The Republicans have secured a majority in the US House of Representatives, giving the party a “governing trifecta” – House, Senate and presidency – that means Donald Trump has broad powers to enact his legislative agenda. The president-elect has named Matt Gaetz, a scandal-plagued congressman from Florida, as his attorney general, and Senator Marco Rubio – a diminutive one-time rival he dismissed as “Little Marco” – as secretary of state. Rachel Reeves will today announce plans to pool the combined £360bn from 86 separate local government pension schemes into eight “megafunds”. The decision is meant to mirror similar set-ups in Australia and Canada, allowing larger sums of money to be invested in a wider range of riskier and long-term assets. The British Museum has received the most valuable donation to a UK museum in history. The institution is being given the British financier Percival David’s 1,700 Chinese ceramics – worth an estimated £1bn – which is regarded as the greatest private collection outside of China and Taiwan.

Is Justin Welby a blameless scapegoat?

Justin Welby was right to resign, says Madeline Grant in The Daily Telegraph, “albeit far too late”. A damning report found that the Archbishop of Canterbury failed to ensure that allegations against the appalling John Smyth, a barrister who ferociously beat more than 100 boys and young men over nearly five decades, were adequately investigated. Welby is not the only high-ranking cleric to fail Smyth’s victims: there are still clergy, many “more culpable” than him, who retain their jobs. And there are still countless victims who go “unlistened to and ignored”. But the buck stops with the boss. With Welby gone, it’s time the Church had a thorough managerial – and moral – overhaul.

Nonsense, says Charles Moore in The Spectator. It has never been clear why, in this “horrendous case”, anyone thinks it should be the Archbishop’s head on the block. Smyth was never an Anglican priest (he was refused ordination) nor paid by the Church. Most of the abuse he perpetrated was when he took boys from Winchester College to lunch with his family nearby. In a sound-proofed hut in his garden, he “beat the boys savagely, in the interests, he told them, of purifying them for God”. The duty of care is surely Winchester’s, not the C of E’s. And when, in 2013, Welby was presented with evidence of Smyth’s abuse, the case was followed up, and Welby was wrongly told the police had been informed. He was already dealing with cases involving historic Church abusers – Bishop Peter Ball, for example – which clearly were his responsibility. All the more reason not to take on cases that were not. “This was not well handled, but it was not wicked.”

I was at a dinner in Haifa on Tuesday with a group of Israeli Jews and Arabs, says Thomas Friedman in The New York Times. The guests told me that many Jewish Israelis think that because one of Trump’s sons-in-law is Jewish, “he is ready to be tough with Palestinians”. Many Israeli Arabs, meanwhile, think Trump will benefit them because he is “the only one tough enough to stand up to Netanyahu”, and because his other son-in-law has a Lebanese American father. They can’t both be right.

The NHS has started using drones to deliver blood samples between London hospitals, says The Times. It takes the autonomous aircraft just two minutes to fly the 1.4 miles between the rooftops of Guy’s Hospital in London Bridge and St Thomas’ opposite the Houses of Parliament, rather than the 30 minutes it can take to drive through the capital’s congested streets. The time-saving development is crucial: the samples are from patients at risk of bleeding out who are set to undergo surgery at Guy’s, and the specialist blood analysis equipment at St Thomas’ helps surgeons decide whether to go ahead with the op.

America’s out-of-touch journalists have learnt nothing

After the shock of the 2016 US election, says Gerard Baker in The Wall Street Journal, the nation’s journalists discovered they knew as much about their country as they did about North Korea. So, “like 19th-century anthropologists venturing into the undiscovered interior of Africa”, passels of metropolitan reporters sallied forth into Flyover Country. They sat down – “warily, we can assume” – in diners and bowling alleys with people who had “never even been to Harvard or eaten a slice of avocado toast”, and listened in rising amazement as men and women “without either gym memberships or nannies from Guatemala” talked about mysterious topics like God, national borders and “something called patriotism”.

From the coverage of the 2024 election, we can surmise that what these intrepid journalists concluded was that the people they met out in small-town America were “fascists” with reactionary views about “race, sex and everything else”, itching to vote for a fascist president. Imagine their surprise on discovering that this community of fascists included not only white supremacists, but also “Hispanic fascists, black fascists and… Jewish fascists”. These groups, and others, voted for Donald Trump in greater numbers than in 2016 or 2020, despite the nation’s news organisations assuring them that he wanted to turn the US into the Fourth Reich. It’s hard to see how these institutions can ever again claim a central role in the democratic life of the nation, given their eight-year campaign to persuade Americans that Trump is a “Russian puppet, a 1930s-style Nazi and a dangerous criminal” resulted in the number of Americans voting for him going from 63 million to 74 million. “They did at least win lots of Pulitzers – which is the thing that really matters, I suppose.”

🪖💥 Kamala Harris was among those to denounce Trump as a “fascist” before the election, says Aris Roussinos in UnHerd. Having lost to such a monster, the vice president should surely “prepare her soul for political martyrdom”, launch a military coup to save American democracy (“from its own voters”), or gather an armed band of partisans around her for a final insurgency, “perhaps in the hilly California wine country she knows so well”. So far, no sign of the resistance.

The design studio KXD has reimagined what today’s most recognisable logos would look like if they were made in the 1980s, including: Pinterest, PlayStation; WhatsApp; Netflix; and a spooky reimagining of Duolingo. See more here.

A central London pub has raised the price of drinks after 10pm, says The Independent. The Soho branch of the Irish pub chain O’Neill’s says the extra costs of staying open late forced it to bring in the change, charging customers an extra £2 for beer and £1 for soft drinks if they order after the cutoff. The move takes a pint of pale ale to £9.40. Yikes.

It’s a group of Russian teachers who were fooled into posing for photos in homemade tinfoil hats by a prankster pretending to represent Vladimir Putin. Vladislav Bokhan, an exiled Belarusian anti-Kremlin blogger, told the teachers the hoax headwear would save them from Nato satellites that were trying to “irradiate the Russian people physically and biologically”, and supplied detailed instructions about how to make them. Some teachers posed for pictures in the hats next to a Putin portrait, and one asked for a certificate to prove she had participated.