Victims in the Church of England abuse scandal have called for more heads to roll, after the Archbishop of Canterbury’s shock resignation yesterday. Justin Welby, the first holder of his post in its 1,427-year history to resign because of a scandal, said he had to take “personal and institutional responsibility” for the failure to act on allegations against John Smyth in 2013. Donald Trump has appointed Elon Musk to head up a new Department of Government Efficiency, alongside former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. The president-elect’s other cabinet picks include Fox News host Pete Hegseth as defence secretary and South Dakota governor Kristi Noem as secretary of homeland security. Samantha Harvey has won this year’s Booker Prize for her space-set novel Orbital. The only British writer on the shortlist, Harvey conducted her research by watching hours of International Space Station livestreams during lockdowns.

This climate change conference is an insult to democracy

The decision to let Azerbaijan host the COP29 climate conference really does beggar belief, says Megan Kenyon in The New Statesman. A whopping 90% of the former Soviet state’s exports are fossil fuels, making it one of the top 10 most oil and gas-dependent economies in the world. Its national symbol is a flame, for crying out loud. But we shouldn’t be surprised: COP28 was held in the United Arab Emirates, which holds the world’s seventh-largest natural gas reserve; next year’s event will be in Brazil, which recently joined the oil exporters’ cartel OPEC+. Sure enough, a recording emerged last week of Azerbaijan’s energy minister using COP29 to strike oil and gas deals. President Ilham Aliyev opened the whole summit by describing fossil fuels as a “a gift from God”.

The other great irony is that the government in Baku has designated this the “COP of peace”, says Ella Whelan in The Daily Telegraph. Just last year, Azerbaijan conducted what has been widely condemned as an ethnic cleansing campaign in the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh – something our “famously measured and sensible foreign secretary David Lammy” recently praised as a “liberation”, sparking a diplomatic row. The autocratic state is also believed to be holding hundreds of academics and activists in prison. These include LSE professor Gubad Ibadoghlu, whose supposed misdeeds include criticising the government for its approach to fossil fuels. It’s an obvious point that COP is antidemocratic: “no plebs will ever be invited to make speeches to UN officials”. But holding it in Azerbaijan really does seem like a “joke to democracy”.

Kamala Harris ran a decidedly traditional election campaign, says Jeremiah Johnson on Substack: heavyweight endorsements, armies of door-knockers and phone-bankers, millions of dollars’ worth of old-school advertising and professional operatives in battleground states. Donald Trump, by contrast, hardly had any “ground game” at all. Instead, he spent his time on podcasts with “highly online personalities” like Joe Rogan and Logan Paul, and leant into “extremely online discourses” about Haitians eating pets and squirrel euthanasia. People used to say “the internet is not real life... You need to log off and talk to real people”. Trump’s victory shows that door-knockers and the like might as well pack it in, and “get back on the internet”.

A pair of German slackliners have set a new world record by walking between two hot air balloons at an altitude of 2,500 metres, says Euronews. Friedi Kühne and Lukas Irmler completed the feat above the alpine region of Riedering, smashing the previous record of 1,900 metres set in Brazil in 2021. Watch the full video here.

Democrats can’t “wash off the stench” of identity politics

Some Democrats are “finally waking up” to the fact that “woke is broke”, says Maureen Dowd in The New York Times. The party embraced a worldview of “hyper-political correctness”, supporting diversity statements for job applications and “faculty lounge terminology” like Latinx and Bipoc. But guess what? Donald Trump won huge support among groups usually assumed to be progressive: white women, black and Latino voters, young men. A revealing chart in the FT (see here) showed that white progressives hold views “far to the left of the minorities they champion”. They believe in far higher numbers than Hispanic or black Americans that “racism is built into our society”, while far more black and Hispanic voters told pollsters: “America is the greatest country in the world”.

Some “gobsmacked” – and presumably brain-dead – Democrats believe Harris wasn’t left-wing enough. This is obviously balls. Trump played to the irritation of millions of Americans who were disgusted at being regarded as insensitive for talking the way they’d always talked. “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone,” says Massachusetts Congressman Seth Moulton. “I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.” Democratic strategist Julie Roginsky points out that using the phrase Latinx makes most Latinos “think we don’t even live on the same planet”. Election guru James Carville – who called “defund the police” the “three stupidest words in the English language” – is frank. The idea that “identity is more important than humanity” is repellent, he says, and now the Democrats can’t “wash off the stench”.

💉💩 To get a sense of why Americans are fed up with progressive nonsense, says Niall Ferguson in the Daily Mail, just look at California, which has been Democrat-run since the 1990s. Taxes on the rich are among the country’s highest, and the state’s 20 “sanctuary cities” (which refuse to enforce immigration law) have made it a magnet for illegal immigrants. As a result, California is home to 12% of the US population, but more than 30% of its welfare recipients, with the highest poverty rate (17.2%) of any state. Ultra-progressive San Francisco, which has not had a Republican mayor since 1964, is so littered with “human excrement and syringe needles” that I avoid it entirely.

The Trump family has a new star, says The Cut: the president-elect’s 17-year-old granddaughter Kai. The daughter of favoured son Don Jr, Kai is an aspiring golfer with big followings on Instagram and YouTube. The teen was a vocal supporter of “grandpa” throughout his campaign and celebrated his win by playing golf with the man himself and Elon Musk, who she said was “achieving uncle status”. She has also released an “Election Night vlog”, in which she has her hair done, picks out a sparkly black dress and wolfs down some pork jerky on the way to Mar-a-Lago while blasting out the Mamma Mia! soundtrack. Watch it here.

During World War One, wine was a “staple supply” for French soldiers, says the London Review of Books. Each man’s daily ration was a quarter of a litre at the start of the conflict, rising to three-quarters by the end of it. The ingenious poilus found that if they fired a blank cartridge into one of the metal tanks used to transport wine, it expanded the container’s capacity, getting even more of the good stuff to the front line. Santé!

It’s the first artwork created by an AI-powered humanoid robot to be sold at auction, says BBC News, and it went for a surprisingly large sum. The portrait of British mathematician Alan Turing by Ai-Da, a “pioneering humanoid artist” who is one of the most advanced robots in the world, fetched just over $1m at the Sotheby’s digital art sale, far surpassing its $120,000 to $180,000 estimate.