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Mr. Pence told the lawmakers he planned to travel to Georgia on Nov. 20 to campaign for Republican senators in the two runoff elections.

For Mr. Pence, the day he will have to announce Mr. Trump’s defeat is two months away. In the meantime, he has resumed more traditional duties of the job, appearing with the president on Wednesday at a Veterans Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery. And he postponed a family vacation to Florida, opting instead for a speaking engagement on Friday.

Mr. Pence told the lawmakers he planned to travel to Georgia on Nov. 20 to campaign for Republican senators in the two runoff elections.

In reality, Mr. Pence’s allies expect him to return to Indiana and make a living giving paid speeches and potentially writing a book. It will be the first time in a long time that Mr. Pence will live as a private citizen

The Constitution calls on the vice president to oversee a joint session of Congress, to be held this time on Jan. 6, in which the votes from the Electoral College are officially counted. Typically, vice presidents simply read from a script and take no actions to interfere with the results.

In 2000, Vice President Al Gore had to certify the disputed election results after the Supreme Court effectively handed the presidential election to his opponent, George W. Bush.

For Mr. Pence, the day he will have to announce Mr. Trump’s defeat is two months away. In the meantime, he has resumed more traditional duties of the job, appearing with the president on Wednesday at a Veterans Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery. And he postponed a family vacation to Florida, opting instead for a speaking engagement on Friday.

And waste produced by a nearby electricity plan and oil refinery has damaged the giant Berre lagoon in southern France.

When five tons of dead fish washed up in August near her house on the lagoon, she decided that she was ready to move.

Madrid says the responsibility lies at the local level.

She said at least 75 percent of the lagoon’s water contamination came from runoffs.

ut in September, the Spanish Institute of Oceanography published a report that rejected the idea that excessive summer heat helped kill the fish.

the contamination comes from water seeping into the lagoon from an aquifer in which toxic substances have accumulated over decades.

Laggards should get government incentives to invest in green technology rather than “stones thrown by people who have no knowledge of our modern irrigation systems,” he added.

“I unfortunately do think that political colors matter,” she said.

The lagoon was proof that “one of the major problems of Europe is the contamination of its waters by nitrates,” he said.

Mr. Morán said that his central government planned to use 300 million euros, or about $350 million, from the European Union’s pandemic recovery fund to protect the Mar Menor’s natural habitat and waters.

Texas Attorney General Paxton was unable to reach the 50% support he needed to avoid a runoff, and will face a head-to-head match-up with a member of the state’s best-known political family.

The efforts to oust him center on his legal troubles: Paxton has been under indictment since 2015 on securities fraud charges, and is being investigated by the FBI after former aides accused him of abusing the power of his office to help a political donor.

Progressives did have one victory to celebrate Tuesday night: Greg Casar, a former Austin city councilman, was projected to win the 35th Congressional District primary outright, avoiding a runoff.

he most competitive US House race in Texas this year could come in the 15th District, a South Texas district that stretches from towns east of San Antonio to the Rio Grande Valley.

Republican Monica De La Cruz, who came within 3 percentage points of defeating Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez in 2020, will win the Republican nomination, CNN projected. Gonzalez, meanwhile, is running in the neighboring 34th District.

Barack Obama’s administration, accelerating a process that had begun in the early 1960s under President Kennedy, was centralizing foreign-policy decision making in the White House’s National Security Council, marginalizing the State Department.

Finally, Kerry, a defeated presidential candidate, was devoid of the sexiness that automatically attaches to a figure, like Hillary Clinton, who remains a legitimate presidential prospect

The consensus in Washington was that Kerry was a boring if not irrelevant man stepping into what was becoming a boring, irrelevant job.

Nearly a year into his tenure, Kerry is the driving force behind a flurry of Mideast diplomacy the scope of which has not been seen in years. In the face of widespread skepticism, he has revived the Israeli-Palestinian peace process; brokered a deal with Russia to remove chemical weapons from Syria; embarked on a new round of nuclear talks with Iran, holding the highest-level face-to-face talks with Iranian diplomats in years; and started hammering out a new post-withdrawal security agreement with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

it will be Kerry who is credited with making the State Department relevant again.

“He’s front and center on all these issues. That clearly represents a very ambitious first year for any secretary of state.”

Kerry has a bad habit of wandering off script. On a trip to Pakistan in August, he created two diplomatic incidents in a single interview. First he said that the Egyptian army was “restoring democracy” when it toppled the country’s democratically elected president.

President Obama had “a timeline” for ending U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan.

he overshot in the opposite direction, promising that any American strike against Syria would be “unbelievably small”—a bit of impressively self-defeating rhetoric that undermined days of administration efforts to argue that a few dozen Tomahawk cruise-missile strikes would be more than what hawkish critics were calling a pointless “pinprick.”

a word that comes up frequently in conversations about Kerry is gasbag. He had few close friends in the Senate, where he served for nearly 30 years. A former diplomat says Kerry’s recent foreign-policy successes have made him more insufferable than ever.

his gaffes are caused by arrogance and indiscipline. They say that even in a city swollen with egotism and pomposity, Kerry stands out.

