Reform leader tells event in Scotland deporting women and children is not part of his party’s plans for the next five years

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Nigel Farage has rolled back on his pledge to deport “absolutely anyone” arriving in the UK on small boats just 24 hours after making it at a combative press conference in Oxford that led to accusations of ugly and destructive rhetoric.

Farage announced plans to deport hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers in the first five years of a Reform government and to pay despotic regimes such as the Taliban to take them back. He also said: “Yes, women and children, everybody on arrival, will be detained.”

The Trump administration sent a letter demanding states, territories and DC ‘remove all references to gender ideology’

The Trump administration has told US states and territories they will lose federal funding for their sex education programs if they do not remove references to transgender people.

In letters sent to 46 states, territories and Washington DC on Tuesday, the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) demanded they “remove all references to gender ideology” within 60 days or risk losing funding from the Personal Responsibility Education Program, or Prep.

Separates can be tricky, but the right dress will make you feel ready for anything

As a plus-size shopper, separates are a tricky game: finding denim that doesn’t sag at the knee and gape at the back is a constant plight, I have yet to experience tailoring that contours my curves in a well-fitting way, and I have never met a co-ord that doesn’t make me look like a human Flump.

But dresses can be good to me. That said, a lot of plus-size designs on the market in the high street are, well, quite crap. They are frumpy, ill-considered and not fashion-forward or exciting. Which is why this summer I was inspired to launch a collaboration with dress brand Rixo – a 16-piece collection of size-inclusive dresses that evoke a sense of freedom, the idea that with one swish of a great dress over your head you are handled, you are stylish, you are good.

After Mother! and The Whale, Aronofsky’s new movie centres on a washed-up alcoholic former baseball star’s encounters with a villainous underworld

Baseball fans will see the pun straight away; I had to look it up. The non-batting runner, having only made it a certain way around the field, gets tagged out by a fielder trying to “steal”, or sneak up, on a base from the one behind. As far as the non-metaphorical meaning goes, no one in this movie is actually apprehended in the act of theft. But in a world where home runs are unavailable to most, the idea of cheekily trying for covert advantage and survival through quick wits is clear.

Charlie Huston’s violent crime novel of the same name from 2004 has been adapted for the screen by the author, and Darren Aronofsky directs with gleeful energy, flair and a dark humour that straddles the mischief/malice borderline. Incredible to think that his last film was the solemn and inertly sententious body-image drama The Whale. This has more of the confrontational extravagance and energy of his earlier work; it’s not as purely deranged as Aronofsky’s meltdown film Mother!, although, speaking of mothers, there is no doubt who the hero of this film considers to be his best friend.

Trump’s threat to deploy troops to Chicago is the latest example of a slow manipulation of the line between legal and illegal

January 6 demonstrated that longstanding democracies can readily resist a disorganized effort at a coup. They are less equipped to withstand the normalization of exceptional measures: the use of federal agents to quell domestic protest, the staging of police raids on the homes of leaders’ political opponents, the pretextual invocations of emergency powers. Each of these steps may seem temporary and targeted; they may even enjoy a thin patina of legality. But over time, a democratic order turns into what Ernst Fraenkel, a German-Jewish lawyer whose book The Dual State stands as one of the first and most perceptive examinations of Hitler’s regime, called a “prerogative state” – a government in which the executive “is released from all legal restraints and depends solely on the discretion of the persons wielding political power”.

So let us be clear: Trump’s commandeering of control of the Washington DC police department was simply an opening salvo. While Americans were greeted with images of soldiers in combat gear, toting rifles and establishing roadblocks and checkpoints near the National Mall, Trump was already tasking defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, with creating “specialized units” of the national guard to be “specifically trained and equipped to deal with public order issues”.