By now you will be aware of the petition demanding another general election. Finally, an answer to what would happen if Maga had sex with the People’s Vote. I assume we don’t use the phrase “bastard offspring” any longer, but in this case I’ll be making an exception. To see the obnoxious essence of not one but two excruciating political movements hook up and push out a screaming signature-baby is not a pretty sight. I have immediately launched a petition to forcibly sterilise all political movements.

To recap, this is the petition started by a Shropshire publican after he’d Googled “how to change the prime minister” and it told him to start a petition. Not a great ad for Google’s search accuracy, let’s face it, but I guess we already knew that was ageing like an unsealed bag-in-box of Phillip Schofield wine. Anyway, the resultant petition has now garnered two and a half million digital signatures, probably many more by the time you read this, and been pushed by public figures ranging from Elon Musk to Michael Caine. Fine. The Jaws film where the shark genuinely follows the Brody family all the way to the Bahamas is no longer the stupidest thing Michael’s done.

We’ll come to the perfectly reasonable complaints about the way Keir Starmer’s government has been doing business shortly – and to the degree to which it has brought this on itself. But first, I think we do have to consider the unfortunate fact that the UK has once again caught the eye of the man soon to be found affixing stickers reading “Elon’s room – keep out!!!!!!!” on the door of the Lincoln Bedroom in the White House.

The Space X/Tesla/United States of America boss keeps pushing the petition on his X platform, with one word prompts like “Interesting” or “Wow”. I mean, not really? Big wows, more like. And it’s hard to believe Elon’s attempts to play dumbly impressed. He must know that in the UK and beyond, you can basically Petition McPetitionface any old poll thanks to platforms like his. But if he doesn’t, can someone trick Vice-President Moobs McMoobsface into agreeing that this campaign to re-run a vote we honestly had 10 minutes ago should be called “The People’s Vote”? I can see Elon gullibly liking the phrasing – even though it’s a title which has always implied that yeah, you do realise some alleged “people” already voted, but the result was something you didn’t like, so were they ever even people at all? Time for the actual humans to vote.

Regrettably, Musk hasn’t limited himself to wading into merely one aspect of British affairs, also opting to repost a picture of far-right Tommy Robinson self-swaddling in a prison-issue blanket, with Elon inquiring: “Why is he in prison for 18 months?” Oh. Normally I would respond to a particularly obtuse online inquiry with a cordial: “Do you have the internet? If so, you could Google it!” But given Elon owns part of the internet, there must be something that keeps him from carrying out this basic task – possibly a growing distrust of Google’s search accuracy.

In which case, happy to oblige. Robinson is in prison for contempt of court, because he wouldn’t stop repeating false claims about a refugee teenager. And it’s not even the first time he’s been in prison for contempt of court. He went before for trying to collapse a grooming trial, which would have put multiple female victims through the horror of having to testify twice. It’s almost as if he doesn’t give a toss about the women, repeatedly indulges in behaviour that in effect makes him their groomers’ and rapists’ friend, and does the entire thing for clicks – and the ready cash that follows. As a man who recently caught a space rocket with some chopsticks, Elon should surely be the person to grasp that the Robinson grift is not exactly rocket science.

Anyway, back to this petition. About 487 leaps down the food chain, Elon is ably supported by Richard Tice, the mid-90s knitwear catalogue model beta-ed out of the Reform leadership by Nigel Farage. Tice is another one that seems to have gone full crybaby about a vote result. Richard once called the People’s Vote campaign a “losers’ vote”, but is now pushing daily for the petition to become “the biggest petition ever” in the UK. Can he have it both ways? Can the QAnon shaman and Steve Bray make a spiritual baby? I wouldn’t have thought so, but the internet is once again refusing to be constrained by facts. As indeed is Richard.