“Nobody would challenge the notion that he’s been very much a team player and willing to take on really hard assignments from the president and go to the toughest places.”

(In one late-night press conference in Moscow last May, he uttered a staggering 95-word sentence.

“Even as a junior or senior, he was a pompous blowhard,” says someone who attended Yale with Kerry in the 1960s and asked not to be named.

he is not so much arrogant as awkward.

Liberal Democrats call his hawkish views on Syria a betrayal of his antiwar past. Republicans say he is a perennial flip-flopper: he fought in the Vietnam War and then protested against it; he supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq and then opposed it; he tried to negotiate with Bashar al‑Assad in 2009, then compared him to Adolf Hitler—and then reopened the door to negotiating with him again.

Kerry “just can’t dance.”

Washington mandarins dismiss Kerry’s foreign-policy ambitions as grandiose and overweening, especially relative to what America’s diminishing power can achieve after Iraq and Afghanistan

old foreign-policy hands say that instead of acknowledging the limits of American power in the post–Arab Spring Middle East, Kerry looks for misguided ways to apply power the country no longer has.

Current aides argue that Kerry’s recent successes belie the caricatures of him. “Show me where he hasn’t done this job well,” one demanded when I interviewed him in mid-October.

“I would ask John Kerry, ‘How can you ask a man to be the first one to die for a mistake?’ ”

Kerry seem “pompous” is that “oftentimes he tries too hard.” According to Manley and others, Kerry had a knack for walking up to fellow members on the Senate floor at precisely the wrong time.

His enormous ambition motivates him to aim for major breakthroughs despite daunting odds. And his healthy self-confidence allows him to believe that he can convince anyone of virtually anything.

Kerry also has bottomless reserves of patience that allow him to engage for hours in seemingly fruitless negotiations; he persists long past the time others would have given up in exhaustion.

The amount of time he’s spent negotiating with Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai and Russia’s Sergey Lavrov alone should qualify him for some kind of diplomatic medal of honor.

an indifference to his own political standing.

Political calculations may have constrained the risks Hillary Clinton was willing to take. Kerry, in contrast, no longer needs to heed political consultants. Nor does he need to worry too much about what his detractors say.

“I don’t care at all,” he said. “I could care less about it. You know, David, I ran for president, so I’m not scared of failure.”

secretary of state is the job for which Kerry was born and bred

“I’m not worried about the politics,” Lowenstein recalls Kerry telling him. “I want to get things done.”

Obama, too, no longer has to worry about reelection; concerns about the 2012 election may have limited the president’s own appetite for diplomatic risk taking in the Mideast during his first term.

But his enthusiasm for his current job is unquestionable; one aide told me that he will have to be dragged from the office—fingernails scraping against the floor—at the end of his term.

As a presidential candidate, he had to downplay his obsession with foreign policy and his fluency in foreign languages, for fear that such things would play badly with voters; as secretary of state, he can freely leverage those qualities.

if there is no breakthrough with Iran, or if his efforts to broker peace in Syria fall short, or if the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks founder, history will likely view Kerry as the tragicomic figure his detractors already judge him to be.

“After you lose the presidency, you don’t have much else to lose.”

Following stints as an assistant district attorney and the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, Kerry would, after his election to the Senate in 1984, go on to serve for 28 years on the same committee he had stood before in 1971, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee

(But for Ohio, where he lost to Bush by 119,000 votes, Kerry would have been president.

But Kerry stepped into the role at a singularly weak moment for the position. For one thing, America, weary after a decade of conflict, is turning inward; activist diplomacy is out of favor. For another, State Department employees I interviewed told me that morale is low.

the department is too hierarchical, inflexible, and risk-averse—and is in danger of becoming even more so in the aftermath of Benghazi.

the intensely controlling Obama administration has centralized foreign-policy decision making in the National Security Council, weakening the State Department.

Just a day after Kerry delivered one of the most impassioned speeches of his career, assailing Assad’s use of chemical weapons on civilians as a “crime against conscience” and sending a clear signal that U.S. air strikes on Syria were imminent, the president announced that missile strikes might in fact not be imminent, and that he would be seeking congressional authorization to attack Syria.

the president risked causing foreign leaders and negotiators to doubt whether any future warnings or statements issued by Kerry were backed by the White House.

Kerry conducted long interviews with every living former secretary of state—Kissinger, George Shultz, Baker, Madeleine Albright, Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Clinton—and set out to model himself after Shultz, who, in six and a half years serving under Ronald Reagan, was seen as a combination of the two prototypes, both a great diplomat and a good manager.

“I don’t care about risk, honestly,” he said, leaning forward in his chair, spoiling for a fight. “The riskiest thing to do is to not act. I would far rather try and fail than fail not trying.”

