The Home Office is “unable to locate” thousands of migrants it has earmarked to deport to Rwanda, says The Times. Only 2,145 of the 5,700 people selected for the scheme are in contact with authorities. John Swinney has emerged as the early favourite to succeed Humza Yousaf as SNP leader. Nicola Sturgeon’s former deputy already has the support of senior party figures; Kate Forbes, who narrowly lost to Yousaf last time round, also says she’s giving “serious consideration” to running again. A newly deciphered papyrus scroll may shed light on Plato’s final evening. The ancient text, which was buried by ash from Mount Vesuvius, recounts how the philosopher, hours before death, listened to a Thracian slave girl playing the flute – and criticised her lack of rhythm.

The “crackpot schemes” that did for Yousaf

Humza Yousaf’s predecessor Nicola Sturgeon left him an “astoundingly bad hand”, says John McLellan in The Scotsman. But “at every turn” Scotland’s first minister, who resigned yesterday having never quite shaken off the nickname Humza Useless, “made matters worse”. Partly his mistake was pitching himself as the “continuity Sturgeon candidate”, when it was plain to see that it wasn’t just her personality that was so divisive, but her mad policies. Yet Humza stuck to crackpot schemes like forcing homeowners to rip out gas boilers, ignored the devastating findings of the Cass review of gender services, and tried to impose “highly protected marine areas” on fishing communities, who naturally revolted.

He was also simply inept. Despite claiming to be a “progressive” left winger, he blithely announced a council tax freeze “out of the blue”, which only benefited middle and upper earners. He insisted he was a “friend of the business community” while making the tax regime even less competitive, and exacerbated a housing shortage by introducing rent controls that sent developers scarpering. Then there was the “chaotic” implementation of the widely ridiculed Hate Crime Act, for which the responsibility was “entirely his”. Time after time, Yousaf failed to see the “havoc” caused by his ultra-progressive coalition colleagues in the Scottish Greens. And he always insisted that independence was “just round the corner”, when even his supporters knew it wasn’t. “All that, and more, in a year and 20 days.”

😇♻️ What really killed Yousaf, says Hugo Rifkind in The Times, is net zero. When the independent UK Climate Change Committee looked at the viability of Scotland’s ambitious green plans, they said, in effect, “lol, no”. So Yousaf abandoned the plans, prompting his Green coalition partners to abandon him. But the CCC’s damning verdict was no surprise, given Scotland’s “climate pledge inflation”. In 2017, Sturgeon was promising an 80% cut in greenhouse gases by 2050. By 2018, it was 90%. A year later, net zero. “Literally weeks later”, the date was brought forward to 2045, seemingly for the sole reason that Theresa May was also promising 2050. “No doubt for at least a moment, Sturgeon had considered the possibility of 2049 and a half.”

A recent “spate of highly public arrests” has illustrated the extent of China’s spying operation in Europe, says the FT. Three German citizens have been detained on suspicion of trying to sell sensitive military technology to Beijing, and British prosecutors have charged two men, one of whom was a parliamentary researcher, with spying for China. Also in the spotlight is Brest, a “rainy industrial port” that is home to the French navy and its nuclear-armed submarines. The city has witnessed “a remarkable number of weddings in recent years between female Chinese students and the seamen who work at its naval bases”.

Gentleman’s Journal has drawn up a list of the world’s greatest hotel swimming pools, including the rooftop pool at the Silo Hotel in Cape Town, with its industrial-style pillars; the mineral-rich waters at The Retreat on Iceland’s Blue Lagoon; the spare and austere infinity pool at the Setouchi Aonagi in Matsuyama; and the “near-mythical” pool overlooking the Mediterranean at the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Antibes. See the rest here.

⛰️ To read about “Iceland’s most iconic route”, click here

Of course students are protesting – they’ve nothing better to do

It’s striking that New York’s Columbia University has cancelled in-person teaching for the rest of the academic year because, in its words, “safety is our highest priority”, says George Will in The Washington Post. “Clearly education is not.” Otherwise, it would have expelled all the students participating in the “anti-Semitic encampment”. It’s not just Columbia, of course. At UCLA’s medical school, a pro-Hamas guest lecturer, in a recent, mandatory course on “Structural Racism and Health Equity”, led students in a “Free Palestine” chant, directing them to kneel and touch the floor in a “prayer” to “Mama Earth”, and warning them against the “crapitalist lie” of “private property”.

Part of the blame for this “infantile” nonsense lies with the “monochrome culture” of academia. For many professors, who glide all the way from kindergarten to postdoctoral fellowships, the 99.9% of the world away from college campuses is “as foreign as Mongolia”. Another reason is that their “self-satisfied” students simply have too much time on their hands. In 1961, full-time college attendees studied for about 40 hours per week. By 2003, that had fallen to 27 hours; today, it is likely in single figures. Then there’s the “rampant grade inflation”: in the last academic year at Yale, “almost 80% of grades were As or A-minuses”. The “leakage of prestige” from these once pre-eminent institutions is as overdue as it is welcome.

First the touts came for your concert tickets and sports seats, says The Sunday Times, and now they’re coming for restaurant bookings. Online “scalpers” are using bots to hoover up reservations at the hottest tables in town, then sell them on for hundreds of pounds. On secondary sites, a table for two in May at Mayfair’s Gymkhana can be bought for £256, while a Friday night slot at Core by Clare Smyth, the three-Michelin star favourite in Notting Hill, is listed for £408.

They’re naked Morris dancer dolls, says The Daily Telegraph. A group of knitters in Somerset created the racy quintet as a “bit of fun” to raise funds for the local air ambulance. They were proudly displayed in the window of The Hive café in Shepton Mallet, dancing around a maypole “wearing only hats and bells around their ankles”, until a local resident complained on social media, saying she didn’t want her grandchildren “looking at genitals on their way to school”. The controversial creations have been censored as a result, using carefully positioned placards.