However. Having said all that, what did Labour expect? We live in chaotic times where conventions and norms are disintegrating by the day. As many, many people said at the time, Labour not being straight with the electorate about money during the election campaign always threatened to go tits up sooner rather than later. Making silly obfuscations about “opening up the books” was warned against by everyone from the heights of the Institute for Fiscal Studies to the depths of this column. Promising revolution via trivial cuts to taxes or services was always putting Starmer’s would-be administration on a hiding to nothing. So here we all are. If populism is claiming there are simple answers to complex problems, then Labour’s manifesto at the recent general election was squarely populist. And if you don’t treat the people like adults, you can hardly complain when they go in for juvenile petitions.

• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

• A Year in Westminster: John Crace, Marina Hyde and Pippa Crerar. On Tuesday 3 December, join Crace, Hyde and Crerar as they look back at a political year like no other, live at the Barbican in London and livestreamed globally. Book tickets here or at theguardian.live

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

My ability to orgasm from penetrative sex seems to come and go. With some partners, I never climaxed; with others, I was able to climax at the beginning of the relationship and then became unable to; and then there are those with whom I had no issues climaxing. Now, I have suddenly become unable to orgasm from penetration with a partner that I previously had no problem climaxing with. I know people chalk it up to being a mental thing, or stress, but the relationship was great, the sex was great and out of nowhere I just became unable to feel anything during penetrative sex. We have been trying to solve this for 11 months.

Is achieving orgasm through penetrative sex really so important to you? Many people see this as an ideal and even (erroneously) consider that there is something wrong with a woman who cannot climax during vaginal intercourse. For most women, though, the main physiological pleasure centre is the clitoris, which is located outside the vagina. So, in order for a woman to have an orgasm during penetration, areas related to the clitoris have to be stimulated; very often, direct clitoral stimulation has to be employed. So, in worrying about the elusiveness of one type of orgasm, you are expecting a great deal of yourself and of your physical sexual response.

It is normal to have times when orgasm does not occur for one reason or another. Sometimes, a change in position will help the connection with clitoral nerve endings, or with an area sometimes referred to as the G-spot. Experiment, but avoid being goal-oriented during lovemaking, as that will set unrealistic expectations, increase anxiety and reduce the likelihood of reaching orgasm. Instead, try to simply focus on giving and receiving pleasure.

Pamela Stephenson Connolly is a US-based psychotherapist who specialises in treating sexual disorders.

Donald Trump’s transition team is planning for all cabinet picks to receive sweeping security clearances from the president-elect and only face FBI background checks after the incoming administration takes over the bureau and its own officials are installed in key positions, according to people familiar with the matter.

The move appears to mean that Trump’s team will continue to skirt FBI vetting and may not receive classified briefings until Trump is sworn in on 20 January and unilaterally grant sweeping security clearances across the administration.

Trump’s team has regarded the FBI background check process with contempt for months, a product of their deep distrust of the bureau ever since officials turned over transition records to the Russia investigation during the first Trump presidency, the people said.

But delaying FBI vetting could also bring ancillary PR benefits for the Trump team if some political appointees run into problems during a background check, which could upend their Senate confirmation process, or if they struggle to obtain security clearances once in the White House.

The putative process for obtaining a clearance in the first Trump administration involved the White House’s personnel security office relying on an FBI background check to decide whether to grant one. The background check initially looked for untrustworthiness or red flags that could be exploited by adversaries.

If the initial checks against law enforcement databases uncovered no issues, applicants were granted an interim clearance while deeper investigations continued until it was advanced to a permanent clearance. The current Trump plan appears set to bypass that initial stage.

“The Trump-Vance transition lawyers continue to constructively engage with the Biden-Harris administration lawyers regarding all agreements contemplated by the Presidential Transition Act. We will update you once a decision is made,” Trump spokesperson Brian Hughes said in a statement.

Trump’s team have long viewed the process with suspicion, arguing that it was pointless to have government employees have the ability to recommend against granting a security clearance given Trump has the power, as president, to ultimately give clearances to whomever he likes.

Trump himself has repeatedly railed against the FBI of being part of the “deep state” conspiracy to undermine his agenda.

During the first Trump presidency, multiple advisers faced delays and hurdles in obtaining top level clearances, including Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn and the controversial former Trump White House national security aide Sebastian Gorka.

