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"Marco Rubio had a very very bad night and personally I call for him to drop out of the race. I think it's time now that he dropped out of the race. I really think so."

While the win in Puerto Rico - a US territory - will boost Rubio's campaign, it sends just 23 delegates to the Republican convention which nominates a presidential candidate. Republican hopefuls need the votes of 1,237 delegates to get the nod for the presidential race proper.

Cruz says he spent the morning investigating what happened before making his decision. Campaign manager Jeff Roe confirmed that Tyler had formally resigned."I have made clear in this campaign we will conduct this campaign with the very highest standards and integrity," Cruz told reporters Monday, adding that Tyler is a "good man."

A former, longtime spokesman for Newt Gingrich, Tyler was a senior aide and one of the Cruz campaign's first hires in the run-up to his presidential announcement.

Trump immediately sought to capitalize on the moment."Wow, Ted Cruz falsely suggested Marco Rubio mocked the Bible and was just forced to fire his Communications Director. More dirty tricks!," he tweeted.

Tyler had apologized late Sunday for the incident."I want to apologize to Sen. Marco Rubio for posting an inaccurate story about him here earlier today," said Tyler, the spokesman, wrote in a Facebook post.The latest dust-up comes as the two senators' campaigns have been clashing heatedly for days about "dishonesty" and "lies" on the trail.

And Rubio's campaign similarly rubbed salt in the wound, praising Tyler's skills but saying he "had the unenviable task of working for a candidate willing to do or say anything to get elected."

Rubio said he accepts Tyler's apology, but called for the Cruz campaign to hold someone accountable.

The flub by the Cruz campaign comes after Rubio finished narrowly ahead of Cruz for second place in the South Carolina primary Saturday, behind Donald Trump. In the heated contest there, the Cruz campaign was repeatedly accused by both Rubio and Trump for being dishonest and engaging in dirty tactics.

The Florida senator wouldn't say whether he has asked former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush -- a one-time presidential rival -- for his endorsement ahead of Florida's 99-delegate, winner-take-all primary.

During the interview, Rubio also pledged he wouldn't nominate anyone for the Supreme Court in the last year of his tenure in the Oval Office if he's elected -- saying that President Barack Obama shouldn't fill deceased Justice Antonin Scalia's seat.

More than 12,900 Americans were killed by guns in 2015. 

At one point Mr. Rubio, in discussing the importance of hindsight on the Iraq war, raised a recent boxing fight to make a point. “Based on what we know, a lot of things — based on what we know now, I wouldn’t have thought Manny Pacquiao was going to beat, uh, in that fight a couple weeks ago — — ” Mr. Rubio said before Mr. Wallace interrupted.

Mr. Rubio’s readiness for the presidency has been questioned among some Republican voters, given than he is a 43-year-old first-term senator, and moments like the boxing reference seemed discordant on a subject like the Iraq war.

Last week, former Governor Jeb Bush of Florida was the one in the hot seat, giving four different answers to whether he thought President Bush, his brother, made a mistake going to war in Iraq. The former governor ultimately said he would not have ordered the invasion in hindsight given that intelligence about Iraq’s chemical weapons turned out to wrong. Mr. Rubio, in his interview on Sunday, chose not to pile on Mr. Bush.

“I think any president, regardless of party, probably would have made a similar decision to what President Bush did at the time with the information he had available,” Mr. Walker said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” That said, Mr. Walker added that knowing now that the 2003 weapons intelligence was flawed, “we probably wouldn’t have taken that tack” in invading Iraq.

“You can’t be on the fence on this one: You’re either for it or against it,” Mr. Sanders said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” Mr. Sanders opposed the trade authority and has drawn support from liberals for his stances to the left of Mrs. Clinton. “No fence-sitting on this one,” he added.

After Saturday's primaries, where Rubio missed the delegate threshold in two states, Trump argued it was time for the senator to drop out of the race.

The senator's campaign hopes his win with Hispanics in the territory will boost help boost him over Trump in the Sunshine State.

This is the only time Puerto Rico Republicans will be able to make their choice known, though; they're ineligible to vote in the November elections.

Rubio was the only Republican candidate to campaign in Puerto Rico. Voters in the US territory are not able to vote in presidential elections but they do participate in each party’s nominating process.

“I always thought of being here in the United States as a resident, living permanently here,” the slight 62-year-old grandfather, speaking through an interpreter, said at a hearing five weeks later.

The immigration officer was unmoved. He did not see an exiled family man — just someone who had no visa, worked for the Castro government and could pose a security risk.

“It is ordered that the applicant be excluded and deported from the United States,”

As he campaigns for president, Mr. Rubio, a Florida senator, says that the United States cannot accept refugees from Syria and Iraq because of the potential security risk

has called for a tightening of immigration law so that if the United States cannot identify with 100 percent certainty who immigrants are and why they want to enter, he says, “We’re not going to let you in.”

But under the stricter screening he now supports, his grandfather would most likely have been deported, depriving him of knowing the man he has called his mentor and closest boyhood friend.

