TODAY’S WEATHER

☀️Another lovely day in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen, with the capital hitting a high of 19 degrees in the afternoon. That’ll be as warm as London. (Here’s the UK forecast).

THE BIG STORIES
The new pope is named | A US-UK trade deal is unveiled

📣 Robert Francis Prevost was elected the 267th pope yesterday, taking the name Pope Leo XIV and becoming the first American to lead the Roman Catholic Church. Overnight, world leaders have been offering congratulations. Today, he’ll host his first mass as pope. (BBC)

Both his nationality and his beliefs are being seen as significant.

• His appointment defied a long-standing belief that a pontiff could be drawn from the US. “The Vatican’s longstanding opposition to a US pope stemmed largely from the optics of having a pontiff from a political superpower and a country with such a hegemonic cultural and secular global influence.” (Guardian)

• Observers said Prevost’s papal name historically symbolised strength during crisis, and took it as a sign he would follow in the footsteps of Pope Francis. Brother Leo was the 13th-century friar who was a companion to St. Francis of Assisi, the late pope’s namesake. (AP)

Who is he, exactly?

• He’s a surprise, not least because he was not seen as ambitious. A friend in the US described him as “not a showboat kind of person”. (CNN)

• He’s a unity candidate for a divided church: “Someone who supported Pope Francis behind the scenes, but who different factions could still think of as one of their own,” suggests the BBC.

• He was - at least before becoming pope - on social media, and had views on gun reform, immigration, and the Trump administration’s policies. (NBC)

• He’s been accused of “looking the other way” when confronted with child sex abuse allegations against a priest in his Chicago church. (Daily Mail)

It’s instructive to read profiles written before he was elected.

• The National Catholic Reporter picked Prevost as “a curial insider who is not [Cardinal Pietro] Parolin, after the Vatican secretary of state's lacklustre homily [the day after Pope Francis’ funeral] raised concerns about a charisma gap.”

• The New York Times similarly flagged Prevost as “a dignified middle of the road” who “resembles Francis in his commitment to the poor and migrants and to meeting people where they are.” (🎁 New York Times gift link)

📣 The US and UK struck a trade deal that will save some British businesses from the worst of Donald Trump’s tariffs, and which is also being seen as a critical moment for the increasingly troubled Starmer government. A hastily-arranged trans-Atlantic press conference between Trump and Starmer became a telephone love-in as the two leaders went to lengths to express their happiness at the deal, and admiration for each other’s deal-making skills.

• There were “astonishing scenes” in the Oval Office as Donald Trump squeezed Lord Peter Mandelson’s hand, and praised his “beautiful accent”. (Independent)

• Keir Starmer said it was a “fantastic, historic day” as he announced the agreement. He immediately spoke to workers at the Jaguar Land Rover plant in Solihull, saying the agreement had saved jobs in their industry. (Guardian)

• It’s all down to Brexit, says the Mail.

• The deal may not be good news for the world. “Whatever short-term benefit it has given to the UK, it hasn’t done a whole lot for the integrity of the global trading system,” says Alan Beattie in the FT (£).

• It’s far from being the “full and comprehensive” deal promised by Trump, with many important questions unanswered. (Bloomberg, free via Yahoo!)

• The deal offers little precedent for other nations (WSJ £)

IDEAS
What Putin wants, Goat Man – he’s a reason for Reform’s rise – and Attenborough, the great man

🗣️ The Economist goes deep on Russia, and “What Putin wants”, and how Europe should thwart him. They also “glimpse inside Putin’s secret arms empire”, granted by use of an AI system that sifts through data shed by electronic devices. It paints a picture of a vast ramping-up of Russia’s defence industry. You begin to understand the vast cost of the conflict to Russia. (The Economist - free to read if you register)

🗣️Despite all that, would Russia attack Nato? That’s one of the biggest questions tackled by the newspaper. And the answer is… it’s complicated, but probably - only probably - not. And there are a lot of factors in the equation, of which only one is a somewhat war-weary Russian public. Yes, the Russians love their children too, as the song has it. But while “a majority of Russians would prefer the war to end, most also credit the war with boosting the country’s international clout,” it reports. (Economist £)

🗣️The Spectator thinks Britain’s decline is a threat to its democracy. “The idea of a public square – where individuals operate in a relationship of trust and shared endeavour – is embedded in the life of our democracy,” the magazine says in a leader. “But today, increasingly, our public squares are squalid, lawless, derelict spaces, as Gus Carter records in our cover piece.” (Spectator £)

🗣️That cover piece attributes Reform’s success in last week’s local elections to those problems, and - a specific example - Goat Man. “In one ward in Runcorn, the seat Labour lost to Reform by just six votes, residents found that no one would listen when a neighbour filled his derelict house with goats and burned the animals’ manure in his garden. Despite repeated appeals to authority, no action was taken. If the council had dealt with this flagrant, unsanitary, anti-social behaviour, one campaigner told me, Labour might just have scraped those extra six votes.”(Spectator £)

🗣️The New Statesman prints a long correspondence with Sir David Attenborough, now 99. He has a new book out today, Ocean, devoted to “the most unexplored habitat on Earth”. There’s some gloom, of course, but also some hope: “Viewed over geological time, life will almost certainly find a way.” (New Statesman)

AROUND SCOTLAND

📣 First Minister John Swinney will not support the assisted dying bill when it comes up for a vote in Holyrood next week. He cited concerns about people feeling they have become a “burden” on the state, and concern a change in law would alter the patient/doctor relationship.

He also spoke of his wife’s health: "I couldn't contemplate having the conversation about the question of assisted dying with my wife knowing the health challenges that she faces and that as you all know, she has a terminal illness.” (The Herald) (Mail)

📣 Scotland’s “best future” lies with independence and a return to the European Union, foreign affairs secretary Angus Robertson will say today, marking Europe Day. (Holyrood)

📣 The UK’s largest oil and gas producer is cutting 250 more jobs in Aberdeen, after cutting 350 roles in 2023. Harbour Energy blamed regulation and “punitive” government measures. Analysis by the BBC’s Douglas Fraser notes the energy transition is “not going smoothly”. (BBC)

AROUND THE UK

📣 The NHS in England faces “previously unthinkable” cuts to balance the books, senior managers have warned. (BBC)

📣 A woman has been cleared of having an illegal abortion by taking abortion medicine during the Covid lockdown, with a friend saying she had been “persecuted” with a four-and-a-half-year investigation for a “tragic accident”. (Independent)

📣 What was it like in the weeks and months after VE Day? It feels an appropriate question to pose today, if only to point you to this evocative piece of writing about the post-war state of the UK. “For all the exuberance of VE Day, post-war Britain turned out to be a grim, sour place.”

The men who returned were often changed and found their wives to be different, more independent, too. “Divorce rocketed among unhappy families in which the experience of war took a heavy toll, a widespread phenomenon that went largely unrecognised in that stiff-upper-lip era,” he writes. (Mail)

SPORT

🏉 Eight Scots have made the British & Irish Lions squad for this summer’s tour of Australia. Pierre Schoeman sat on his sofa and cried with joy when he saw his name on the tour party list. “No one preps you for that moment,” he said. (The Offside Line)

• Suione Tuipulotu warned the tests against Australia will be “very tough”. (The Scotsman)

⚽️ It’ll be an all-English Europa League final after Manchester United swept past Athletic Bilbao 4-1 (7-1 on aggregate) and Spurs beat Bodo/Glimt 2-0 (5-1 on aggregate).