2/In 2021, Nicola Sturgeon told the public she was "not concerned" about party finances. The accounts were "independently and fully audited." That same year, the auditors flagged "the greatest potential for fraud" in SNP revenue recognition procedures — a warning that had never appeared in previous years' reports.

Nicola Sturgeon has rejected allegations that £600,000 of SNP funds raised by activists has ‘gone missing’. bit.ly/3g17gJ2

A senior SNP minister refuses to rule out asking some Scots to pay more if that is demanded by the Greens in return for supporting legislation or Budgets. mol.im/a/15805919 via @DailyMail

Oh look. The Green Party in Enfield Council agree to support a minority Tory administration after Labour loses majority. Central objective: to block the development of the New Town in Crews Hill. The Greens, working with the Tories: opposing new homes in London. Marvellous.

Demis Hassabis, the Nobel Prize winner who runs Google DeepMind just described the most consequential project on earth, and most people have no idea it exists. The project is called Isomorphic Labs and the goal is to end the way drugs have been developed for the last century. Here is the problem it is trying to solve. Developing a single drug today takes an average of 10 years, costs billions of dollars, and fails 90 percent of the time before it ever reaches a patient. Of every 10 drugs that enter clinical trials, only one makes it through. The other nine years of work, the other billions of dollars, the other scientific careers, gone. Hassabis believes AI can collapse that entire process from identifying a disease target to designing a compound that binds to it, predicts how it behaves in the body, and minimizes side effects , end to end, on a computer, before a single experiment is run. The foundation is AlphaFold, the AI system that solved one of biology's hardest problems predicting the 3D structure of every protein in the human body and won him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024. But knowing a protein's shape is only one part of designing a drug. Isomorphic is building what Hassabis describes as adjacent systems , AlphaFold 3, AlphaFold 4, and now a unified model called IsoDDE , that take the next steps. From designing the actual chemical compound that binds to the protein, predicting its binding strength, identifying new pockets to target that no one has ever found before. IsoDDE more than doubles the accuracy of AlphaFold 3 on the hardest protein-ligand prediction benchmarks that exist. Isomorphic is already running 18 to 19 live drug programs, cardiovascular disease, cancer, immunology in partnership with Eli Lilly, Novartis, and Johnson and Johnson. The first human clinical trial of a fully AI-designed drug is expected by the end of 2026. If that trial succeeds, it will be the first time in history that a drug put into a human body was designed not by a team of chemists working for a decade but by an AI working for months. Hassabis's long-term vision is even more direct, one day you describe a disease, click a button, and a drug blueprint comes out the other side. AI will solve almost all diseases within 10 years.

Implied vote share from the MRP suggests the SNP leads the Constituency vote by 20 points, and the Regional List vote by 13 points. Constituency Vote: SNP: 39% LAB: 19% REF: 17% CON: 12% LD: 10% GRN: 2% OTH: 2% Regional List Vote: SNP: 29% LAB: 16% REF: 17% CON: 13% LD: 8% GRN: 15% OTH: 2%

Our next Scottish manifesto analysis: the SNP. Would the food price cap work? And does the manifesto face up to the fiscal reality? Read it below: fraserofallander.org/2026-sc…

The SNP has pledged to roll out a new “minimum income” for Scotland’s writers, musicians, filmmakers, playwrights, comics and visual artists if it returns to power after the Holyrood election. heraldscotland.com/news/2601…