When off the record, in relaxed settings, he is refreshingly direct, profane, and insightful, speaking bluntly about the limits of American power and caustically lamenting Washington’s growing paralysis and partisanship

He finishes sentences with phrases such as something like that or that’s about it or thanks, man. Toes tapping, head bobbing back and forth, he speaks with fervor and candor. His tenacity is palpable.

Recent secretaries of state have had different strengths. Henry Kissinger and James Baker, two secretaries who had close relationships with their presidents (Nixon in Kissinger’s case, George H. W. Bush in Baker’s), were powerful bureaucratic players.

But isn’t staking America’s credibility, and his own reputation, on long-odds breakthrough agreements with Tehran or Moscow, or on Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, a dubious exercise, as Obama’s failed first-term efforts at Mideast peace demonstrated?

Colin Powell lost a crucial internal administration battle in failing to halt the Bush White House’s march to war in Iraq—but was adored at the State Department for implementing sweeping administrative reforms.

Clinton embraced a new, Google Hangout era of town-hall diplomacy, and she elevated economic development and women’s issues. She was an architect of the administration’s “pivot to Asia,” and she took risks in supporting the Afghanistan troop surge and the intervention in Libya.

steered clear of the Middle East, delegating special envoys like Richard Holbrooke and George Mitchell to grapple with the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, peace talks with the Taliban

Clinton was much more prudent and careful than Kerry, whom one former State Department official describes as more of a “high-risk, high-reward”

“My view is that she was pretty sheltered,” he told me. “They were not interpersonally pleasant, and they were very protective of her. You can get into a cocoon.”

“My assessment was that she made a calculated political choice not to hang her hat on that thankless task,” Kim Ghattas,

the former secretary would have taken bolder risks but was reined in by the White House—especially during her first couple of years in office, when hostility from the bitter 2008 primary campaign still lingered between the Obama and Clinton staffs.

she actively engaged in Middle East talks, at one point meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for seven hours in New York.

Kennan warned Powell about the dangers of traveling too much—of prioritizing activist diplomacy over providing the White House with solid foreign-policy analysis.

Powell gave a copy of Kennan’s letter to Kerry. So far, Kerry is not following the advice. As October came to a close, Kerry had already flown more than 213,000 miles and spent more than 100 days—roughly 40 percent of his time—outside the United States. In his first nine months, he’d traveled more miles than Clinton had in her entire first year in office.

In 2009, he convinced Afghan President Hamid Karzai to consent to a runoff in his country’s disputed presidential election.

2011, he was dispatched to Pakistan after the killing of Osama bin Laden to persuade local officials to return the tail of an American helicopter that had crashed at the site.

cemented Kerry’s bond with Obama was less his diplomatic achievements than his ability to impersonate another tall, wealthy Massachusetts politician with good hair: Kerry served as Mitt Romney’s surrogate during weeks of preparation for the 2012 presidential debates.

Kerry channeled Romney so effectively that, aides to both men say, he got under Obama’s skin.

Kerry agreed that the U.S. should try to revive Middle East negotiations before the Palestinians again pushed for statehood, at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2013.

In private meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Obama pushed for a resumption of negotiations. At a final press conference before returning to Washington, Obama announced that he was handing the pursuit of talks over to Kerry.

“What I can guarantee is that Secretary Kerry is going to be spending a good deal of time in discussions with the parties.”

He met alone with Abbas for two hours in Amman and then flew to Jerusalem to meet with Netanyahu and three of his aides.

Kerry pressed on, returning in April to Jerusalem and Ramallah, the de facto Palestinian capital in the West Bank. After 24 hours of talks with both sides, Kerry held a press conference at the airport in Tel Aviv.

Kerry held three meetings with Netanyahu and Abbas in three days, including one meeting with the Israeli prime minister that lasted six hours, until 3 a.m. On June 29, he canceled a trip to the United Arab Emirates so he could keep talking with Netanyahu and Abbas, raising expectations of a breakthrough. On June 30, he held another press conference at the Tel Aviv airport.

“We started out with very wide gaps, and we have narrowed those considerably.”

Five months into the job, Kerry was off to an ominous start. His wife was in the hospital. Syria was convulsing. Progress toward Israeli-Palestinian talks was stalled. Egypt was burning. And Republican attack ads were making it appear as though the secretary of state had spent the weekend yachting.

Kerry said, according to the aide. “The only thing I’m interested in is a serious negotiation that can lead to a final-status agreement.”

“On behalf of President Obama, I am pleased to announce that we have reached an agreement that establishes a basis for resuming direct final-status negotiations between the Palestinians and the Israelis,” Kerry said, calmly and deliberately. “This is a significant and welcome step forward.” He declined to take questions.

Nine days later, the Israeli cabinet approved the release of the 104 Palestinian prisoners. The next day, Israeli and Palestinian officials arrived in Washington to begin peace talks.

