Good afternoon. Donald Trump has made his first appointment as US president-elect, naming Susie Wiles as his White House chief of staff – the first woman to hold the influential role.
Wiles joined Trump’s third campaign and served as his “de facto chief of staff” to lead his successful re-election bid, as well as helping him work with lawyers on his various criminal and civil cases. In his victory speech, Trump referred to Wiles as “the Ice Maiden”, saying she “liked to stay sort of in the back”.
Meantime, Vladimir Putin has congratulated Trump on his win, saying he had reacted “courageously” and “like a man” to an assassination attempt during the campaign. He also said he was ready for dialogue with Trump, a prospect which will cause disquiet in Kyiv and many other European capitals.
Elsewhere, divisions are growing within the Democrats as the party tries to work out what went wrong. The leftwing Vermont senator Bernie Sanders wrote in a statement that “it should come as no great surprise that a Democratic party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them” – comments labelled “straight up BS” by the chair of the Democratic National Committee.
Top news
Qantas flight makes ‘distressing’ emergency landing | A Qantas flight bound for Brisbane was forced to turn back to Sydney after suffering an engine failure, with the emergency landing coinciding with a grass fire next to one of the airport’s runways. Earlier, a technical outage at immigration kiosks caused delays at Sydney and Melbourne airports.
Bridget McKenzie unlikely to face consequences over flight upgrades | Labor is not expected to pursue formal action against the Nationals senator for not disclosing 16 flight upgrades over her time in parliament within the required timeframe. The independent senator David Pocock said the matter showed parliamentary transparency rules needed reform.
Teen charged with manslaughter after alleged carjacking | A 16-year-old boy was taken into custody after allegedly carjacking a woman at gunpoint north of Brisbane, before crashing the stolen Audi into another car at a nearby intersection, killing the driver.
Neo-Nazi freed on bail after salute sentence | Jacob Hersant (above) walked out of the Melbourne magistrates court flanked by fellow far-right extremist Thomas Sewell after being granted bail pending an appeal to a one-month jail sentence handed down for performing an illegal Hitler salute in public.
Man who stabbed paramedic found not criminally responsible | Jordan James Fineanganofo admitted stabbing 29-year-old paramedic Steven Tougher 55 times outside a McDonald’s in south-western Sydney in 2023, but pleaded not guilty to murder on the grounds of mental health impairment.
Xi Jinping’s father lionised in TV drama | Funded by the Central Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist party, the 39-part Time in the Northwest chronicles the life of Xi Zhongxun, the father of the Chinese president, who was himself a party elder and key figure under Chairman Mao Zedong.
US to continue Ukraine aid until Trump enters office | The Biden administration confirmed it would continue its surge of military aid to Kyiv, while the Nato chief, Mark Rutte, said North Korea’s involvement in Russia’s war posed a direct threat to the US, in a first effort to convince Donald Trump to keep backing Kyiv.
Charges laid over Liam Payne’s death | Authorities in Argentina have charged three people in connection with the former One singer’s death at a Buenos Aires hotel for supplying narcotics and the abandonment of a person followed by death.
New light shed on Pompeii victims’ identities | Researchers said DNA evidence debunked long-held assumptions about the identity and relationships of those frozen in time by the eruption, including that of a victim long thought to be a mother but revealed to be an unrelated man.
In pictures
‘The first thing I did was poke it’: Canada beach blobs mystery solved by chemists
Sydney isn’t the only city dealing with mysterious beach blobs: for more than a month, hundreds of pale, gooey masses have been washing up on the shores of Newfoundland. Now a team of scientists has determined the blobs are most likely a synthetic material used to clean pipes in the oil and gas industry – and the search is on to find the culprit.
What they said …
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“I will not let another man touch me until I have my rights back.”
McKenna, who is 24 and lives in a rural, conservative part of the US, first heard about 4B a few months ago. The South Korean social movement began during the 2018 protests against “revenge porn” and grew into the country’s #MeToo-esque feminist wave. The basic idea: women swear off heterosexual marriage, dating, sex and childbirth in protest against institutionalised misogyny and abuse. In the wake of Trump’s victory, 4B is once again on McKenna’s mind – and she’s not the only one.
In numbers
Books about democracy, dystopia, tyranny, feminism and far-right politics rapidly climbed bestseller charts in the wake of Donald Trump’s US election victory. Margaret Atwood’s novel about a totalitarian society in which women are forced to reproduce, is now third on the US Amazon bestsellers chart, while Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me has climbed more than 40,000 places over the past day.
Before bed read
Leading questions: I’m a ‘trad wife’ in a happy marriage. How can I get my friends to accept me for who I am?
To your friends, your relationship is probably the least interesting thing about you, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. Perhaps feeling more accepted in these friendships isn’t a matter of changing their attitudes to your marriage but changing how much your marriage is what they see of you.
Daily word game
Today’s starter word is: CREW. You have five goes to get the longest word including the starter word. Play Wordiply.
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