United States: California Governor Gavin Newsom was sworn in and immediately drew sharp battle lines with President Donald Trump, pledging to enact "progressive, principled" policies as the antidote to the White House's "corruption and incompetence". Newsom, 51, said: "People's lives, freedom, security, the water we drink, the air we breathe — they all hang in the balance". Newsom took the helm as California's 40th governor after 80-year-old predecessor, Jerry Brown.
Congo: As tensions build in Congo over the delay in announcing the election results, actor Ryan Gosling urged equitable trade in the country's strategic minerals. Gosling collaborated on a book about the Central African country with activists and experts on Congo who have urged officials to announce a credible winner. Congo's electoral commission delayed indefinitely the announcement of the results of the December 30 vote. However, the influential Catholic Church said it can see a clear winner from the 40,000 observers it posted across the country and it urged the electoral commission to publish the true results in "respect of truth and justice." Gosling took photos in Congo that illustrate the book Congo Stories, published last month with text written by activist John Prendergast and other Congo analysts. Gosling wrote by email: "I've learned that if Congo was the beneficiary of its own natural resources it would be one of the richest countries in the world as opposed to one of the poorest".
Britain: Like a military operation, the project to test how traffic might flow around South East England in the event of a no-deal Brexit started before dawn. The Department for Transport had asked for between 100 and 150 trucks to assemble at a disused airfield in Kent. In the event, 89 turned up. The vehicles moved in convoys back and forth to the port of Dover in tests that Britain's Road Haulage Association said were too limited in scope to replicate the chaotic scenes that could play out if traffic is held up by customs delays after March 29. The exercise is designed to test the UK's readiness in case Prime Minister Theresa May fails to get her Brexit deal through Parliament and the country crashes out of the bloc without an agreement to smooth the split. Trucks are currently carried between Dover and Calais with minimal delay. But customs checks, if required, could take up to 45 minutes per vehicle, risking road back-ups as long as 27km.