The smallness of his circle of aides, which had been seen early on as a detriment to his management of the State Department, now made it easier to keep information contained.

Working with consultants from McKinsey, diplomats estimated that $4 billion in long-term private investment would flow to the Palestinians in the wake of an agreement.

Palestinian officials appear to have compromised on their demand for a settlement freeze.

From the beginning, Kerry had insisted that the Obama administration not allow a halt in Israeli settlement construction to become a public precondition.

Kerry also reiterated a core argument: the security that Israel currently enjoys is temporary, if not illusory. Without a two-state solution, Israel will face a European-led campaign of delegitimization, a new intifada, and a Palestinian leader far more radical than Abbas.

The crucial concession—the release of the 104 prisoners—came from the Israeli side

“It takes time to listen, it takes time to persuade,” Frank Lowenstein told me. “This is where Kerry’s willingness to stay up all night pays off.”

The U.S. provided nonlethal aid to the opposition, but White House officials were so fearful of American assistance inadvertently falling into the hands of jihadists that the National Security Council Deputies Committee monitored the distribution of the aid in granular detail. Qatar and Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, were funneling cash and weapons to hard-line militants, including Al Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda affiliate.

Russia continued providing Syria with arms and blocking any action by the UN Security Council.

When Putin finally received Kerry, after a three-hour delay, Putin reportedly fiddled continuously with his pen and “more resembled a man indulging a long-ago scheduled visit from the cultural attaché of Papua New Guinea than participating in an urgent summit with America’s top diplomat,”

At a late-night press conference, a beaming Kerry announced that he and Lavrov would co-host a peace conference in Geneva.

“They were great efforts, and again, I reiterate my gratitude to President Putin for a very generous welcome here.”

Earlier, in April, after American intelligence officials had confirmed that Assad had carried out several small-scale chemical-weapons attacks, Obama had reluctantly agreed to mount a covert CIA effort to arm and train moderate rebels.

if the United States did not “impose consequences” for Assad’s use of chemical weapons, the Syrian leader would see it as “a green light for continued CW use.” But the White House did not alter course.

Both Obama and Kerry favored a military response—air strikes—according to a senior administration official. As American intelligence agencies accumulated evidence suggesting that Assad was responsible, Kerry offered to make the public case for strikes. White House officials welcomed the idea and vetted his speeches.

“My vision is that, if you can make peace, if you can get Israel and Palestine resolved and can get the Iranian threat of a nuclear weapon put to bed appropriately—even if Syria didn’t calm down—if you get those two pieces or one piece of that, you’ve got a hugely changed dynamic in a region that is in turmoil. And if you take just the Palestinian-Israeli situation, you have the potential to make peace with 57 nations—35 Muslim nations and 22 Arab nations. If the issue is resolved, they will recognize Israel.”

By the end, Safina is nearly a contrarian. Fertilizer runoff from the Mississippi, he concludes, causes the gulf more harm than did BP, while the fishing ban that went into force just after the spill might have helped marine wildlife more than the oil hurt it.

Safina concludes that greenhouse gases from routine fossil fuel use — “That spill is invisible” — are far more worrisome than what happened in the gulf. He asserts that true market pricing of gasoline to reflect its cost in atmospheric harm — that is, a carbon tax — would be a better response to the gulf spill than cleaning birds.

For Fernandez, who's slated to leave office in December after eight years at the helm, Sunday's closely watched vote was a test of whether her populist political legacy would endure.For a region where leftist movements have played a growing role, it's an election that could shift the balance of power.

And for the finance world, it's a long-awaited moment that could change how the South American country handles its debt problems and interacts with Wall Street.The election of Macri, a center-right candidate who's mayor of Buenos Aires and the former president of the Boca Juniors football club, could signal a conservative shift for Argentina. Macri has said he wants to rewrite the playbook on Argentina's economy -- a campaign promise that made him popular on Wall Street and drew sharp criticism from his opponents.

In his victory speech Sunday night, Macri promised he'd work to eliminate poverty in Argentina and change the way business is done.

he maps below compare the results with those in 2010’s regional elections: the Socialist party (PS) and its allies are marked in pink, the far left in red, the centre right (now Les Républicains, then the UMP) and allies in light blue, and the FN in dark blue:

The second round takes place on 13 December between candidates who won at least 10% of the vote in the first round (but less than the 50% required to have won in a single round)

Les Républicains and its allies had a disappointing election, winning 27% of the vote. While the PS took only 23%, the party did better than polls predicted.

In Alsace-Champagne-Ardenne-Lorraine, the PS candidate, Jean-Pierre Masseret, who came third, has said he will not withdraw.

The two regions the FN could win are Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie, where Marine Le Pen, won 40.5% of the vote, and Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, where her niece, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, gained 40.6%. The Socialists are expected to drop out of both races

The FN also stands a strong chance in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté. The party came first there with 32% of the vote in the first round, while the centre right (24%) and socialist vote (23%) is split and a formal alliance is improbable.

