I was planning a trip to the US later this year, says Indian economist Mihir Sharma in Bloomberg, but I’ve now decided my air miles will be “better spent elsewhere”. It’s not just the stories from within the US: the long-term residents sent off to El Salvadorean prison camps; the researchers deported for attending a protest. It’s also hearing about innocent tourists being locked up for minor problems with their travel plans, and border staff demanding people’s phones and cross-examining them about emails they may have sent. European officials are being issued with burner phones for their visits to the US. Japanese travellers applying for US visas have been told to submit details of all their social media accounts over the past five years.

This is already having a big impact: the number of overseas visitors to the US is declining, with 12% fewer arrivals in March compared to a year earlier. The decline from some European countries is particularly sharp: visitors from Germany were down by almost 30%. And tourism is only half of it. America has long led the world in science and innovation because it attracts the best people, who know that, even as non-citizens, they have rights there. Strip those rights away and American universities will become “as attractive to foreign talent as, say, China’s”. I started avoiding visits to China and Hong Kong for that very reason some years ago. “I never dreamed I would one day put the US in the same category.”

🎓🇬🇧 One beneficiary of all this is the UK, says Amy Borrett in the FT. The number of American students looking to study in Britain is 25% higher than it was this time last year, according to the student search platform Studyportals, the highest increase of any study destination. Over the same period, overseas interest in US courses fell 15%.

THE BACHELOR PAD Winston Churchill’s old Mayfair pied-à-terre sits in a Mount Street mansion block designed in 1888 by the architect Sir Ernest George, says David Byers in The Times. The two-bedroom flat has been painted a “decidedly un-Churchill-like creamy white” by its Middle Eastern owner, with “nondescript” cream carpets throughout, but there is a smart modern kitchen, and original windows, high ceilings and a period fireplace in an excellently sized sitting room, with room for a small dining table in the corner. Transport irrelevant: you are already in Mayfair. £3.75m. Click on the image above for the listing.

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The rest of today’s heroes and villains – including a Chinese student who had to be rescued from Mount Fuji twice in four days, and the dozy US Navy sailors who let a $67m fighter jet roll into the Red Sea – are for subscribers only.

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