American voters just delivered a once-in-a-generation rebuke of a sitting president and his movement.
They handed his political opposition, the Democrats, control of the US House and the Senate in the same night. And they did it in deep red places like Texas, Kansas and South Carolina, states that haven’t sent a Democrat to the US Senate in decades. By the early hours, Donald Trump was telling the he would accept the results while blaming Fox News, bad candidates and Greg Abbott, who he decided had “become a RINO [Republican In Name Only]”.
I was in the White House the last time Trump lost part of Congress, in the 2018 midterm elections. What followed was chaotic, vindictive and more dangerous than what came before.
How you ‘smart fridge’ could be hacked
Household appliances, energy meters and even microwaves are vulnerable to hacking from hostile states, experts have warned.
Here’s how…
Fridge hack
Hackers sent temperatures soaring in supermarket freezers across 10 countries on Tuesday – including Ireland, Italy, Belgium, Portugal and Sweden.
The incident occurred three weeks after an unprecedented cyber attack caused French freezers to heat to 50°C, spoiling millions of euros worth of food.
How was the attack carried out?
Older internet remote-control boxes that manage refrigeration were targeted with an automatic defrost function, triggering dozens of shops, including IKEA.
Security experts believe a state actor like Russia may be to blame for the attacks, which also affected fridges in a small number of British businesses.
While state-linked attackers are more likely to target supply chains or national infrastructure to cause maximum disruption, experts are now calling for homeowners to reconsider if they need appliances that connect to the internet and action from government.
5 min read
Warnings from the Government
Millions have ‘smart fridges’
A YouGov poll last year showed more than two million Britons have smart fridges.
MP Graeme Downie said people in the UK should reconsider the connected appliances in their homes.
Cellular modules
Downie warned against the use of smart cellular modules that can connect to the internet or mobile network.
What else is vulnerable?
Luke de Pulford, the co-founder of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, which monitors the threat from Beijing, said any firmware in devices that requires remote software could be vulnerable to hacking from a foreign-based entity.
- “Energy smart meters, microwaves, smart TVs – those are all things that are vulnerable. But also Chinese-made CCTV equipment. These are all devices that are well known to be vulnerable,” he said.
Taking pets abroad may be about to get easier – here’s why
Pet owners are likely to get easier access to the European Union for their pets under a new UK-EU agreement, it has been reported.
Pet passports
Pet passports will be revived under a new UK-EU sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) agreement due to be agreed ahead of a joint summit reports.
Post Brexit, pet owners paid £200 to obtain an animal health certificate in order to take them abroad. Under the proposed deal, pets will now be a given a passport.
New deals with the EU
- 1Travellers will be able to bring their dogs, cats, and ferrets into EU territory for the duration of their lifetime without the need for expensive certificates. This will be implemented from 2028.
- 2UK ministers also hope to agree a deal to give car manufacturers access to the EU’s Made in Europe scheme.
- 3The EU is also looking to agree a youth mobility scheme allowing up to 100,000 Europeans to work aand study in the UK a year. Separately, Brussels is also looking for a reduction in tuition fees for EU students.
UK may have to accept almost 100,000 young Europeans a year to unlock Brexit deal
British negotiators think they can strike a youth mobility agreement with the EU while staying under the “psychologically important” figure of 100,000 visas, The i Paper can reveal.
Why Rice Krispies is no longer made from whole grain rice
Kellogg’s has removed rice grains from its Rice Krispies and Coco Pops cereals after “changing weather conditions” affected the quality and availability of the ingredient, the firm has said.
New formula
Rice Krispies has been reformulated to use rice flour instead of rice, while Coco Pops now contains a blend of rice flour and corn flour in place of rice.
Under the new recipes, the cereals now also contain wheat gluten, meaning they are no longer suitable for shoppers with a wheat allergy or coeliac disease.
Kellogg’s spokeswoman:
“This recent change helps us maintain consistent quality at a time when changing weather conditions are affecting the quality and availability of some of the and grains used in our cereals.”
The change in formula comes after this year’s El Niño weather phenomenon caused widespread droughts, floods and heatwaves across much of Asia where most of the world’s rice comes from.
Watch more from The i Paper
What to know as Republicans suffer brutal election losses
The Democrats have made sweeping gains in a bruising night for Donald Trump and the Republicans.
Sweeping victories
The US midterms have seen the Democrats flip key Republican Senate seats in places such as and .
The stunning results have been widely regarded as a consequence of the cost of living crisis which has been driven by the US-Israeli war with Iran. Losing both houses will now make it hard for Trump to drive his legislative agenda.
Key Republican losses in the Senate
Democrat James Talarico defeated Trump-backed Ken Paxton in Texas.
Democrat Sherrod Brown won in Ohio, defeating Republican Jon Husted.
Democrat Annie Andrews beat Trump’s hand-picked candidate Darline Graham to take the seat.
The losses keep coming
Democrat Troy Jackson won, taking the state’s Senate seat for the first time in 29 years.
Abdul El-Sayed is projected to win, becoming the first Muslim senator in US history.