The numbers suggest Les Républicains will comfortably win control of Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes and Pays de la Loire.

The Socialist party will almost certainly control Bretagne (Brittany), where the defence minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, was comfortably ahead in the first round.

Le Pen’s party and France’s two mainstream political outfits will vote when faced with a runoff contest. This will be particularly interesting with a presidential election due in 2017.

However, FN support is clearly on the rise and it is not clear where its ceiling is. Between the previous regional vote in 2010 and the 2012 presidential election, support for the party nearly tripled in terms of votes won.

FN-controlled Hénin-Beaumont has a population of 26,000. Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie has one of nearly 6 million – a different ballgame. How the responsibility and scrutiny of government plays out for the FN will go a long way in determining the shape of French politics over the next two years and beyond.

There’s the murder conviction of Rodricus Crawford, which Cox secured despite thin evidence and racist appeals to the all-white jury.

Then there’s the case of Glen Ford, another black man sent to death row by Caddo Parish. He spent 30 years on death row, much of it in solitary confinement, before a court declared him innocent in 2014. Ford died of lung cancer within a year of being released

At the same time, it’s possible that Cox didn’t run for office because he has his sights set higher.

He’s justified the death penalty as an expression of “revenge;” he’s said “we need to kill more people;” he’s said of racism, “I don’t get this discrimination business, I really don’t.” And he has a portrait of a Confederate general turned Ku Klux Klan leader hanging in his office.

“George Soros reflects an anti-American sentiment that does not reflect the values of Caddo Parish,” said the Republican chairman, Louis Avallone.

 “My campaign knows nothing about where the funding for this PAC comes from,” he said. “Just like my campaign cannot force a PAC to stop a negative ad, my campaign cannot stop a positive ad.”

Each side complains that the others tip the scales. Ranked-choice voting can at least even the odds by forcing every candidate to reach out to all residents in the hopes of at least being their second favorite — rather than trying to run up the score in one’s strongholds.

Mr. Middlekauff said: “I’ve become more frustrated with politics. Moving to Illinois, I realized, I’ve lost a lot of political power.” He went on, “You don’t have a lot of choices. Things are decided by money.

The person who collects the most first-choice votes doesn’t necessarily win, a useful sticking point for critics

If farmers must grow twice as much food to feed the 10 billion, following the ecosystem-conserving rules of Sir Albert Howard ties their hands.

Prophets smite their brows at this logic. To their minds, evaluating farm systems wholly in terms of calories per acre is folly. It doesn’t include the sort of costs identified by Vogt: fertilizer runoff, watershed degradation, soil erosion and compaction, and pesticide and antibiotic overuse.

To Borlaugians, farming is a kind of useful drudgery that should be eased and reduced as much as possible to maximize individual liberty. To Vogtians, agriculture is about maintaining a set of communities, ecological and human, that have cradled life since the first agricultural revolution, 10,000-plus years ago. It can be drudgery, but it is also work that reinforces the human connection to the Earth. The two arguments are like skew lines, not on the same plane.

The cost: The participating counties and municipalities are contributing to a $4bn statewide spend, including Miami Beach’s $400m Forever Bond, a $1bn stormwater plan and $250m of improvements to Broward county’s sewage systems to protect against flooding and seawater seepage. In the Keys, many consider the estimated $60m a mile cost of raising roads too expensive.

The threat: Saltwater from sea level rise is seeping further inland through Florida’s porous limestone bedrock and contaminating underground freshwater supplies, notably in the Biscayne aquifer, the 4,000-sq mile shallow limestone basin that provides drinking water to millions in southern Florida. Years of over-pumping and toxic runoff from farming and the sugar industry in central Florida and the Everglades have worsened the situation. The Florida department of environmental protection warned in March that “existing sources of water will not adequately meet the reasonable beneficial needs for the next 20 years”. A rising water table, meanwhile, has exacerbated problems with south Florida’s ageing sewage systems. Since December, millions of gallons of toxic, raw sewage have spilled on to Fort Lauderdale’s streets from a series of pipe failures.

The cost: The Everglades restoration plan was originally priced at $7.8bn, rose to $10.5bn, and has since ballooned to $16.4bn. Donald Trump’s proposed 2021 federal budget includes $250m for Everglades restoration. The estimated $1.8bn cost of the reservoir will be split between federal and state budgets.

Possible solutions

The cost: With homeowners and businesses largely bearing their own costs, the specific amount spent on “hurricane-proofing” in Florida is impossible to know. A 2018 Pew research study documented $1.3bn in hazard mitigation grants from federal and state funding in 2017, along with a further $8bn in post-disaster grants. Florida is spending another $633m from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development on resiliency planning.

