Top story: ‘Scandalously inhumane and unjustifiable’

Good morning. It’s Warren Murray with the essential news of the morning.

A snapshot by the Guardian of 200 migrants held in seven British detention centres found more than half were suicidal, seriously ill or victims of torture, with 84% not told when they would be deported. Almost half the detainees had not committed a crime but had been detained for an average of four months. The situation appears to contravene UN human rights guidance that immigration detention should be a last resort.

The government detains just over 25,000 people every year pending deportation, at an annual cost of £108m. But fewer than 50% of those held in removal centres actually end up being deported, and most have lived in the UK for five years or more. A handful of private firms are paid hundreds of millions of dollars to run the detention centres, raking in up to 30% profit. The UK is the only European country without a limit on how long these people can be detained. The Labour shadow home secretary, Diane Abbott, said: “This is a scandalously inhumane and unjustifiable system.” James Price from the TaxPayers’ Alliance said: “A bureaucratic and lengthy wait [for deportation] is bad for the welfare of those detained, as well as costing taxpayers and meaning less money for essential services.” A Home Office spokesman said the home secretary, Sajid Javid, wanted to “go further and faster” in finding alternatives to detention.

Our investigation compiled data from 11 law firms and charities that work with those facing deportation. It should be treated as a snapshot and not a sample representative of the whole population in immigration detention. We will be publishing more of our findings here this morning.

Hurricane Michael’s havoc – The strongest storm to ever hit the Florida Panhandle has caused widespread damage. In Florida a man was killed by a falling tree, and a child died in Seminole County, Georgia, when a house was damaged. More than 311,000 homes and businesses in Florida, Georgia and Alabama were left without power.

Play Video 0:18 Hurricane Michael tears apart roof as it makes landfall in Florida - video

Donald Trump described the storm as a “monster” and acknowledged that poverty in some areas had held back evacuation efforts. “A lot of people are very poor … And it’s very tough for them to leave,” he said. The hurricane was downgraded to a category 2 storm last night, with Georgia and the Carolinas next in its path.

In addition to the morning briefing, we now have a US briefing to bring you a view of the news from stateside. Here’s how to get it.

House price downturn – “A disaster for the property market,” says one property surveyor, about Brexit uncertainty, though people trying to find a home they can afford may feel differently. Prices are continuing to fall in a depressed property market and that trend has spread beyond London, according to the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (Rics). Outside the south, Brexit uncertainty is having less of an impact. “House prices continue to rise firmly across much of the UK, with the West Midlands, Northern Ireland and Scotland posting the strongest growth,” says Rics.

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Caught by the backstop – Theresa May will convene an urgent meeting with senior cabinet ministers today after the DUP threatened to vote against the upcoming budget over Brexit. The sticking point with the Northern Ireland unionists is the “backstop” provision to keep the Irish border open come what may. The hard-Brexiter, Chequers-hating Tory faction ERG is also threatening to vote against the budget, which would be a crisis for May’s authority. Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, has claimed a deal could be within reach by a crunch meeting next Wednesday but warned the PM that impediments on trade between Northern Ireland and the rest of UK could be avoided only if she abandoned a key red line and agreed to a customs union.

Perils of wet wood – People burning wet wood on inefficient stoves are poisoning themselves and their neighbours, the IPPR thinktank has warned. Its study highlights the “shocking contribution” of wood and coal fires to UK air pollution, which causes 40,000 early deaths a year and health problems for many others. Burning wood, coal or other solid fuels in the home is the largest single contributor to production of the most dangerous pollutant, known as particulate matter: tiny particles that penetrate deep into the body. The IPPR calls for the sale of wet wood and smoky coal to be banned no later than 2020, and for near-zero domestic emissions by 2050 of the worst particulate emissions, known as PM2.5.

