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
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 …
“I will not let another man touch me until I have my rights back.”
McKennawho 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.
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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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