Keir Starmer has become the first British leader to attend an Armistice Day ceremony in Paris since Winston Churchill in 1944, having been personally invited by Emmanuel Macron. The pair will take the opportunity to discuss how best to handle Donald Trump’s expected scaling back of US support for Ukraine. The price of bitcoin has risen above $81,000 for the first time as traders bet on Trump deregulating cryptocurrencies when he returns to the White House. The digital currency touched a record high of $81,899, more than doubling in price from 12 months ago. Drones that scan zebras like a barcode will be used to monitor the animals as part of a conservation project in Kenya. The tech, which was developed in Britain, can track and assess the banded beasts without disturbing them.

Kyiv secretly wanted Trump to win

Many assume Donald Trump’s return to the White House is Ukraine’s “worst nightmare”, says The Economist. The president-elect has refused to condemn Vladimir Putin’s invasion and promised to end the conflict within 24 hours of taking office – even though nobody, “perhaps not even Mr Trump himself”, knows what he’s planning. Yet many senior officials in Kyiv were secretly hoping for the Republican to win. Volodymyr Zelensky’s staff have become increasingly frustrated by the Biden administration’s timidity: the “chronic delays” in providing the promised military aid; the ban on using US-made long-range missiles on Russian territory; and so on. Faced with a choice between this “bare life-support” and a wildcard president willing to rip up the rules, “they were prepared to gamble”.

The hope in Kyiv is that Trump will pursue a plan laid out earlier this year by Mike Pompeo, his former secretary of state. This would involve ramping up both military and financial support for Ukraine, and keeping open the prospect of Nato membership, to convince Moscow to end hostilities. There is of course no way of knowing whether this approach appeals to Trump – he has already said Pompeo will not serve in his new administration. But a “total sell-out” of Ukraine seems unlikely. Trump hates losing, and he knows that withdrawing support for Kyiv would make him the “author and owner” of a big defeat. Whether Putin wants to negotiate is another matter: his forces definitely have the Ukrainians on the back foot, and the Russian president may figure it’s still worth pushing for their complete capitulation. Either way, Zelensky and his aides think Trump could offer them a way out of what looks like “a bloody deadlock at best, defeat at worst”.

Labour are understandably worried that Donald Trump’s forthcoming tariffs will hamper UK growth, says Kamal Ahmed in The Daily Telegraph. But there’s an opportunity here. Trump is likely to be much more aggressive with the EU than he is with the UK, a country he “instinctively likes”. If Keir Starmer plays it right – and keeps Europe at arm’s length – he could potentially secure the UK some sort of “tariff-forgiveness”. The PM should heed the advice of his new national security advisor, Jonathan Powell. When Powell was Tony Blair’s chief of staff in the run-up to the Iraq war, he told the UK’s ambassador to the US that his job was to “get up the arse of the White House and stay there”.

Park rangers across the US are doubling as social media influencers, says Condé Nast Traveller, and they’ve created “the most wholesome corner of the internet”. As part of a concerted effort by the National Park Service to boost the popularity of their natural domains, the Zion National Park team in Utah performed a rendition of the song Cool Water “about the dangerous heat of the desert and the need for cool, clear water to survive”. At Minute Man National Park in Massachusetts, staff played Chappell Roan’s pop hit Hot to Go! on a pipe while wearing historical costume. One video of a ranger in Alaska’s Glacier Bay showing off his uniforms has racked up over two million views.

Why didn’t more women vote for Harris?

Kamala Harris positioned herself as the most “female-friendly presidential candidate ever”, says Camilla Long in The Sunday Times, focusing relentlessly on how madame president would “restore abortion rights nationwide”. Yet abortion “barely figured” in exit polls. In the swing states, 11% named it their most important issue; immigration and the economy played, predictably, far bigger. So what made the Democrats think they could win on reproductive rights? Or rather: “Why did they think women wouldn’t care about immigration and the economy?” There’s a point at which the supposed party of anti-sexists starts to look “a bit, well, sexist”.

My view on women is the same as my view on men: “I want the women who run things to be good at running things, not just for them to be women.” Yet the Dems fielded “a woman famously hired simply because she was a woman”. And “not a single one of Harris’s policies” actually spoke to women. How was she planning to “write” Roe v Wade “into law”, when the obstacle is the Supreme Court, over which she would have no power? Other policies “actively repelled” female voters. Harris’s VP pick Tim Walz has turned Minnesota into a “trans refuge”, signing a law allowing children to be taken away if their parents don’t agree they should receive “gender-affirming care” – including having their “ovaries or penises removed” or being “surgically or chemically castrated”. Put another way: “in a choice between having your pussy grabbed, or having your child stolen and sterilised by the state, almost every woman in the country is going to choose the former”. Only a Democrat could fail to see that.

After the “travesty” of the 2019 film Cats, composer Andrew Lloyd Webber bought himself a dog called Mojito, says Leaf Arbuthnot in The Daily Telegraph. When he applied to have the pooch registered as an emotional support animal for a flight to New York, the airline asked him for medical proof that he needed one. “Just see what Hollywood did to my musical,” Webber wrote back. Mojito was granted approval with the note: “No doctor’s report required.”

I learnt some new slang at my nine-year-old son’s football match, says Richard Godwin in The Oldie: “the Brexit tackle”. Apparently, it’s the name for a particularly brutal challenge – the type Roy Keane, Neil “Razor” Ruddock and Stuart “Psycho” Pearce were known for. In “extreme circumstances”, a defender might even commit a “hard Brexit”: the sort of bone-cruncher that ensures the opposition player will play no further football, ever. Children were literally running about the field shouting “Brexit him!” and “Brexit means Brexit!”

They’re the babies of a cloned ferret named Antonia, says The Washington Post. The cute kits were born at the Smithsonian National Zoo’s conservation institute near Washington DC, where staff are hoping to use the techniques they’ve learned in cloning Antonia to help preserve other endangered species. “The successful breeding and subsequent birth of Antonia’s kits marks a major milestone in endangered species conservation,” said Paul Marinari, the zoo’s curator. The babies are said to be “doing well”.