内容摘要：A council leader who has stepped down said he will be calling for Kemi Badenoch to quit as head of the Tory party after "terrible" local election results.

A council leader who has stepped down said he will be calling for Kemi Badenoch to quit as head of the Tory party after "terrible" local election results.

Trump's promise to end the conflict within 24 hours of taking office is a typically grandiose boast, but it comes from a man who has clearly lost patience with the war and America's costly involvement."The numbers of dead young soldiers lying on fields all over the place are staggering," he has said. "It's crazy what's taking place."

But the incoming US administration faces twin challenges, according to Michael Kofman, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace."First, they're going to inherit a war on a very negative trajectory, without a tremendous amount of time to stabilise the situation," he said in December. "Second, they're going to inherit it without a clear theory of success."The president-elect offered some clues during recent interviews about how he intends to approach the war.

He told Time Magazine he disagreed "vehemently" with the Biden administration's decision, in November, to allow Ukraine to fire US-supplied long-range missiles at targets inside Russia."We're just escalating this war and making it worse," he said.

On 8 December, he was asked by NBC News if Ukraine should prepare for less aid.

"Possibly," he replied. "Probably, sure.""There is a sense that in the voice of the pope, there's a voice of something that is needed," says Cardinal Nichols. "For some people it's a moral compass, for some people it's the sense of being accepted, for some people it's the insistence that we must look at things from the point of view of the poorest.

"That's a voice that has fallen silent and our task is to find someone who can carry that forward."From the death of Pope Francis to the moment cardinals checked into the Santa Marta guesthouse and its overflow residences, there appeared to be a trend towards a desire for continuity of what Pope Francis had achieved.

Though perhaps that vision of continuity is one that could bring along more of his sceptics, in a way that was pragmatic. The word "unity" has been talked of a lot, after a period where the divides between supporters and detractors of the Pope's vision could sometimes become ugly.But in the end, when they step into the Sistine Chapel, the holiest of voting chambers, for all the pragmatism they may have taken into consideration before they cast their ballot, they will be urged to let God and the Holy Spirit guide them.