Kushner, who played a number of roles in the first administration and was involved in drawing up a Middle East peace plan, received his clearance only after Trump personally intervened and ordered it, according to a memo written by then White House chief of staff John Kelly.

In Kushner’s case, officials in the White House personnel security office were reportedly divided about whether to grant him a top-secret clearance based on the results of his FBI background check.

In 2018, after the matter had dragged on for more than a year, the then White House counsel Don McGahn recommended to Trump that Kushner should not be granted a security clearance at that level. But Trump ordered Kelly to disregard that advice and grant it to Kushner anyway.

The precise details of the concerns about Kushner are not known, although it was reported at the time that it resulted in part from concerns at the FBI and the CIA about Kushner’s foreign and business contacts, including with Israel, Russia and the United Arab Emirates.

In 2019, a manager in the personnel security office told a House committee that 25 people, including two senior Trump White House officials, had been denied clearances by career employees for “disqualifying issues”. The New York Times reported that Kushner appeared to be among that group.

Epshteyn left the Trump White House before he received a permanent clearance. While the Trump team has said his situation was “resolved”, it remains unclear what the resolution of his background check was. Epshteyn has been floated for a senior role in the incoming administration.

Gorka failed to obtain a national security council clearance when he was part of the first Trump administration in 2017, after he was charged with carrying a gun at Ronald Reagan Washington national airport, according to the AP. Gorka was named on Friday as a deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counter-terrorism.

More flooding is likely this week after Storm Bert brought torrential rain over the weekend, the environment secretary has said.

Steve Reed said the impact “should be less severe” than it was on Sunday and Monday morning, as communities in England and Wales start a massive clean-up after the widespread flooding.

A former chair of the Environment Agency, Emma Howard Boyd, has said not enough money was spent on maintenance of existing flood defences and recommended a focus on tackling “surface water” flooding.

A severe flood warning is still in place for the River Nene at Billing Aquadrome and nearby business parks in Northamptonshire, while 132 flood warnings remain in place across England and six in Wales.

The Met Office weather forecast shows an area of low pressure moving into southern parts of the UK on Tuesday night into Wednesday, bringing heavy rain for some.

Mike Silverstone, the deputy chief meteorologist at the Met Office, said: “On Tuesday night we’ll see outbreaks of rain spreading north-eastwards, which could be heavy at times.

“We’re expected this to be heaviest across the south [and] south-east of England, although subtle changes over the next 24 hours will have an impact on how this develops. There could also be strong winds for a time, and it’s possible this will require a weather warning.”

Hundreds of homes were flooded, roads were turned into rivers and winds of more than 80mph were recorded across parts of the UK.

People in some affected areas have said they do not believe the chaos will be cleared by Christmas.

Extreme rainfall is more common and more intense because of human-caused climate breakdown across most of the world, particularly in Europe. This is because warmer air can hold more water vapour. Flooding has most likely become more frequent and severe as a result.

Howard ​Boyd​ told Radio 4 that during her time at the Environment Agency “one of the areas that we struggled with getting more money to … was on the maintenance of our flood defences”.

“The ongoing maintenance is so important to making sure that the existing infrastructure that we’ve got is fit for purpose,” she said. “Another area that we really need to be aware of … with warmer, wetter winters, we need to be ready for surface water flooding, and this is roughly accountable for 60% of our flooding, and needs a very different response to the flood defences that we see up and down the country.”

Reed told the House of Commons on Monday evening that an estimated 107 properties have flooded across England.

He added: “Further flooding is sadly likely over the next few days as water levels rise in slower flowing rivers such as the Severn and the Ouse.

“The Environment Agency anticipates that any impacts should be less severe than we have seen in recent days.”

A man in his 80s died after his car entered water at a ford in Colne, Lancashire, on Saturday, while a body was found in the search for Brian Perry, 75, who went missing while walking his dog near the Afon Conwy River in north Wales on the same day.

This summer was the first time 31-year-old Daisie Morrison had been on a cruise when she set sail on a two-week holiday with two friends, also in their early 30s.

“One of my friends suggested it,” she says. “She had seen different influencers on Instagram going on cruises. You go to so many places that we wanted to visit, so we were all quite keen.”

