Migrants who have been granted asylum in the UK will be temporarily barred from bringing family members into the country. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper says the refugee family reunion scheme is “not fair” and will be suspended until the law can be changed to introduce new conditions, including tougher language and financial requirements, and a two-year waiting period. Britain’s long-term borrowing costs reached their highest level since 1998 this morning due to investor concerns over the country’s economic outlook, piling pressure on Chancellor Rachel Reeves ahead of her autumn budget. Britain pays higher interest on its debt than any other G7 country, thanks to persistent inflation and rising public borrowing. The Northern Lights appeared in our skies last night, after a powerful eruption on the surface of the sun known as a coronal mass ejection. The Met Office says increased solar activity could continue into this evening, meaning the aurora should be visible again tonight.

It’s easy to become complacent about Donald Trump’s “march towards authoritarianism”, says Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. This is partly because it is happening relatively steadily – “another step or two every day” – and partly because sober-minded observers are wary of sounding hysterical. But it’s worth taking stock of what the US president is actually doing. He has deployed 2,000 heavily armed troops to the streets of Washington DC, and warned that other Democratic-run cities – Chicago, perhaps Baltimore – will be next. He has sent the FBI to raid the home of his former national security adviser John Bolton; fired the head of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; sacked the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for publishing an unflattering jobs report; and sought to remove a member of the Federal Reserve board over unproven charges of mortgage fraud.

The goal in all these actions is the same: control. Trump is amassing power by “removing or neutering any institution or person that could stand in his way”. That includes the Democrats – hence the “unabashed” gerrymandering in Texas, where Republicans have redrawn congressional boundaries to give themselves five more safe seats. Ominously, Trump’s top adviser Stephen Miller told Fox News last week: “The Democratic Party is not a political party; it is a domestic extremist organisation.” Not everyone is blind to what is going on. As the former Obama adviser David Axelrod recently put it: “We have gone from zero to Hungary faster than I ever imagined.” But there is still a broader reluctance to accept the reality of this authoritarian takeover. To adapt the title of Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel about an American dictator: “It can happen here – and it is.”

🥰🙇 Particularly striking is Trump’s “insatiable” appetite for flattery, says Gideon Rachman in the FT. Last week, the labor secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer invited the president to see “your big beautiful face” on a banner outside the Department of Labor; Steve Witkoff, Trump’s “hapless peace envoy”, told the president he was the “single finest candidate” ever for the Nobel Peace Prize; Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gushed: “You have saved this country.” This insistence on public brown-nosing is a hallmark of authoritarians like Nicolae Ceaușescu – referred to in official media as “the Genius of the Carpathians” – or Stalin, whose henchmen were fond of paying tribute to his “guiding genius”.

To The Guardian:

Water at £19 a bottle (“You’re either going to be a pioneer or a joke”, 28 August)? What a load of rubbish. Far better to order a free glass of tap water. At an Open University summer school some years ago, students were invited to take part in a trial. All were given 10 lots of two samples, Nottingham tap water and Highland Spring. There were enough participants over the weeks for a statistical sample. Answer? They could not tell the difference.

Rosalind Clayton
London

The latest hit show in Taiwan isn’t the world-conquering musical KPop Demon Hunters, says Elisabeth Braw in Foreign Policy. It’s a “frighteningly real” drama about the country being invaded by China. The 10-part Zero Day Attack begins with the Chinese effectively blockading the island to conduct a search-and-rescue operation for a crashed pilot, before conducting “large-scale interference”. It’s not the first time TV has been used to highlight the risks of a real-life invasion: a decade ago, the Norwegian series Occupied depicted the Scandinavian country being taken over by the Russians (on behalf of the EU, weirdly). Watch a trailer for Zero Day Attack here.

As debate boils over allegations of genocide in Gaza, says Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times, there’s another place where all sides in the West agree a genocide is under way, “yet largely ignore it”. I’m talking about Sudan – “probably the site of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis”. Famine was officially declared last year; the UN estimates some 25 million Sudanese face “extreme hunger” and at least 12 million have fled their homes because of civil war. Tom Perriello, US special envoy for Sudan until this year, tells me he believes the death toll has by now exceeded 400,000. In January, the Biden administration declared the slaughter to be a genocide; in April, the Trump administration agreed. Yet there is also, evidently, a rare bipartisan consensus to “do little about it”.

Whatever you think of Gaza, we should recognise our collective failure to address another human catastrophe with a “far higher death toll”. It’s not a competition – we should be capable of feeling appalled by the suffering in both places – but the lack of coverage of Sudan is shocking. And the failure is global. Arab and African powers have “done more to aggravate the suffering” than to ease it. Survivors describe ethnic cleansing of “unimaginable savagery”, with lighter-skinned Arab death squads wiping out whole villages of darker-skinned Africans because, to quote one militia leader, “we don’t want to see any black people”. Two decades ago, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan went to Darfur and pushed to end the genocide there. This month, the current secretary-general, António Guterres, will host world leaders to repeat platitudes about making the world a better place. A simple test of their sincerity is what they will do for Sudan.

The world’s largest cruise ship, Royal Caribbean’s Star of the Seas, set off on its maiden voyage from Florida on Sunday, says Kelly Tyko in Axios. The 20-deck “floating city” can carry as many as 7,600 passengers and 2,350 crew, with amenities including 40 bars and restaurants, 10 hot tubs, seven swimming pools, six waterslides, and a full-scale Back to the Future musical featuring a flying DeLorean. The vast vessel weighs in at nearly 249,000 gross tons and has an overall length of 364.83 metres – a crucial three inches longer than its sister ship, Icon of the Seas.

Henry Kissinger was rumoured to have become a lifelong fan of Grimsby Town FC after attending a game with the then foreign secretary, Anthony Crosland. That story isn’t true, says Popbitch, “but the truth is arguably funnier”. Kissinger did indeed travel up to Grimsby for a breakfast meeting with Crosland in April 1976, because Crosland had told him he needed to stay close to the town for a very important “constituency appointment”. Only afterwards did the disgruntled US secretary of state discover that Crosland’s supposedly crucial appointment was Grimsby Town vs Gillingham.

It’s the first recorded case of an orange shark, says Stacy Liberatore in the Daily Mail. Sport fishermen caught and then released the six-foot, tangerine-coloured nurse shark off the coast of Costa Rica last year. They knew it was unusual – “We were all screaming like crazy,” said fishing guide Garvin Watson – and posted footage of the catch on social media. Marine biologists have since concluded that the predator’s odd pigmentation is likely the result of two rare genetic conditions coinciding: albinism, which strips pigment from the body; and xanthism, which causes an excess of yellow pigment.