In your briefing today:

📣 “Apocalyptic” wildfires are bearing down on the city of Bordeaux, with tens of thousands of people being evacuated from areas around the western French city, and the hotel zone of the city’s airport being evacuated. There are no announcements, at send time, of a wider evacuation of the city.

📣 The Scottish Government minister in charge of emergency planning is facing scrutiny over the “chaotic” response to wildfires in the Cairngorms which have forced the evacuation of villages and continue to burn this morning, after more than 12 days.

Neil Gray, Justice Secretary, said last week that the fires had been contained - words which were quickly contradicted by events. His new claims that a change in weather was a surprise are also being challenged - a weather forecast had warned of exactly the swing in wind direction last week which caused fresh problems.

On Friday night, police declared a major incident after the government had resisted calls to do so.

Sandy McCook, chairman of Nethy Bridge Community Council, accused ministers of being woefully ill-prepared and branded Mr Gray’s words “patent nonsense”. (Mail)

📣 Police chiefs have warned those involved in the violent scenes in Glasgow over the weekend during a far-right anti-immigration demo can expect “a knock on their door” in the days ahead. (Daily Record)

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📣 A man accused of murdering his ex-partner at a home in Edinburgh has been found dead in prison. (STV)

📣 Police forces should consider using psychological assessments to vet potential police officers, the head of the Scottish Police Federation has indicated, in the wake of the revelations surrounding PC Alan Greer. Greer, who took his own life in May, attacked at least nine women over the course of 14 years while employed by Scotland’s national force. (The Scotsman has the exclusive)

📣 Monica Lennon has announced she will stand to become leader of Scottish Labour. Lennon said her party was “in the last chance saloon” and needed “radical and fast change” or faced “oblivion”. (Sunday Mail)

📣 Amnesty International UK is investigating new potentially “serious” errors in an ongoing anti-rights row involving JK Rowling and women’s organisations. (Herald has the exclusive)

📣 Former US president Barack Obama will appear in Scotland as part of a UK speaking tour later in the year. (Scotsman)

📣 Prime Minister Andy Burnham has pledged to use “whatever political capital I have” to finally fix the crumbling social care system in England, saying that without rapid action the NHS could effectively collapse. (Guardian)

📣 German police shot dead the man suspected of driving his van into Berlin’s Pride festival, killing a man and injuring at least 29 others. (Mirror)

📣 Benjamin Netanyahu says New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is “fomenting hate” by calling the Israeli prime minister a war criminal who should be arrested if he visits the city to attend the United Nations. Mamdani has admitted he does not have the power to follow through with the threat. (AP)

⚽️ Rangers hope to announce another signing within 48 hours, with manager Derek McInnes a second might be in his squad by the time his side open their season away to Dundee United on Friday. (BBC)

⚽️ Kasper Hogh has arrived in the UK as he prepares to undergo his Celtic medical. The Bodo/Glimt striker is expected to be a Hoops record signing, costing of £11 million plus add-ons. (Herald)

🏎️ Lando Norris ended the first half of the Formula 1 season with a victory in the Hungarian Grand Prix that he described as "one of my best performances". (BBC) (🎥 Highlights)

🗣️Investigations into the funding behind Reform UK are widening, with Scotland Yard now looking into donations made to the party before the 2024 general election, and revelations that the party’s bank froze its accounts before election day.

The story so far: the Guardian had previously reported that Fiona Cottrell, mother of convicted fraudster “Posh” George Cottrell, made a £1 million transfer to Britain Means Business before the 2024 general election. Britain Means Business is a company controlled by Reform’s deputy leader, Richard Tice.

Britain Means Business then made two donations of £250,000, weeks before the election. Those transactions are the ones being investigated by police. (Guardian)

Meanwhile, the Sunday Times reported that Arbuthnot Latham, the private bank, froze Reform UK’s accounts for two weeks while it undertook compliance checks.

That is an unprecedented move for a political party’s bank account, the title suggests. (Sunday Times)

🗣️ScotWind, Scotland’s vast offshore wind energy programme, is going to deliver £6 billion less to the Scottish economy than originally thought, reports Martin Williams.

Companies delivering the programme were supposed to spend around £32 billion in Scotland on developing the necessary infrastructure. But data seen by the Herald shows only £25.6 billion of work is earmarked for Scotland, with the assumption being that the work is going elsewhere.

“Union representatives are concerned that the ScotWind ‘disaster’ represents a direct transfer of wealth from local communities straight into the pockets of foreign rivals,” reports Williams. (Herald (£))

🗣️The wildfires in France and Spain are having an impact across Europe: a haze is hanging over much of the continent. Smoke from the fires is very high up - three or four kilometres - so isn’t impacting on health. But The Early Line, peering out the window of a plane headed south, reckoned it was easily visible over France on Saturday, and you can see the vast plumes themselves on the air quality maps from Ventusky. (Ventusky)

🗣️ Restricting when you eat might lead to cognitive improvements when you’re older, researchers have found.

We’ve known that intermittant fasting - where, for instance, you don’t eat anything before 10am or after 6pm - helps you lose weight, and also brings with it lots of other improvements to your health.

Now, reports Ian Sample, “a pilot study of older women living with overweight or obesity found hints of improvement in mental skills among those who ate within the restricted period compared with those who spread their meals over a longer time.”

“The benefits could be driven by a complex interplay of circadian rhythms, metabolism and inflammation,” he reports. (Guardian)

🗣️ The woman behind the extraordinary fake baby deception has told her side of the story for the first time. Kira Cousins gained worldwide notoriety last year after it emerged she had scammed friends and family for months by wearing an artificial baby bump, sharing AI-generated baby scan images, and holding a lavish gender reveal party.

She posted photographs of baby clothes and gifts, including a £1000 pram and car seat, before later - after “giving birth” - posing with a baby that was, in fact, a realistic-looking doll.

Kira, from Airdrie, now accepts what she did was wrong but claims she was unable to tell her boyfriend she was no longer pregnant after suffering a miscarriage.

She told the Sunday Mail: “I did lose a child. I’d tried to tell him when I first lost the child. I still have messages on my phone which said, ‘Jamie, we need to sit down,’ but I couldn’t speak to him about anything.”

The long-suffering Jamie, who accepts none of his ex’s latest tale, is quoted as saying: “I want to get as far away from her as possible. I just want to move on with my life.”(Sunday Mail)

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