Despite Mr. Garcia’s insistence that he was fleeing oppression, immigration officials raised suspicions that he might harbor communist sympathies, the records reveal.

In an interview, Mr. Rubio acknowledged that some would see a conflict between the stricter immigration and refugee policies he supports and his grandfather’s experience.

But Mr. Rubio said the difference between then and now is how much more sophisticated foreign infiltrators like the Islamic State have become, and how dangerous they are.

“I recognize that’s a valid point,” the senator said, “But what you didn’t have was a widespread effort on behalf of Fidel Castro to infiltrate into the United States killers who were going to detonate weapons and kill people.”

He says at the hearing that what made him decide he wanted to leave for the United States to join his wife and seven daughters, one of whom was Oria, Mr. Rubio’s now 85-year-old mother, was when Castro confirmed suspicions that he was a Marxist.

just as we saw in the summer with immigration writ large, the progression doesn't end with Trump. We've had three presidential elections since the 9/11 terror attacks and no presidential candidate has ever proposed shutting down mosques in the United States or creating a special registry and identification cards for Muslims living in the United States.

So yesterday Megyn Kelly asked Marco Rubio whether he'd shut down radical mosques like Trump. He tried to deflect the question by saying that it wasn't about mosques but closing down any facility that was promoting radicalism. In other words, Rubio, while clearly not eager to answer the question, pointedly refused to rule out following Trump's lead.

It is a very good example of how Trump is not only shaping the debate on the right but rapidly mainstreaming ideas that were as recently as a week ago considered entirely outside the realm of mainstream political discourse.

It's particularly effective with the less sophisticated and principled candidates like Rubio. Jeb Bush said flatly this morning that Trump's database proposal is "just wrong." But Ben Carson quickly took Trump's lead comparing Syrian refugees to "mad dogs." The difference is that Marco Rubio could very well be president in 18 months. Jeb Bush won't be.

this is no longer a matter of Trump yakking on about building a gilded 100-foot wall along the southern border and having Mexico agree to pay for it. Trump is now proposing things that sound like they put millions of American citizens and resident aliens on a road to something like the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

“The Italian government, with support from Europe, has put a stopper on the departures from Libya by not calculating or perhaps omitting the inevitable consequences of violations of human rights that would originate,” he said.

n spite of the criticism, Minniti’s harsh approach to migration and his history working with the country’s security services has paid off politically. According to a September poll, he is the most popular minister in the Italian government. (The bar is low; just 33 percent of the country approve of his policies.)

For his part, Minniti denies being interested in the country’s top job. But even Matteo Salvini, the leader of Italy’s far-right Northern League praises the minister. “Minniti is for sure better than [Angelino] Alfano [his predecessor] and is finally implementing tough policies such as controlling NGO’s ships operating rescues. When we proposed such measures we were labeled as racist. Now finally everyone seems to understand we were right,” he said.

Interestingly, the ancient Greek word for China is “Seres,” which literally means “the land of silk.”

Historians now prefer the term “Silk Routes,” which more accurately reflects the fact that there was more than one thoroughfare.

The Silk Road routes included a large network of strategically located trading posts, markets and thoroughfares designed to streamline the transport, exchange, distribution and storage of goods.

Silk Road routes also led to ports on the Persian Gulf, where goods were then transported up the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

Although it’s been nearly 600 years since the Silk Road has been used for international trade, the routes had a lasting impact on commerce, culture and history that resonates even today.

Commodities such as paper and gunpowder, both invented by the Chinese during the Han Dynasty, had obvious and lasting impacts on culture and history in the West. They were also among the most-traded items between the East and West.

paper’s arrival in Europe fostered significant industrial change, with the written word becoming a key form of mass communication for the first time.

Similarly, techniques for making glass migrated eastward to China from the Islamic world.

The Silk Road routes also opened up means of passage for explorers seeking to better understand the culture and geography of the Far East.

Venetian explorer Marco Polo famously used the Silk Road to travel from Italy to China, which was then under the control of the Mongolian Empire, where they arrived in 1275.

His journeys across the Silk Road became the basis for his book, "The Travels of Marco Polo," which gave Europeans a better understanding of Asian commerce and culture.

Inside Washington, D.C., Corker is seen as a serious policy pro. Most importantly for Trump, perhaps, he’s been one of the few Republicans in Washington who has said he would be fine with supporting Trump.

She didn’t endorse anyone ahead of the Iowa caucuses — although she introduced US Senator Marco Rubio at an event. Ernst was also quite critical of Trump’s comments about women, but that might actually be an asset as he seeks to make up ground with female voters.

No matter what words have been said during the primary, a Kasich pick would makes sense for both Kasich and Trump.

Consider this math: If the Democratic nominee wins all the states the party won in the last six presidential elections, and then wins Florida, Trump will lose in the Electoral College.

It does make some sense politically: Christie was the first establishment politician to endorse Trump, and he took a lot of heat for it.

Trump doesn’t need Christie anymore.

here is no indication that Ryan would ever accept another ride on the national ticket as a vice presidential candidate, let alone for Trump.