Wildlife and habitat loss The threat: Florida’s native flora and fauna are being devastated by climate change, with the Florida Natural Areas Inventory warning that a quarter of the 1,200 species it tracks is set to lose more than half their existing habitat, and the state’s beloved manatees and Key deer are at risk of extinction. Warmer and more acidic seas reduce other species’ food stocks and exacerbate the deadly red-tide algal blooms that have killed incalculable numbers of fish, turtles, dolphins and other marine life. Bleaching and stony coral tissue disease linked to the climate crisis threaten to hasten the demise of the Great Florida Reef, the only living coral reef in the continental US. Encroaching saltwater has turned Big Pine Key, a crucial deer habitat, into a ghost forest.

As for the Key deer, of which fewer than 1,000 remain, volunteers leave clean drinking water to replace salt-contaminated watering holes as herds retreat to higher ground. A longer-term debate is under way on the merits and ethics of relocating the species to other areas of Florida or the US.

Coastal erosion The threat: Tourist brochures showcase miles of golden, sandy beaches in South Florida, but the reality is somewhat different. The Florida department of environmental protection deems the entire coastline from Miami to Cape Canaveral “critically eroded”, the result of sea level rise, historically high tides and especially storm surges from a succession of powerful hurricanes. In south-eastern Florida’s Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade and Monroe counties, authorities are waging a continuous war on sand loss, eager to maintain their picture-perfect image and protect two of their biggest sources of income, tourism dollars and lucrative property taxes from waterfront homes and businesses.

In the devastating hurricane season just one year before, major storms named Harvey, Maria and Irma combined to cause damage estimated at $265bn. Scientists have evidence the climate crisis is causing cyclones to be more powerful, and intensify more quickly, and Florida’s position at the end of the Atlantic Ocean’s “hurricane alley” makes it twice as vulnerable as any other state.

With the other option abandoning beaches to the elements, city and county commissions have little choice but costly replenishment projects with sand replacement and jetty construction. Federal law prohibits the importation of cheaper foreign sand, so the municipalities must source a more expensive alternative from US markets, often creating friction with residents who don’t want to part with their sand. Supplementary to sand replenishment, the Nature Conservancy is a partner in a number of nature-based coastal defense projects from West Palm Beach to Miami.

benefited from 61,000 cubic yards of new sand this year at a cost of $16m. Statewide, Florida spends an average $50m annually on beach erosion.

The threat: “Climate gentrification” is a buzzword around south Florida, a region barely 6ft above sea level where land has become increasingly valuable in elevated areas. Speculators and developers are eyeing historically black, working-class and poorer areas, pushing out long-term residents and replacing affordable housing with upscale developments and luxury accommodations that only the wealthy can afford.

No study has yet calculated the overall cost of affordable housing lost to the climate crisis. Private developers will bear the expense of mitigating the impact on the neighborhood – $31m in Magic City’s case over 15 years to the Little Haiti Revitalization Trust, largely for new “green” affordable housing. The University of Miami’s housing solutions lab has a $300,000 grant from JPMorgan to report on the impact of rising seas to South Florida’s affordable housing stocks and recommend modifications to prevent it from flooding and other climate events. A collaboration of not-for-profit groups is chasing $75m in corporate funding for affordable housing along the 70-mile south Florida rail trail from Miami to West Palm Beach, with the first stage, a $5m project under way to identify, build and renovate 300 units.

Florida has long been plagued by political leadership more in thrall to the interests of big industry than the environment. As governor from 2011 to 2019, Rick Scott, now a US senator, slashed $700m from Florida’s water management budget, rolled back environmental regulations and enforcement, gave a free ride to polluters, and flip-flopped over expanding offshore oil drilling. The politician who came to be known as “Red Tide Rick”, for his perceived inaction over 2018’s toxic algae bloom outbreaks, reportedly banned the words “climate change” and “global warming” from state documents.

Last month, state legislators approved the first dedicated climate bill. It appears a promising start for a new administration, but activists say more needs to be done. In January, the Sierra Club awarded DeSantis failing grades in an environmental report card, saying he failed to protect Florida’s springs and rivers and approved new roads that threatened protected wildlife.

The cost: Florida’s spending on the environment is increasing. The state budget passed last month included $650m for Everglades restoration and water management projects (an instalment of DeSantis’s $2.5bn four-year pledge) and $100m for Florida Forever. A $100m bridge project jointly funded by the state and federal governments will allow the free flow of water under the Tamiami Trail for the first time in decades.

Florida has woken up to the threat of climate change but it is not yet clear how effective the response will be. The challenges are innumerable, the costs immense and the political will to fix or minimize the issues remains questionable, despite recent progress. At stake is the very future of one of the largest and most diverse states in the nation, in terms of both its population and its environment. Action taken now will determine its survival.

Ossoff nearly won the seat outright during the first vote on April 18, coming just two points short of the necessary 50 percent. Handel, a former Georgia secretary of state, bested 10 GOP rivals to advance to the June 20 runoff.

. Lopped off the district was Cherokee County, which favored the president over Hillary Clinton by 50 points last November.

