charlie Kirk, AP reports from Budapest on Trump’s inspiration for a clampdown on the media.

The dateline is no accident: Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán is “revered by many conservatives in the US,” not least for his chipping away “at speech freedoms and independent media while consolidating political power.” (AP)

• Trump suggests some TV networks should have their licences "taken away" (BBC)

• Rival late-night hosts have decried the suspension of Kimmel’s show as a “blatant assault on freedom of speech” (Guardian)

📣 Former Scottish Conservatives leader Douglas Ross said he was “physically assaulted and verbally abused” by SNP minister Jamie Hepburn in the Scottish Parliament earlier this week.

Hepburn acknowledged he had used some “choice words” during an interaction between the pair but denied anything more than that.

Ross said he’d be taking the matter up with parliamentary police. (Holyrood)

• There are suggestions the rammy between the men was related to seagulls. (Daily Record)

IDEAS
From the weekly magazines: How Israel is “losing America”, lessons from history, New York’s insurgent candidate, and the future of work

🗣️ Israel is “losing America”, The Economist says in a leader, and that should worry Israelis. The country “depends increasingly” on America: it’s all that stands between “a paraiah status that would have dire implications for its diplomatic, legal and military security”.

“For all [Binjamin] Netanyahu’s blithe assurances that relations with America are perfectly solid, they are not,” the newspaper says in a leader.

Polling in the US shows Americans on both sides of its political divide hold an unfavourable view of Israel, and now they are a majority: 53%.

What’s gone wrong? For Democrats, Israel’s rightwards lurch and projection of “their dismay at America’s history of slavery and new-colonialism onto oppressed Palestinians and Israeli settlers, even though the comparison is strained.” For Republicans, it’s divergent interests - anger over using taxpayer money ($300 billion since 1948) when a regional peace seems far away.

“A sudden loss of popular American support would be a catastrophe for Israel—a small country of 10m people in a dangerous and hostile neighbourhood.” (The Economist £)

🗣️Michael Gove offers a thoughtful, if disturbing, leader in The Spectator, seeing historical precedent as “our politics has increasingly moved from the capital’s corridors to its streets”. That shift offers parallels from the Weimar Republic. “Any mention of the agonies of 20th-century Germany risks descending into overwrought references to Nazis at the threshold of power,” he notes. “Any comparison to that era demands care.

“To be clear, there is no figure in our own politics that should be compared with the Austrian corporal. But other parallels are inescapable.”

That shift to street politics is powered by the failure of democratic institutions to deliver. Combined with economic insecurity which has made many poorer, and the country close to broke, “the intellectual and cultural energy is, as it was then, with the most radical and transgressive forces.

“The appetite for a future right-wing government in Britain to rule without constraint, with existing conventions discarded, is growing,” he writes.

But there is hope from history, too. Roosevelt’s America existed in the same age, and met the challenge.

“If your lodestar is ‘the forgotten man’, the citizen who has been disempowered by global forces and who you will restore to dignity, you can forge a brighter future.” (The Spectator £)

🗣️ Ross Barkan interviews insurgent New York Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, darling of the American left. Mandani rose from a zero rating in the polls less than a year ago to beat Andrew Cuomo, the former New York governor, in the Democratic primary, despite the latter’s experience, endorsements and money.

Success means “every progressive and leftist organiser from across the country (but also in the UK and Europe) is wondering whether the Mamdani model is truly exportable,” says Barken. “The unsatisfying answer is: maybe.”(The New Statesman £)

🗣️ If you’re interested in the future of work, look to China’s 200 million gig workers. They are “a warning for the world,” says The Economist. What are the lessons?

China shows, first, that manufacturing jobs can be displaced by AI or de-skilled by automation. Second, it’s futile to try and stamp out gig work in favour of permanent jobs: the alternative to gig work is often no work at all. Third, governments need to re-think the social contract to make gig work, work: regulate the platforms, “nudge” the gig work platforms to provide benefits such as Insurance and health care. (The Economist £)

AROUND SCOTLAND

📣 The Scottish Government has been branded “cowardly” over its decision to exempt certain properties from rent controls in an attempt to boost housebuilding. (Scotsman)

📣 Police Scotland has backed a proposal from Alba MSP Ash Regan to criminalise the buying of sex, saying “buying sex is a form of exploitation and should be covered by law.” (The Record has the exclusive)

📣 St Andrews University has been named the best in Scotland in the latest Sunday Times rankings, while the University of Strathclyde is - slightly confusingly - the guide’s Scottish University of the Year and the UK’s Runner-up University of the Year. (STV)

AROUND THE UK & WORLD

📣 Two men and a woman have been arrested in Essex on suspicion of spying for Russia. (The Independent)

📣 A split has opened between Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana in the formation of their new leftwing party. The former Labour leader has confirmed a referral to the Information Commissioner’s Office over an unauthorised membership portal promoted by his co-leader Sultana, who has claimed she has been frozen out by a “sexist boys’ club” inside the party. (Guardian)

📣 Defeated Presidential candidate Kamala Harris is publishing a book about her experience: 107 days (referring to the length of her campaign, after Joe Biden decided not to run) is said to pull no punches. AP has a rundown of its best bits. (AP)

📣 The band Massive Attack say they will pull their catalogue from Spotify in protest at founder Daniel Ek investing €600 million in the military AI company Helsing. At send time, the act’s music was still on the platform. (Guardian)

📣 A team of researchers from Japan who experimented by painting cows with zebra-like stripes to prevent flies from biting them have been honoured with one of this year’s Ig Nobel prize for comical scientific achievement. (AP)

SPORT

⚽️ The arrival in Scotland of Rangers chairman Andrew Cavenagh should make embattled head coach Russell Martin “worried”, according to former Ibrox defender Alan Hutton. Cavenagh will take in Saturday’s Premier Sports Cup clash with Hibs at Ibrox, with fan protests and a thin crowd likely to ram home how unpopular Martin is. (Scotsman)

• Former Rangers boss Barry Ferguson says he “can’t” urge Rangers fans to be patient with Martin. He says they’ve made their minds up, and nobody will be able to win them over. (Daily Record)

⚽️ Former Celtic star Stiliyan Petrov says the club “must” offer Brendan Rodgers a new contract. "He's proven around the world how good he is as a manager,” said Petrov. “So he has the right to make demands and to ask for players, for the club spending money.” (The Herald)

📣 It’s a packed weekend for sport, with an array of top-class football (and probably some duff football, too) on both sides of the border, Formula 1 action, world-class athletics and women’s rugby to enjoy from your sofa.

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