A fandango into literature – Anthony “the Mooch” Scaramucci is back with bouquets for Donald Trump and brickbats for Steve Bannon. The man who lasted only 10 days as White House communications director is publishing a memoir entitled Trump, the Blue-Collar President wherein he trashes Bannon as a hypocrite and a weirdo, while hailing Trump as having “an intellect that is uniquely suited to the presidency”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Anthony Scaramucci. Photograph: Pablo Martínez Monsiváis/AP

The Briefing will let the Mooch explain that one: “He never let anyone know he was gathering information to make policy out of it … So he made it seem like he was chatting, talking economics and trade policy the way you’d talk about the New York Mets. Then he synthesised all the responses into one position, letting in the good bits and keeping out the bad.”

Lunchtime read: ‘Soft hair’ – Hawking’s final legacy

Stephen Hawking’s final scientific paper has been released by physicists who worked with the late cosmologist on his career-long effort to understand what happens to information when objects fall into black holes. The work tackles “the information paradox”: the rules of the quantum world demand that information is never lost, even when something falls into a black hole.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Artist’s rendering of cosmic debris surrounding a black hole. Photograph: Nasa Goddard Space Flight Center

But when an exhausted black hole evaporates out of existence, what happens to all that information? Researchers who collaborated with Hawking now believe that, at least in part, it goes into “soft hair” – a haze of photons at the event horizon, a black hole’s point of no return. Malcolm Perry, Cambridge professor and co-author of the paper, Black Hole Entropy and Soft Hair, said the information paradox was “at the centre of Hawking’s life” for more than 40 years. The paper was completed in the days before Hawking’s death in March. It has now been written up by his colleagues at Cambridge and Harvard universities and posted online. “We think it’s a pretty good step,” said Perry, “but there is a lot more work to be done.”

Sport

Wimbledon’s ambitions of trebling its space for the high point of the tennis summer came down to old-fashioned pragmatism and money on Wednesday night as members of the adjoining golf club decided to share equally a £63.75m offer for their precious 73 acres.

Dean Smith has been appointed Aston Villa’s head coach, with John Terry brought in to work alongside the former Brentford manager as his assistant. Cristiano Ronaldo’s lawyers have said documents that appear to substantiate Kathryn Mayorga’s claims of rape by the Juventus forward had been altered. Nathan Hughes must wait up to a week to find out if he can play any part in England’s autumn series after his disciplinary hearing for punching was postponed in mysterious circumstances.

And this year’s Next Generation list has been released: from Lilian Thuram’s son to Real Madrid-bound Rodrygo and the “Croatian Neymar”, we pick 60 of the most talented footballers born in 2001.

Business

A jittery, volatile week on global financial markets burst into a frenzy of selling, triggered by heavy losses on Wall Street and comments by Donald Trump describing US interest rate rises as “crazy”. The Nikkei index in Tokyo fell by almost 4% while in Hong Kong the index was down 3.25% and Shanghai was off 2.5%. In Sydney the benchmark S&P/ASX 200 index was down almost 2%, slipping below the 6,000-point mark for the first time since early June. The pound has been trading at $1.322 and €1.143 overnight.

The papers

The Guardian’s splash today is our exclusive story: “Flawed system failing to protect vulnerable migrant detainees”. The story of May’s plan to force employers to publish their pay gap based on ethnicity of employees leads the Times – “Employers must reveal ethnic pay gap of staff” and the Mail – “Now bosses told: reveal your ethnic salary gap”.

Business news is the lead in the Mirror, which reports that Cadbury’s US owners paid no tax in Britain (or as their headline puts it “Less than Buttons”) despite making £185m in UK profits. The FT has “James Murdoch leads race to take Musk’s seat as chairman of Tesla”. The Telegraph splash is “May’s deal to keep UK in customs union” and the i warns of a “Threat to topple May with Budget protest”. The Express reports on the ongoing inquiry into the Westminster attack: “Police hero who put his boss to shame”. The Sun’s headline is “Strictly Tap Dancing” as the Seann Walsh and Katya Jones saga drags on another day.

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