The previous summer, Morrison says, she had been on a group holiday around Italy, which in contrast had involved “spending a lot of time, money and stress” getting around. With the cruise, “you just wake up in a new place every day”.

Far from being unusual, Morrison is part of a generation of holidaymakers who are at the heart of the expansion of an industry once seen as the preserve of rich retired couples. The number of passengers taking ocean cruises has more than doubled from 13 million in 2004 to nearly 32 million – and that is despite the devastation to the industry during the Covid pandemic.

The Cruise Lines International Association (Clia), which represents the industry, expects this number to approach 40 million in 2027, and says the key to such growth will be attracting millions of new-to-cruise travellers. Millennials, according to its latest report, are “the most enthusiastic cruise travellers of the future”.

It is not surprising that the industry needs a new target market, when many cruise ships “can start to feel a bit like care homes at sea”, says Xavier Font, a professor at the University of Surrey, who has studied the cruise ship industry. “So the cruise companies need an entirely new brand of ship. They are then turning these into either the party cruise ship, say, or the family cruise ship.”

As the industry has expanded and ships have become much more numerous and visible, this has increased concerns about the environmental impact of this type of holiday. But Font believes this is having little impact on the popularity of cruises.

“[The thought process is:] ‘I’m now going to have a break, just back off,’” he says. “The slogan ‘What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas’ was brilliant, right? Because this idea that I can be a good person all the time but that one week I’m just going to be bracketing it, it seems to me that applies to everywhere in the world, not just Vegas.”

Emma Otter, a cruise expert who sells trips through the holiday company Travel Counsellors, provides further evidence of this sentiment. She says the company recently surveyed 2,000 travellers and found that 45% of them said the climate crisis was something they factored in when choosing a holiday. This, she says, increased to 65% of those aged between 25 and 34. But do any of her clients ask her about sustainability when looking at cruise holidays? “It rarely comes up,” she says.

Morrison, for her part, says she was aware that cruising is the least sustainable way to travel, “so I did feel quite guilty about it”.

Going on a cruise was not the immediately obvious holiday choice for Tom and Abby, a married couple in their early 30s. “It was the first time for both of us,” says Tom. In fact, he previously considered cruises to cater chiefly to “retirees and elderly people”.

When they decided to go on a weeklong tour of the Norwegian fjords in May, rather than embarking on a road trip or flying abroad, it was partly for practical reasons: they had a six-month-old baby.

“When you have a baby, your perspective shifts a bit … You value things by convenience a lot more than adventure,” says Tom, a construction consultant who lives in Manchester, who preferred that we use his first name only. “A cruise seemed to offer the best of both.”

Each day allowed them to explore a new location, including historic villages and natural sites such as waterfalls, says Tom. “You’d draw back the curtains and there would be a different view out of the window each morning.”

Tom looked at the carbon footprint of his trip on his return and was surprised. “You’re told flying is bad for the environment and that getting on a boat isn’t nearly as bad,” he says. “But cruise ships’ carbon footprints are [much higher], which makes sense, since you’re taking the hotel with you.”

Otter, who has been “banging the drum about cruises not just being for old people” for the past 30 years, says social media has played a big part in driving up the numbers of younger people taking cruise holidays. “Cruising is right in your face now. It’s in your front rooms, it’s on your phones, it’s on TikTok … Daily, you know you can see that somebody will be on a cruise.”

Cruise companies have also become very good at providing something for everyone onboard, she says, and providing it at a price Otter thinks can compare favourably with land-based holidays.

“You’ve got places that are very Instagrammable, such as Santorini. The cost of going there for somebody on a family holiday can be significant, whereas if they visit it on a cruise, they can say: ‘Yes, we’ve seen that.’ And the teenagers are happy as they have done their Instagram reels where there’s a picture of them with the Santorini sunset – box ticked.”

Targeted at some of the industry’s newer, younger cohort is a bold new generation of ships, sometimes referred to as “cruisezillas”, with the biggest having doubled in size over the last quarter of a century. The biggest, Icon of the Seas, was launched earlier this year with 20 decks and capacity for more than 7,000 passengers. Royal Caribbean, the vessel’s parent company, has two even bigger ships commissioned to sail in the next two years.

