The BBC is excited but brief.

Breaking News, it declares.

Former White House aide Steve Bannon “lost his mind” after he lost his job at the White House, US President Donald Trump has said.

The president disavowed Mr Bannon after he was quoted in a new book describing a meeting between Mr Trump’s son and a group of Russians as “treasonous”.

But where did he say it, when did he say it, to whom did he say it.

I guess the reporter is still typing; the Beeb says to keep refreshing the page.

Updating to add:

Oh, I see, it’s a press statement. You’d think the Beeb could have said that before pressing Publish.

holy WHAT.

Trump: "When [Bannon]

The toddler ran amok.

It's not only Pakistan that we pay billions of dollars to for nothing, but also many other countries, and others. As an example, we pay the Palestinians HUNDRED OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS a year and get no appreciation or respect. They don’t even want to negotiate a long overdue…

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 2, 2018

…peace treaty with Israel. We have taken Jerusalem, the toughest part of the negotiation, off the table, but Israel, for that, would have had to pay more. But with the Palestinians no longer willing to talk peace, why should we make any of these massive future payments to them?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 2, 2018

North Korean

Twitter has told “Sheriff” David Clarke to knock it off with the violent threats.

Former Milwaukee Sheriff David A. Clarke, Jr., a vocal surrogate for President Donald Trump on the campaign trail, was temporarily blocked from tweeting after Twitter users’ complaints alerted the company that three of his messages violated the terms of service, CNN has learned.

Clarke was placed in read-only mode until he deleted three tweets that seemed to call for violence against members of the media.

In one of them, which has since been deleted, Clarke told his followers, “When LYING LIB MEDIA makes up MAKE NEWS to smear me, the ANTIDOTE is to go right at them. Punch them in the nose & MAKE THEM TASTE

Bloodroot Vegetarian Restaurant in Bridgeport, Connecticut, yesterday:

As many of you know, Bloodroot has recently come under attack and is currently being trolled by a number of people in the transgender community and their supporters. We felt it was time to make an official statement. Because it seems whenever we try and explain what happened and our stance on this issue, it only serves to inspire more hatred, we will not be replying to comments.

Bloodroot and her owners are not transphobic – far from it! Bloodroot has always welcomed and respected everyone – especially people who might feel uncomfortable in a public space. Whether that be people from other countries, people of color, people of every type of

Benjamin Wittes looks at Trump’s war on the Deep State so far, and finds it fulfilling dire predictions but also not as bad as it could be if Trump were more competent.

The first few weeks of the Trump administration raised the question of the degree to which Trump’s malevolence would be tempered by his incompetence. In the first year of the Trump presidency, the answer to that question was that incompetence did a lot of tempering. Trump blundered from crisis to crisis. The lawyering around him was comically dreadful—as was the broader executive functioning. Taking on established democratic institutions and wrecking them actually takes a certain amount of focus and energy—and Trump just isn’t very good at

Deborah Cameron has a shorter and of course vastly better list of some good reads.

• Mary Beard, Women and Power: A Manifesto.
• Emma Jane, Misogyny Online: A Short (and Brutish) History.
• Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and tumblr to Trump and the alt-right.

About the Nagle, she says

Before anyone was talking about the ‘alt-right’, Angela Nagle was investigating the online subcultures from which it emerged, tracking the people involved, the platforms they used, the political positions they espoused and—from a linguist’s perspective most interestingly—the evolution of their distinctive communication style. This isn’t as distinctive as we might think: it has much in common with earlier celebrations of transgression (‘kill all