Paralympian Josh Turek won a Senate seat in the state for the first time in 18 years.
Democrats needed a net gain of four seats in the 100-member Senate to win a majority, while in the 435-member House, they needed three. Democrat Senator Jon Ossoff, who won re-election in Georgia, told supporters “the American people have rebuked the depravity, corruption, and incompetence of the failed lame-duck President Donald J Trump”.
Trump’s response:
I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!
Posting on his social media platform Truth Social, the President sought to defend the bruising results.
While offering to work with opponents, he also posted a picture of a red baseball cap emblazoned with the word “Veto”, suggesting he would block legislation they sought to take through Congress.
Watch more from The i Paper
Why you feel completely broke
A decent salary and watching what you spend is increasingly not enough for people to feel well off– here’s why.
Cost of living
The UK is suffering the worst decade in terms of the growth in household incomes since records began.
Due to cost of living pressures and a lack of substantial wage growth, leading think-tanks like the Resolution Foundation predict that a typical working-age household will see their disposable income fall by £1,050 or 3 per cent between now and 2029.
Disposable income growing slower
Slow growth, inflation and stubbornly high housing costs are the main culprits. While disposable incomes fluctuated throughout the 1970s and 80s, they generally rose again after a fall. Not so since the 2008 global financial crisis, Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic.
3 min read
House prices rising faster
The average house price in the UK is currently around 6.5 times the average income, compared to around 3.5 times in 1996 and 2.5 times in 1966.
- One could argue that it is why Andy Burnham thinks Britain should rejoin the European Union and why we’ve heard so much about growth – now rebranded as “good growth” – in order to improve incomes.
More people paying higher rate income tax
One of the major reasons behind stagnated income growth is the constant freezing of tax thresholds – levels that won’t change until 2030.
You are now dragged into paying the higher tax rate of 40 per cent if you earn £50,271 or more. You stay in that bracket until you earn £125,000, but at £100,000 a year you lose your personal tax-free allowance and your entitlement to state-funded free childcare.
The NHS blood test which could find several cancers
Blood tests capable of detecting signs of several cancers from a single sample will be offered to NHS patients in a world-first trial.
New blood tests
Thousands of patients will be invited to take part in the Stride-RCT study, which aims to catch cancers at a time when treatment is more likely to succeed.
The tests – which use AI and other cutting-edge technology – could also help GPs identify patients with cancers that are difficult to diagnose.
How will the tests be rolled out?
Who is eligible?
More than 20,000 patients aged 45 or older will be invited to take part.
The tests will be offered to patients who present with symptoms such as persistent bloating or abdominal discomfort.
Where will they be available?
The £8.5m government-funded trial will be offered in more than 200 GPs across England.
How do the tests work?
The tests are designed to detect signs of cancers including bowel, pancreatic, ovarian, stomach, liver, kidney, bladder and prostate cancer.
Some work by identifying tiny fragments of DNA that are shed into the bloodstream by tumours. Others measure proteins in the blood, or use AI to analyse results.
The tests aim not only to identify possible cancer cells but also to indicate where in the body it may be developing.
6 min read
Watch more from The i Paper
How autism diagnoses are ‘increasingly linked to ADHD’
Experts found a rapid rise in autism diagnoses among 16-to 20-year-olds since 2010 in the UK, as well as a rise in women and white people, compared to other ethnicities.
What were the findings?
Researchers from the Medical Research Council looked at data from the UK and Sweden.
They found that new diagnoses have increased from six people per 100,000 in 2010, to 64 per 100,000 in 2023.
Analysis also showed there has been a change in the make-up of people diagnosed with autism, with a decrease in those with a prior diagnosis of epilepsy.
Instead, they found an increase in the proportion of people who had a prior diagnosis of ADHD, stress-related disorders, eating disorders, headaches and chronic fatigue.
The story in numbers
58%
The proportion of autism diagnoses in people with anxiety more than doubled form 29 per cent to 58 per cent between 2010 and 2023.
- In the UK, 24.5 million adults contributed to the study, including 141,119 with an autism diagnosis.
- Writing in , the team said this could be the result of “greater appreciation of nuanced forms of autism that may have previously been labelled as other conditions due to overlapping features, particularly in females”.
How menopause is affecting women’s careers and pensions
Half of women in the perimenopause or menopause say their career has suffered as a result, with workers cutting their hours or feeling forced to turn down opportunities for career progression, according to a new survey.
Lack of support for symptoms
Nearly one in three said their life stage had influenced their retirement savings, according to the research for Scottish Widows. A similar number also said their regular finances had been affected.
And 50 per cent of women surveyed said they would like more support at work. 17 per cent said they had been forced to take time away to manage symptoms.
Breaking down the numbers
- One in eight (13 per cent) women had reduced their working hours and 10 per cent had turned down a promotion or career progression opportunity, for menopause-related reasons.
Scottish Widows found that a 50-year-old woman in full-time work taking a six-month unpaid break could potentially cost £1,300 in pension contributions.
Gaps in pension contributions will have a bigger impact over time, as savers will also miss out on the interest that could have been earned on them.