One of the company’s aims is to attract a cross-generational audience, so the ships come with areas that have activities specifically targeting teenagers or toddlers. Icon’s Thrill Island, for example, includes the Flow Rider, a 12-metre-long (39ft) surf simulator, that has been built to face away from the sea “so your selfies will be better and your friends will see you against the actual ocean”, says Tim Klauda, a vice-president at Royal Caribbean International in a promotional video for the ship.

At the same time, brands such as Virgin Voyages, which launched its first ship in 2021, are unashamedly targeting customers in their 20s and 30s like Daisie Morrison and her friends. Virgin ships are all adults-only and, unusually for cruise itineraries, offer overnight stops at islands such as Ibiza.

While the cruise ship industry is celebrating the growing number and diversity of its travellers, this rapid growth is already proving to be a turnoff for some. When Nick Webb, a 32-year-old design engineer based in Monmouthshire, embarked on an 11-day tour of Venice, Dubrovnik and a handful of Greek islands a few summers ago, he had hoped for a stress-free way to take in the sights. But as cruise ships like his own swelled the numbers of tourists at each port, he quickly found this mode of travel came with its own stresses.

“You know those videos online of people running out to get sun loungers at 6am? It was exactly like that,” he recalls. His travel agent sold the voyage as targeted towards adults, but there were still lots of children onboard, he says. “They were all in the main pool, which wasn’t very big … It wasn’t relaxing if you did manage to get a space on the top deck.”

Webb wouldn’t entirely rule out going on another cruise, he says, but would only do so at an off-peak time. While he appreciated the ease of rolling out of bed at a different location each morning, he was a bit shocked by what he saw. “Looking down from Santorini, there were four or five cruise ships, all spewing smog into the air. It was so busy – it was horrible.”

Otter has been going on cruise holidays with her two children, aged nine and 11, for the past six years. “This year my daughter did say: ‘Mum, do you know, I think I would get bored on a land holiday,’” she says. It is children like her daughter who are helping to “future proof” the industry, she adds. “When she’s 15, when she’s 20, when she’s 30, she’ll go on holidays with her friends, and she’ll say to them: ‘Let’s go on a cruise.’”

“We’re all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit,” author Cory Doctorow wrote earlier this year.

In 2023, Doctorow coined the word “enshittification”, which has just been crowned Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year. The dictionary defined the word as follows.

“The gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.”

Social media users, if they don’t know the word, will viscerally understand the concept, the way trolls and extremists and bullshitters and the criminally vacuous have overtaken the platforms.

Think Twitter, a once useful and often fun microblogging site twisted by a tech bro into X, a post-truth swamp.

Or Facebook, where you’re now more likely to be presented with crocheted arseless chaps from Shein than a humblebrag from a dear friend.

Or Instagram, where cute dog videos once reigned. Now, yet another unfathomable algorithm serves up a diet of tradwives, gym bros and uwu girls.

The dictionary’s committee described enshittification as “a very basic Anglo-Saxon term wrapped in affixes which elevate it to being almost formal; almost respectable”.

Without those affixes – if one were to say, for example, merely that X has got a bit shit – the deliberate degradation of the platform is erased.

With those affixes, the impression is conveyed of the platform owners tampering with their own product until the bad stuff, like guano on a rock, eclipses the original form.

Doctorow wrote that this decay was a three-stage process.

“First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves,” he wrote.

“It’s frustrating. It’s demoralizing. It’s even terrifying.”

The Macquarie Dictionary committee’s honourable mentions went to “right to disconnect”, and “rawdogging”.

But enshittification not only won their vote, it took out the people’s choice award.

“This word captures what many of us feel is happening to the world and to so many aspects of our lives at the moment,” the committee said.

Doctorow himself is surprisingly optimistic about where this could all end up.

Action on competition to prevent market dominance, regulation on things such as digital privacy, more power for users to decide how they use platforms, and tackling the exploitation of workers could reverse the process, he wrote, because “everyone has a stake in disenshittification”.

