In your briefing today:

👋 Good morning Early Liners! Happy New Year to you: it’s great to be back in The Early Line chair after a joyful festive period. I hope it was just as good for you, your family and friends.

Welcome to the many new readers - and especially new paid subscribers - who signed up even as I had my feet up. Your support makes this email possible: thank you.

Neil Mc

📣 Who’s next? Greenland? Cuba? Columbia? That’s the question being posed in the wake of the US military operation in Venezuela over the weekend, in which its leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife were seized and flown to the US. That action is variously described as “audacious”, an “abduction” and “illegal” this morning.

The speculation is Donald Trump will turn his attentions to Greenland - chat that is being fuelled by Trump himself, it should be said, with him telling reporters last night that “It’s so strategic right now. Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place”. (AP)

📣 A chunk of Scotland is under a layer of snow this morning, with hundreds of schools closed in northern Scotland and travel disrupted by drifts. Several weather warnings - including amber snow alerts - are in place north of the Central Lowlands, with a yellow snow and ice warning further south. (BBC)

📣 How clean are your local restuarants? The Mail has one of those endlessly fascinating features where you enter your postcode and see which establishments need to clean up their act. It has bad news for the Shetland Islands, and Aberdeen. (It’s exclusive to the Mail)

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📣 Scottish political leaders launch their election campaigns today, ahead of May’s Holyrood poll.

📣 Tributes are being paid to Scottish musician Andrew Ure, lead singer of Falkirk’s The Ray Summers, who died on Hogmanay after he went out hillwalking. (Sun)

📣 A deal to nationalise Ardrossan Harbour is at an “advanced stage”, according to First Minister John Swinney. (Sky News)

📣 Rangers player Dujon Sterling has been charged with driving offences after a car crash in Glasgow hours after his side’s Old Firm derby victory. (STV)

📣 A British teenager is among the 40 people who died in the Swiss bar fire, with all the victims now identified. (Sky News)

📣 Left-wing extremists have left 30,000 homes in Berlin without electricity after they cut high-voltage power lines. (Sky News)

📣 Protests in Iran - sparked by its ailing economy and nuclear programme - are spreading. (AP)

📣 Andy Burnham is Labour’s best bet to keep Nigel Farage out of power, according to Professor Sir John Curtice, who says Keir Starmer “doesn’t have the skill set for Downing Street”. (Independent)

📣 Prepare for a “mild zombie apocalypse” this year, at least in business terms, as businesses which barely make enough money to cover costs are picked off by harsher economic conditions. (Guardian)

⚽️ Jimmy Thelin has been sacked as Aberdeen manager after 18 months in the Pittodrie hot seat during which he won the Scottish Cup. A 1-0 defeat to Falkirk was the final straw. (Daily Record)

⚽️ Celtic boss Wilfried Nancy has been in the job little more than 30 days, but is also under huge pressure after his side’s 3-1 defeat at home to Rangers. Player Luke McCowan says players aren’t reacting well enough in games. (BBC)

⚽️ Also on the brink appears to be Manchester United manager - or is it head coach? - Ruben Amorim, who had a bit of a rant about being given full control of his team after a disappointing draw with Leeds yesterday. (Mirror)

🗣️The case of Alaa Abd el-Fattah nagged away at the UK Government through the holiday period. Abd el-Fattah, you’ll recall, is the British-Egyption activist who was reunited with his family after 12 years, including a long stretch in an Egyptian jail.

His return to the UK had been labelled a “high priority” for the government, which made it embarassing when old Tweets of his - calling for the killing of Zionists and police officers - resurfaced.

Sir Keir Starmer was forced to condemn the messages and plead ignorance, while Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper ordered an inquiry into why - and I paraphrase - nobody had Googled the guy first.

The problem, writes former No 10 advisor Paul Ovenden in The Times, is the “supremacy of the stakeholder state": “the gradual but decisive shift of politics and power away from voters and towards groups with the time, money and institutional access to make themselves too important to ignore.

“The Stakeholder State isn’t the civil service,” he writes. “Instead, it is incubated by a political perma-class that exists within every party and every department, one whose entire focus is on preserving their status within a system that gives them meaning and whose politics could broadly be described as a) anything at some point and b) nothing at any point.” (The Times £)

🗣️Donald Trump has a horrific diet, guns down aspirin and is basically getting old. Those are the takeaways from a big WSJ interview with the 79-year-old US President, conducted before his Venezuela adventure. “Trump gets little sleep and has recently struggled to keep his eyes open during several televised events in the West Wing,” the title says.

“While flying to a campaign event, according to [Republican National Committee Chairman Joe] Gruters, Trump consumed french fries, a McDonald’s Quarter Pounder hamburger, a Big Mac and a Filet-O-Fish.” (🎁WSJ - gift link)

🗣️ Could 2026 be the year tunnels between Scottish islands get traction? Severin Carrell reports that Scotland islanders want tunnels, not ferries, to link them together and reduce depopulation, disruption and vast amounts of wasted time.

The economics don’t get a mention until near the end, but seem rather compelling by this telling: one estimate for tunnels on Shetland is £115 - £135 million, while replacement ferries will cost £100 million - and £7 million a year in subsidy. (Guardian)

🗣️The horrific bar fire in Switzerland on New Year’s day hit hard, and perhaps not just because my own boys are close to those ages of so many of the teenage victims.

The disaster was also a reminder these things - or, rather, the greed and incompetence which lead to these things happening - can exist just as readily in a prosperous place like Switzerland as in those far-flung Pacfic resorts where these sorts of things seem to happen more often. Or indeed Turkey, where there was a deadly ski resort fire less than a year ago.

Tyler Brûlé of Monocle lives in the country, and has reported back a sense of shock: “We’re in a period where there is a little bit of disbelief,” he says. “People are asking, ‘How could this happen in Switzerland, the country that is famous for its building codes, for its safety, for its risk aversion?’ But I think there’s something else, another dynamic, which is that this country can’t cope with this.” (Monocle)

🗣️If you want to sound wise about the year ahead in macroeconomics and business, then Bloomberg’s The Big Take - Here’s (Almost) Everything Wall Street Expects in 2026 - may offer a start. The financial news giant reviewed the investment outlooks from 60 institutions and compiled them in one handy page.

Long story short? Lots more AI investment, even if there are concerns about the vast sums already splurged. (🎁 Bloomberg - gift link)

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