He initially pledged to "make Trump furious," and a fundraising haul unprecedented for a House race followed: $8.3 million in the first quarter with 95 percent of the donors from outside Georgia. Having quickly overshadowed the rest of his party's field, Ossoff made the sort of strategic pivot that generally typifies presidential contests between the primary season and the general election.

What he talks like is a professional politician, going before the cameras to proclaim that "both parties in Congress waste a lot of your money."

Do voters trust his posturing, she asks, or do they see "the most liberal of the left who are the power behind his campaign"?

the president used an expletive to describe players who kneel or sit during the anthem to protest police brutality against black Americans and other forms of social injustice.

“Wouldn’t you love to see one of these N.F.L. owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, out, he’s fired,’ ” the president said at a rally for Senator Luther Strange, who was appointed to the Senate this year and is facing Roy Moore in a Republican primary runoff.

“U bum @StephenCurry30 already said he ain’t going! So therefore ain’t no invite. Going to White House was a great honor until you showed up!” Mr. James wrote on Twitter.

The Warriors, who play in a league that sometimes promotes social issues and whose owners and players have been known to denounce the president, said in a statement they would use a visit to Washington in February to highlight issues of diversity and inclusiveness.

By midafternoon, a spokesman for the University of North Carolina national championship basketball team confirmed the team would not be going to the White House

Many athletes have been moved to comment on race and social justice more frequently in the past year after a series of police shootings of unarmed African-Americans and the support Mr. Trump has received from white supremacists.

“It’s unfortunate that the president decided to use his immense platform to make divisive and offensive statements about our players and the N.F.L.,’’ said Mark Murphy, the president and chief executive of the Green Bay Packers.

He predicted critics of the new law "will threaten, boycott, sue, demonize and team up with their friends in the national media to call me everything in the book."

The new law imposes new voter identification requirements for absentee ballots, empowers state officials to take over local elections boards, limits the use of ballot drop boxes and makes it a crime to approach voters in line to give them food and water.

"It's like the Christmas tree of goodies for voter suppression," Democratic state Sen. Jen Jordan said on the Senate floor

"In large part because of the racial disparities in areas outside of voting -- such as socioeconomic status, housing, and employment opportunities -- the Voter Suppression Bill disproportionately impacts Black voters, and interacts with these vestiges of discrimination in Georgia to deny Black voters (an) equal opportunity to participate in the political process and/or elect a candidate of their choice," the lawsuit states.

The package is part of a national Republican effort that aims to restrict access to the ballot box following record turnout in the election.

Advocates said they were alarmed by measures that will allow any Georgian to lodge an unlimited number of challenges to voter registrations and eligibility, saying it could put a target on voters of color. And Democrats in the Georgia Senate on Thursday lambasted measures that boot the secretary of state as chairman of the state elections board and allow lawmakers to install his replacement, giving lawmakers three of five appointments.

"Now, more than ever, Americans must demand federal action to protect voting rights," she said in a statement.

Voting rights advocates say the state's rapid-fire action -- and plans in other Republican-controlled states to pass restrictions of their own -- underscores the need for federal legislation to set a national baseline for voting rules.

Another provision shortens the runoff cycle from the current nine weeks to just four weeks

Republicans scaled back some restrictive provisions from earlier iterations of the legislation, including a proposed repeal of no-excuse absentee voting.

As of February, state legislators in 43 states have introduced more than 250 bills with restrictive voting provisions, according to a tally from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

20,000 conservative activists it said had lobbied lawmakers to pass the overhaul.

Last November, Biden became the first Democrat in nearly three decades to win the state. And strong voter turnout in January helped send two Democrats to the US Senate, flipping control of the chamber to their party. One of those new senators, Raphael Warnock, captured his seat in a special election and will be on the ballot again in 2022.

And voters who seek absentee ballots have to provide a copy of their identification or the number of their Georgia driver's license or state ID to both apply for and return the ballot. The also prohibits the secretary of state's office from sending unsolicited absentee ballot applications, as it did before the 2020 primaries due to the coronavirus pandemic.

"I fully support the Republican Party and important GOP Committees, but I do not support RINOs and fools, and it is not their right to use my likeness or image to raise funds," Trump said in the statement.

"If you control the money, you control the party," Republican donor Dan Eberhart told CNN on Tuesday. "Trump has effectively stunted the RNC, NRCC and NRSC this cycle because they are going to have to spend an awful lot of time worrying about friendly fire from the MAGA crowd."

The RNC's chief counsel, J. Justin Reimer, told Trump's lawyers the RNC has "every right to refer to public figures" in its political speech and will "continue to do so."

"The MAGA endorsement is going to loom large this cycle for everyone. When Trump puts his finger on the scales, it may prove decisive in a lot of races," said Eberhart, who said he is considering a Senate run in Arizona. "There is going to be a lot of consternation when Trump backs a different candidate than the NRSC and the NRCC in primary races. Serious people are going to get burned."