Big tech can’t be fixed, he argues, but maybe it can be destroyed.

He adds a fourth stage to the tech platforms’ scatological journey from being good to users, to abusing them in favour of their customers, to abusing their customers to serve themselves.

“Then they die,” he wrote.

Ryan Kobayashi, who flew to Los Angeles from Hawaii in search of his missing daughter, has been found dead near the Los Angeles international airport. Ryan Kobayashi had been searching for his 31-year-old daughter, Hannah Kobayashi, who was last seen at the airport on 8 November en route to New York City.

“After tirelessly searching throughout Los Angeles for 13 days, Hannah’s father, Ryan Kobayashi, tragically took his own life,” the family wrote in a statement shared by the Rad Movement, a missing persons non-profit. “This loss has compounded the family’s suffering immeasurably.”

According to the Los Angeles county medical examiner, Ryan Kobayashi’s body was discovered in a parking lot on Sunday. Los Angeles police responded to reports of an apparent suicide there at 4am. He was 58.

The Kobayashi family has urged the public to “maintain focus” on the search for Hannah.

“Hannah IS still actively missing and is believed to be in imminent danger. It is crucial for everyone to remain vigilant in their efforts to locate Hannah,” the family’s statement read.

Hannah Kobayashi boarded a flight from Maui on 8 November, intending to visit her aunt in upstate New York. She landed in Los Angeles that day, but left the airport and missed her connecting flight.

In Los Angeles, Hannah Kobayashi visited the Grove shopping mall, where she spent time at Taschen bookstore and attended the LeBron XXII Trial Experience, an event held at the Nike store, on 10 November. The next day, Hannah Kobayashi’s mother texted to see if she’d made it to New York. Hannah Kobayashi responded no. The same day, she messaged a friend saying that someone was trying to steal her identity.

“Deep Hackers wiped my identity, stole all of my funds, & have had me on a mind f**k since Friday,” she wrote to a friend. “I got tricked pretty much into giving away all my funds” for “someone I thought I loved”.

The text messages appeared suspicious to Hannah Kobayashi’s family. “It just didn’t seem right because it’s not how she normally texts,” Sydni Kobayashi, Hannah’s sister, told the Los Angeles Times.

That was the last day that anyone heard from Hannah Kobayashi – and the same day Ryan Kobayashi decided to fly to Los Angles in search of her. The following day her family filed a missing persons report.

On 15 November, the Los Angeles police department released a missing persons poster of Hannah Kobayashi. In a statement released that day, the family said it had obtained surveillance video showing Hannah Kobayashi in downtown Los Angeles near Crypto.com Arena. In the footage, the family wrote: “It is evident that Hannah does not appear to be in good condition and she is not alone.”

Two days later, Syndi Kobayashi wrote on Facebook: “LAPD has not been of much help and are not taking this as seriously as we would hope because my sister is considered an adult who can make her own choices.” On 21 November, her family held a vigil for Hannah at the Crypto Arena where she was last seen, where her aunt, Laire Pidgeon, told NBC News that the family was trying to make the police “take us seriously because it’s been 11 days”.

A frontrunner to be deputy national security adviser in Donald Trump’s administration reportedly withdrew from the running after learning that he would have to work with Sebastian Gorka, the president-elect’s choice as counter-terrorism adviser.

Michael Anton, a conservative speech writer and national security official in Trump’s first presidency, removed his name from contention over Gorka’s appointment against a backdrop of acrimonious past relations between the pair, the Washington Post reported.

His withdrawal graphically signifies the unease provoked by the prospective return to the White House of Gorka, a controversial figure who was forced out of Trump’s first administration, where he worked closely with Steve Bannon, within its first seven months.

His departure is believed to have been engineered by John Kelly, who became White House chief of staff in July 2017 with the task of bringing order to the chaos that characterised Trump’s first months. Kelly, who later resigned, has since turned against Trump, saying he met “the general definition of a fascist” in interviews given shortly before this month’s presidential election.

