In your briefing today:

📣 Strikes across the Middle East have continued overnight, with the US consulate in Dubai in flames and Israel launching strikes on targets in both Iran and Lebanon. Explosions have been heard in Tehran and Jerusalem on the fifth day of the war. (BBC) (AP)

Meanwhile, governments around the world are preparing to evacuate citizens stranded in the region. (BBC)

And President Donald Trump’s remarks about Keir Starmer - saying he was “no Churchill” - has raised new questions about the UK-US “special relationship” and the UK’s role in the war. (BBC)

📣 Reform’s Scottish leader has been accused of making “racist” remarks by blaming illegal immigration for a knife incident in Edinburgh which left two people injured. Malcolm Offord admitted he did not know the full facts about Monday’s events but said “we can tell by the photographs” that a surge in immigration had been a factor. The suspect, widely pictured on social media, had brown skin. (Times - gift link)

📣 Rachel Reeves delivered her Spring Statement with a promise that “people will be over £1,000 a year better off” by 2029, and the next General Election. But there are concerns that war in the Middle East has already rendered the prediction out of date. (Guardian)

While you were debating if AI would take your job, other people started using it to print money. Seriously.

That's not hyperbole. People are literally using ChatGPT to write Etsy descriptions that convert 3x better. Claude to build entire SaaS products without coding. Midjourney to create designs clients pay thousands for.

The Hustle found 200+ ways regular humans are turning AI into income. Subscribe to The Hustle for the full guide and unlock daily business intel that's actually interesting.

Start making AI money

📣 Four ships are to be built at the state-owned Ferguson shipyard under plans to directly award the commissions to the troubled yard. But another contract - to replace the CalMac ferry Lord of the Isles - will go to competitive tendering. (BBC)

📣 A domestic abuser whose wife took her own life has been convicted of culpable homicide at the High Court in Glasgow.

📣 Gordon Brown is said to have played an important role behind the scenes in “saving” Keir Starmer after Anas Sarwar’s call for the Prime Minister to stand down. (Daily Record has the exclusive)

📣 Brewdog’s new boss told staff that the brewer’s takeover was a “win”, after 500 of their colleagues lost their jobs. (The Sun has the exclusive)

📣 People from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Myanmar and Sudan will no longer be able to secure UK study visas, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has said, with Afghans also being denied skilled work visas, after “widespread visa abuse”. (BBC)

📣 A British grandmother died from rabies months after she was scratched by a stray dog on a Moroccan beach, an inquest has been told. (Sky News)

📣 Alan Cumming has joined the criticism of the BBC’s failure to edit out a racial slur from their Baftas broadcast, saying it turned “what should have been an evening celebrating diversity and inclusion into a trauma-triggering shitshow”. (Guardian)

🏉 Scotland have been urged to deliver against France this weekend at Murrayfield, as they face their sternest test of the Six Nations so far. A bonus point win for the French would secure the championship with a game to spare. (Scotsman)

⚽️ Dundee United managed a 2-1 win over St Mirren to keep their faint chances of a top-six finish alive. (BBC)

⚽️ Arne Slot watched his Liverpool side lose 2-1 to Wolves after Andre netted a dramatic 94th-minute winner. (BBC report & highlights)

🗣️Marina Hyde spots (one of) Keir Starmer’s problems. “Donald Trump says Keir Starmer has damaged the special relationship by not helping him more in the US-Israel war on Iran,” she writes. “But you have to remember that when you do help, Trump pretends you didn’t anyway, and also pisses on your war dead. Still, what could be more enticing than the Americans trying to sell you a timeshare on a war in the Middle East?”

Of Trump and the commentators who have abandoned previous criticism of the US President to support the war, she writes: “Wake up. How many times do you have to get hurt by this wingnut before you start thinking yourself into positions where, actually, his way might not be the answer? More times than we’re up to, apparently. I know they think this is realpolitik. But it’s not. It’s just real forgetful politik.” (Guardian)

🗣️ Allison Pearson is right behind Donald Trump’s comments on Keir Starmer: she says his Commons statement that “the United Kingdom played no role in these strikes” is “the most contemptible sentence Sir Keir Starmer has ever uttered in a hotly-contested field”.

“Iran with a nuclear weapon would make North Korea look like an eight-year-old with a Nerf gun. Once the Mullahs had the bomb, they would not hesitate to inflict a second Holocaust on Israel,” she writes.

“My God, the shame and humiliation that man has brought on the land of Winston Churchill,” she continues. “Even Left-leaning Canada and Australia had the sense to offer Trump their full support over Iran.” (Telegraph - gift link)

🗣️ Not all Telegraph columnists are as solidly behind Trump and his war with Iran. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, the title’s international business editor, calls the war “reckless”: he notes the Trump administration didn’t fill up the US strategic petroleum reserve, which lies at near their lowest level in 40 years. China has been filling its reserve for a year, at a record rate.

“It is even more careless to launch this war of choice when the Gulf’s oil industry lacks the pipeline infrastructure to replace dependence on shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and when there is zero spare capacity in the rest of the world,” he writes.

“If the reduction in tanker traffic continues for a week or so it will be historic. Beyond that it would be epochal for the oil market,” he quotes one oil market expert as saying. Europe will face “a ruinous bill” (Telegraph)

🗣️ Max Hastings also sounded a note of caution. The historian recalls “one of the great lines in modern war,” delivered in Baghdad by General David Petraeus, then commanding the US 101st Airborne Division. “Tell me how this ends”.

Hastings asks the same question of Iran. “That question deserves a credible answer from every national leader who starts a war of choice,” he writes.

“On Saturday Donald Trump urged Iranians to rise up and overthrow the regime. Wellington once said that a man takes upon himself a heavy responsibility when he incites unarmed civilians to revolt against an armed power. The Iranian regime still has a lot of guns, and the opposition does not.

“It seems doubtful that US and Israeli air power alone can generate a successful revolution in this enormous country of 93 million people. The overriding lesson of recent western foreign policy experience is that force cannot achieve good outcomes without a political dimension.” (Times - gift link)

🗣️ But Sarah Vine doesn’t have much time for the influencers left stranded in Dubai. “Obviously, no one wishes them any harm – and we pray they all get out unscathed. But one can’t help feeling a slight shiver of schadenfreude here,” she writes.

“Let’s face it, they’re not exactly desperate refugees, are they? Their numbers include the debatable Andrew Tate, who has a base in one of the city’s exclusive neighbourhoods, from where he broadcasts his bombastic credo to his armies of loser wannabes.” (Mail + (£))

Sent this by a friend?