Two-thirds of women surveyed believe employers should be required to provide better support to women experiencing menopause symptoms, including financial support.
A blow to pension pots
Perimenopause or often coincides with what should be the peak earnings potential of a woman’s career. When symptoms force women to reduce their hours, step back from promotion opportunities or leave work entirely, the ripple effect on their pension pots is huge
Susan Hope, a retirement expert at Scottish Widows
Here’s what to expect out of Washington in the weeks and months ahead.
1. The President will purge parts of his White House and cabinet
Trump cannot take blame. In two and a half years working under him, I never saw him do it. And in the weeks after the 2018 midterms, he pushed out his chief of staff John Kelly and lost his defence secretary Jim Mattis, along with a string of others deemed insufficiently loyal or simply convenient scapegoats. A repeat may be on the way. According to recent reporting, Trump has eyed axing his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, as well as his defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, who is being set up as the Iran War fall guy. Surely others will follow.
But buckle up. The purge after 2018 didn’t produce a more cautious White House. If anything, from my vantage point it produced a more radical one, because the people who left were the ones who occasionally said “no” in our private meetings with the president. The same will happen now. The adults who remain will be thrown overboard, and their replacements will be chosen for one quality only, which is that they’ll never tell him he’s wrong.
More from Miles Taylor
2. Democrats will gear up for the biggest investigations in Congressional history
In 2018, Democrats took the House and spent two years digging into a presidency that was, frankly, amateurish in its misconduct. This time they will have both chambers, subpoena power in the Senate as well as the House and a target list that includes nearly every major department and agency in Washington. These won’t just be symbolic hearings.
I have been in regular communications with top Democrats on the oversight committees in Congress, and what they have planned has no parallel in American history. None. The investigations will be sprawling, relentless and fact-driven. And there are early discussions about how to bring in auxiliary talent, including former prosecutors, ex-FBI investigators and other experts who’ve run complex anti-corruption investigations.
3. Those who bent the knee will run for the hills
For two years, Americans watched elites bow to Donald Trump out of fear or avarice. Corporate America, the big law firms and half of Washington’s lobbying class found ways to make peace with him, even when many had stridently opposed him in his first term. They cut deals to avoid his retribution, wrote cheques for his White House ballroom and signed settlements that looked to a lot of us like protection money. The self-debasing logic of capitulation made sense when Trump controlled all the levers of power in the capital. It looks very different this morning.
Robert Garcia, who will chair the House Oversight Committee in January — the main investigative committee in the chamber, shared a two-word post last night as the results rolled in: “Lawyer up.” I spoke with him recently, and his targets will include the Trump family’s business dealings, corporate corruption, abuses at ICE and the Epstein files. The companies and firms that cosied up to this administration will soon have to explain their decisions under oath, and several that I’ve talked to are quietly panicking.
4. Republicans will start abandoning him
Watch the “lame duck” session closely. Over the next few months before Democrats officially take power, Republicans will start to break from the White House. In particular, GOP candidates who’ve lost their races will have far less loyalty toward the man who cost them their jobs and cost their party its power. Even before polls closed, his own allies were texting people like me that the Iran war had sunk the midterms and the President lacked the discipline to deliver any sort of coherent closing argument.
Trump has already responded by pointing the finger back at them. He posted that Republicans would have won “in a landslide” if he’d been on the ballot. This, of course, was despite the fact that Trump spent weeks campaigning and telling his people to pretend he on the ballot. That seems to have been the problem — voters very much made it a referendum on Trump. Now he doesn’t want ownership of the loss, and outgoing Republicans will surely remember that as the White House presses them to cement Trump’s agenda in the three months before they’re out of power.
5. Trump will re-focus on foreign policy, with potentially disastrous consequences
As I wrote on Tuesday, presidents constrained politically at home tend to set their sites abroad. While many seek out new accords and legacy-cementing diplomacy, Trump will retreat to his grievance factory. He will return to his quest to diminish or even dismantle Nato, punish European countries he sees as insufficiently loyal, and weigh in favourably on the side of the world’s autocrats, with lasting repercussions for the western world. Allied capitals are already bracing for more erratic behaviour than usual and a president who seems keen to abandon Ukraine and to double down on a disastrous war in Iran.
But he still won’t have free rein. A Democratic Congress will control the power of the purse and consider shutting off funds for Trump’s wayward foreign policies. What’s more, a few moderate Republicans who’ve lost their races because of Trump may suddenly find they’ve lost their loyalty to him, potentially joining hands with Democrats in constraining Trump’s field of action. That won’t necessarily stop the President, but for the first time in two years, there will be people in Washington able to slow him down.
Last night, America delivered an indictment against the sitting president. What comes next will be a public “trial” that I expect to be as raucous as it is unpredictable. And one thing that is now absolutely certain: Garcia will get his wish. Everyone will be lawyering up.
Miles Taylor has served on Capitol Hill, in the White House and at the Pentagon. He is a #1 New York Times bestselling author, national security commentator and democracy reform leader. Follow all of his US politics coverage here