Gorka, who has worked at the National Defense University, has drawn multiple accusations of Islamophobia.

Being considered anathema by Anton – who was believed to be under consideration to become deputy to the prospective national security adviser, Mike Waltz – is all the more striking given Anton’s own hardline views on Islam, which he has called “a militant faith”. He argued that “only an insane society” would accept Muslim immigrants following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

But his opinions have paled in comparison to those of Gorka, who has depicted the religion as a threat to western civilisation and has peddled fears about America falling under sharia law.

He was a vocal supporter of the Muslim travel ban enacted against citizens of seven majority Muslim countries during Trump’s first administration. When he departed, he wrote a resignation letter lamenting the president’s failure to use the term “radical Islamic terrorism” in a speech on Afghanistan.

The Washington Post cited a source in Trump’s national security transition team as saying there was widespread dismay at the prospect of Gorka’s return, which does not need to be confirmed by Senate hearings.

“Almost universally, the entire team considers Gorka a clown,” the source said. “They are dreading working with him.”

Anton has previously written about the animosity between Gorka and himself. He recounted how Gorka called him a “coward” and scolded him in a Fox News green room.

Gorka, who first came to attention as a firebrand pundit working at the rightwing Breitbart News, declined comment, telling the Post: “I don’t comment to the fake failing news.”

Anton’s reported withdrawal follows scathing comments on Gorka’s qualifications by John Bolton, who was national security in Trump’s first term before being fired.

Speaking to CNN, he called Gorka “a conman” and said the FBI should investigate his credentials.

“I wouldn’t have him in any US government,” Bolton told the network’s Kaitlan Collins. “I don’t think it will bode well for counter-terrorism efforts.”

Gorka, a US-British citizen and the son of Hungarian immigrants to the UK, drew criticism when he appeared at Trump’s first inauguration ball wearing an honorary medal from the Hungarian nationalist organisation, Vitézi Rend. The World Jewish Congress has said some members of the outfit were complicit in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews in the Holocaust.

His views on Islam have been distinguished by a rejection of interpretations attributing the root causes of Islamist terrorism to poverty, repression or US foreign policy mistakes.

“This is what I completely jettison,” he told the Washington Post in 2017. “Anybody who downplays the role of religious ideology … they are deleting reality to fit their own world.”

In a video filmed after Hamas’s murderous 7 October attack on Israel last year, he said he had watched unedited footage of the episode and offered advice to Israeli leaders on how to deal with the Palestinian militant group.

“Kill every single one of them,” he said. “God bless Israel. God bless Judeo-Christian civilisation.”

There isn’t a galaxy far, far away enough where women can escape sexist online trolls.

Emily Calandrelli became the 100th woman to go to space when she joined a group of six space tourists in a launch led by Blue Origin, the aerospace company owned by the billionaire Jeff Bezos.

“We got to weightlessness, I immediately turned upside down and looked at the planet and then there was so much blackness. There was so much space,” Calandrelli said in a video posted to social media that showed her reacting with awe to seeing Earth from space.

She added: “I didn’t expect to see so much space, and I kept saying that’s our planet! That’s our planet! It was the same feeling I got when my kids were born, and I was like, ‘That’s my baby!’”

But it was not long before the comments beneath the video were flooded with hateful, objectifying remarks.

The astronaut and MIT engineer said some sexualized her reaction to viewing the planet from space. The incident led to Blue Origin taking down the original video from its social media accounts.

Calandrelli, who also hosts a television show on Netflix called Emily’s Wonder Lab, where she’s known as “Space Gal”, said the reactions made her sad and angry, but she doubled down on her joy. In an Instagram post, she wrote she refuses “to give much time to the small men on the internet.

“I feel experiences in my soul. It’s a trait I got from my father,” she said. “We feel every emotion deeply and what a beautiful way that is to experience life. This joy is tattooed on my heart.

“I will not apologize or feel weird about my reaction. It’s wholly mine and I love it.”

Calandrelli said in an interview with CNN that the beauty of sending more women into space is that they “get to describe it in a way that moms can understand, that women can understand”.

Blue Origin did not respond to a request for comment.