Not content with aggravating everyone on Earth, Donald Trump's taking his brand intergalactic.

Yesterday, the President announced that he has directed the Department of Defence and the Pentagon to put together a "Space Force", which sounds like the kind of kind of bargain bin sci-fi you chance upon at the very end of a Netflix trawl but which will actually be a sixth branch of the armed forces.

The surprise announcement came at a meeting of the National Space Council. "Our destiny beyond the Earth is not only a matter of national identity but a matter of national security," he said.

Trump had trailed the idea of having a fighting force in space back in March, when he told an audience of troops at a marine air base in California that, "space is a war-fighting domain, just like the land, air and sea. We may even have a space force."

There are shades of Ronald Reagan's ill-fated Strategic Defence Initiative - better known as his 'Star Wars' project - from 1983 which intended to make nuclear weapons obsolete by positioning a missile defence system in space to shoot down Soviet nukes with lasers or particle beam weapons. Obviously, it was incredibly expensive and was binned off in the early 90s after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, back on terra firma, the outcry over the Trump administration's policy of separating parents and their children at the southern border of the United States has been kicked up several notches by photos and recordings of sobbing children in a Customs and Border Protection facility which have surfaced.