A flurry of Senate confirmation hearings for Trump’s Cabinet picks, beginning Tuesday, will exemplify the president-elect’s aggressive efforts to wield swift and consequential power after taking the oath of office on January 20. Trump will also make fresh efforts this week to nail down the strategy to push his sweeping agenda of disruption through the narrowly divided House and Senate before he launches a weekend of celebrations ahead of the inauguration.

Biden, 82, will deliver his farewell speech from the Oval Office on Wednesday in his first such address since he told Americans he wouldn’t run for reelection in July after a disastrous debate laid bare his diminished capacity. The outgoing administration is still hoping for a deal that would free US and Israeli hostages in Gaza, and Biden is also pushing the Taliban for the release of three Americans the US considers unjustly held in Afghanistan.

The president is also still considering whether to grant preemptive pardons to people whom the White House believes may be targets of the next president’s retribution, such as former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, one of the president-elect’s most prominent GOP critics. Biden said Friday he was watching Trump’s rhetoric to try to assess his intentions, at a time when the departing president is using his appearances to try to fashion last-minute adjustments to how he will be remembered in history.

An already tense transition, given the brittle personal relationship between Trump and Biden, will be further overshadowed by the disastrous wildfires that have destroyed thousands of homes in the Los Angeles area and killed at least 24 people

The new year in politics starts with the bang of a billionaire with a bigger mouth than his bank balance.
Elon Musk has been lobbing almost as many digital darts over the Atlantic as Luke Littler has the real things in the last couple of days.
The world’s richest man has been sounding off in the strongest possible terms about the prime minister for almost as long as Sir Keir Starmer has been in Downing Street.
In recent days, the focus has been on child sexual exploitation and Musk’s allegation that the prime minister was “complicit in the rape of Britain” when he was Director of Public Prosecutions by failing to deal with the scandal.
I’m told Sir Keir “will not want to get into a food fight with Musk” but will make a robust defence of his time as chief prosecutor.
He is also keen to emphasise the importance of political debate being grounded in verifiable facts and that Musk is making claims that are “blatantly untrue” as one source put it.
Sources point, for instance, to those defending the Prime Minister’s record as DPP, including another former senior prosecutor who took to X – the social media platform Musk owns – to say Sir Keir oversaw a record number of child abuse convictions.
Those in government also point to the local inquiries there have been into the abuse and rape of vulnerable young girls by groups of men mainly of Pakistani descent – and the national inquiry conducted by Professor Alexis Jay.
The Conservatives, Reform and Elon Musk have each expressed varying degrees of outrage in recent days that the government has said no to a public inquiry into the scandal.
But few expected this weekend’s twist: that within hours of the Reform leader Nigel Farage describing Musk as a “hero” who “makes us look cool,” the X owner said Reform needed a new leader as Farage “doesn’t have what it takes”.

The death of a teenage boy sparked violent protests in a city in north-west China, the BBC has confirmed through verified video.
In the videos shared on social media, protesters can be seen hurling objects at police and officers beating some demonstrators in Pucheng in Shaanxi province.
Authorities said the teenager fell to his death on 2 January in an accident at his school dormitory. But following his death allegations began spreading on social media that there had been a cover-up.
Protests erupted soon after and lasted a few days, before they were apparently quelled earlier this week. The BBC has seen no further evidence of protest in Pucheng since then.
Public demonstrations are not uncommon in China, but authorities have been particularly sensitive about them since the 2022 White Paper protests against Covid policies, which saw rare criticism of the Chinese Communist Party and President Xi Jinping.