In the 2008 presidential race, the Iraq 'debate' was largely fought over who was right about the surge.

We all sort of know that the ground has shifted on this issue. We can see it clearly in public opinion polls. But it is as though it's been years since we actually had a show of hands - especially among national Republicans. Good idea? Bad idea? As I was writing this, Jeb Bush himself has now come forward and, on the fourth try, said the Iraq War was a mistake. What I've called that showing of hands seems to show virtually no one of any consequence standing up for the decision to invade. Maybe we all kind of knew that that was where people had gotten to. But seeing people say it is a transformative event.

the ground has shifted not just on the facts of the issue, but on what is in many ways a more consequential front: Time has passed and Republicans simply don't feel the same sort of partisan responsibility for the conflict. It's drifting back into history. The sense of ideological and partisan commitment has just loosened - the intuitive reflex that says our guy did it so it must be right and I need to defend it

Cruz and Rubio especially are fighting for base Republicans. If they were still committed to the wisdom of the Iraq War, they wouldn't be saying this. And yet they are. That is a major watershed in the country's reckoning with the war. If Republicans running as hawks say it was a mistake, then the debate is really over.

with a consensus in place that the Iraq War was a bad idea, the whys and hows of just how we made this decision are up for discussion in a very new way.

Since then, however, over-the-top warnings about the evils of debt and deficits have become a routine part of Republican rhetoric; and even conservatives occasionally admit that soaring inequality is a problem.

Moreover, it’s harder than ever to claim that tax cuts are the key to prosperity. At this point the private sector has added more than twice as many jobs under President Obama as it did over the corresponding period under W, a period that doesn’t include the Great Recession.

You might think, then, that Bush-style tax cuts would be out of favor. In fact, however, establishment candidates like Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush are proposing much bigger tax cuts than W ever did. And independent analysis of Jeb’s proposal shows that it’s even more tilted toward the wealthy than anything his brother did.

The Bush administration’s determination to dismantle any restraints on banks — at one staged event, a top official used a chain saw on stacks of regulations — looks remarkably bad in retrospect. But conservatives have bought into the thoroughly debunked narrative that government somehow caused the Great Recession, and all of the Republican candidates have declared their determination to repeal Dodd-Frank, the fairly modest set of regulations imposed after the financial crisis.

The only real move away from W-era economic ideology has been on monetary policy, and it has been a move toward right-wing fantasyland. True, Ted Cruz is alone among the top contenders in calling explicitly for a return to the gold standard — you could say that he wants to Cruzify mankind upon a cross of gold. (Sorry.) But where the Bush administration once endorsed “aggressive monetary policy” to fight recessions, these days hostility toward the Fed’s efforts to help the economy is G.O.P. orthodoxy, even though the right’s warnings about imminent inflation have been wrong again and again.

Last but not least, there’s foreign policy. You might have imagined that the story of the Iraq war, where we were not, in fact, welcomed as liberators, where a vast expenditure of blood and treasure left the Middle East less stable than before, would inspire some caution about military force as the policy of first resort. Yet swagger-and-bomb posturing is more or less universal among the leading candidates. And let’s not forget that back when Jeb Bush was considered the front-runner, he assembled a foreign-policy team literally dominated by the architects of debacle in Iraq

The point is that while the mainstream contenders may have better manners than Mr. Trump or the widely loathed Mr. Cruz, when you get to substance it becomes clear that all of them are frighteningly radical, and that none of them seem to have learned anything from past disasters.

The truth is that there are no moderates in the Republican primary, and being reasonable appears to be a disqualifying characteristic for anyone seeking the party’s nod.

Donald Trump likes to boast that he put the topic of immigration on the map in the Republican campaign. While that may be a bit of an exaggeration, he has certainly owned the issue, with his condemnation of undocumented Mexican migrants and calls to build a wall on the US-Mexican border and temporarily prevent all Muslims from entering the US.

In what can only be considered a significant break with Republican orthodoxy, Donald Trump has repeatedly defended Planned Parenthood, saying that the organisation performs important medical services (although he agrees with his competitors that they shouldn't get US government funding). He says he's now anti-abortion, although he backed legalisation for many years.

Most disconcertingly for the GOP establishment, the latest poll finds a hefty portion of its electorate, even beyond current Trump supporters, coming around to the idea of Trump as their standard-bearer. Two-thirds of GOP voters said they'd be either enthusiastic or satisfied if he captured the party's nod, while 65% said the brash billionaire had the right temperament to serve as president.

Trump's favorability rating stands at 61% — the best among the field and a nine-point jump from his 52% favorable rating in the October Monmouth poll. Only 29% of Republicans view Trump unfavorably, compared to 33% two months ago

The finding comes amid signs that Trump's call last week for a "total and complete" ban on Muslims entering the United States is resonating with GOP voters. A Bloomberg Politics poll found that two in three Republicans back the ban, although an NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey showed the Republican electorate more divided. 

What's clear, though, is that after briefly surrendering his national polling lead to Carson, Trump is back on top. Of the 12 national polls conducted since November, Trump has led in all of t hem.