Britain will begin detaining and returning some of the migrants who arrive on small boats from France within days, after the EU approved the government’s “one in, one out” deal. The pilot scheme will see around one in 17 arrivals sent back to the continent, which it is hoped will act as a deterrent to migrants and people smuggling gangs. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has asked the Taliban for access to the leaked list of Afghans who worked with the British Army, says The Daily Telegraph. Tehran wants to use the so-called “kill list” to root out MI6 spies and as leverage with the West ahead of nuclear negotiations this autumn. Eating home-cooked food helps you lose twice as much weight as eating processed foods, a new UCL study suggests. When 55 adults alternated between two nutritionally similar diets – one made up of ultra-processed foods and the other home-made fare – they lost double the weight when eating the meals prepared from scratch.

Sorry, but this is banana republic stuff

Of all the awful things Donald Trump has said and done as president, says Thomas Friedman in The New York Times, “the most dangerous one just happened on Friday”. Presented with a set of disappointing job numbers, Trump responded by firing Erika McEntarfer, the head of the Bureau of Labour Statistics, and promised to appoint someone more to his liking. In other words, he is going to ensure that America’s “trusted and independent” office of economic statistics is “as big a liar as he is”. It is, as former Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen put it, “the kind of thing you would only expect to see in a banana republic”.

Almost as bad as the firing itself is that the senior officials responsible for the economy – the likes of Labour Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent – have all backed the decision. How many government bureaucrats will dare pass along bad news now, when they know their bosses will fail to stand up for them? This isn’t an isolated incident. In May, the national intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard fired two top officials who had overseen an assessment that undermined the government’s “dubious legal rationale” for deporting suspected Venezuelan gang members. Similarly, one of America’s top cyberwarriors, Jen Easterly, has just had her appointment to teach at the US military academy at West Point revoked after a far-right conspiracy theorist ludicrously claimed she was a “Biden-era mole”. I’m a “congenital optimist”. But if this sort of behaviour continues for the rest of Trump’s presidency then America as we know it will be gone. “And I don’t know how we will get it back.”

📉🤷‍♀️ The irony in all this, say Robert Armstrong and Hakyung Kim in the FT, is that a whopping 40% of the decline in new jobs is due to reductions in government workers – and shrinking the state is exactly what the Trump administration has been trying to do. In other words, the president has fired McEntarfer “to scapegoat her for the success of one of his own signature initiatives”.