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 can happen here – and it is”

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”.