Trump's lawyers also sent the same cease-and-desist request to the NRCC and the NRSC. A spokesman from the NRCC declined to comment and a spokeswoman from the NRSC did not respond to a request for comment.

"The desire is to have it both ways, where you get the former president's voters, not his baggage," said a GOP campaign strategist who requested anonymity to speak candidly about Republican incentives.

As a consequence, Trump's clash with party leaders "will have very little -- if any effect -- on major donors," she told CNN in an interview Tuesday.

"They are less concerned about a former president's agenda, or frankly, making him feel good," she added.

After losing the election last November, Trump amassed millions of dollars for his own political action committee as he promoted falsehoods about election fraud -- instead of plowing funds into twin US Senate races in Georgia. In the end, the Republicans lost the runoffs in early January, along with their majority in the chamber.

"He's all about himself. He's not about building or supporting the party."

The bill comes as Georgia has become ground zero for election law changes in the wake of the 2020 election.

Republican-controlled state legislatures are relying on election falsehoods to mount aggressive changes to voting rules. As of February 19, lawmakers in more than 40 states had introduced more than 250 bills that included voting restrictions, according to a tally by the liberal-leaning Brennan Center For Justice at New York University, which is tracking the bills.

Georgia GOP Senate Majority Leader Mike Dugan, the primary sponsor of the bill, said in introducing the legislation in February that limiting absentee voting was necessary in order to reduce the costs of processing ballots, relieve stress on local election workers and increase the certainty that absentee ballots are counted.

Senate President Butch Miller, also a Republican, told CNN that the legislation aims to increase confidence in the Peach State's election system following the 2020 elections.

The bill also creates ID requirements to request an absentee ballot, requiring anyone who does not have a state identification or state driver's license to submit a copy of an approved form of ID when requesting an absentee ballot as well as when submitting their absentee ballot.

The bill would also establish and maintain a voter hotline at the State Attorney's office for complaints and allegations of voter intimidation and illegal election activities, require Georgia to participate in a multi-state voter registration system in order to cross-check the eligibility of voters, limit the use of mobile voting locations, require a court order for extending polling hours, and would give the legislature authority to temporaril

Georgia Democratic lawmakers have denounced the legislation as backlash to the record turnout of the 2020 election and January runoffs which saw the state turn blue with President Joe Biden becoming the first Democrat to win the presidential election in the Peach State in nearly three decades.

"They (Republicans) passed this law. They didn't use it. The Democrats did. The GOP lost. And because of that, now, they want to change the laws back," Democratic Caucus Chair, Sen. Gloria Butler told CNN

Lauren Groh-Wargo of Fair Fight Action, the voting rights group founded by former Georgia Democratic gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams, said in a pointed statement Monday, "This blatantly unconstitutional legislation will not go unchallenged."

"It's a double pronged fight that we're in right now: to push back against this disinformation which is extremely dangerous and on the voting front itself to make sure that these regressive bills are not codified into law," said Poy Winichakul, staff attorney for the SPLC Action Fund. Last week, the US House of Representatives passed HR 1, also know as the "For the People Act," a sweeping government, ethics and election bill aimed at countering state-level Republican efforts to restrict voting access. The legislation would bar states from restricting the ability to vote by mail and, among other provisions, call for states to use independent redistricting commissions to create congressional district boundaries.

On Sunday, Biden signed an executive order expanding voting access and directing the heads of all federal agencies to submit proposals for their respective agencies to promote voter registration and participation within 200 days,

As of Tuesday, 152,817 absentee ballots had been sent out by elections officials. Citywide, more than 12,000 had already been returned.

To calculate the winner, the first-choice votes of each ballot are counted. If no one receives a majority of the vote (which is unlikely in such a large field), the candidate with the least support is eliminated from contention, and votes for that candidate are redistributed to whomever the voter marked as their second choice. That process continues until a winner is determined.

The stakes are high. Thirteen candidates are running for the Democratic nomination for mayor, with the winner heavily favored in November's general election. (Two Republicans are vying for their party's nomination.)

Almost three-quarters of New York City voters picked ranked-choice voting for primaries and special elections in a 2019 referendum.

While the system is new to New York, it's been used in other places for years, according to FairVote, an organization that advocates for election reforms. New York City is the largest jurisdiction in the country to adopt ranked-choice voting, but it's been used for congressional and presidential elections in Maine since 2018. Alaska will begin using it next year.

"In order to do this process in the best way, we need to balance the public's right to know who won the election and the individual voter's right to cast absentee and affidavit ballots that will be counted and counted in an anonymous manner," Frederic Umane, the election board's president, said at a meeting last week.

Under the old system, if no primary candidate won 40% of the vote, the top two advanced to a runoff.November's general election will not use ranked-choice voting.

In April, the city launched a $15 million voter education plan, including advertising and community outreach.

In a statement announcing the initiative, Mayor Bill de Blasio committed to a "full court press to ensure every New Yorker has the information they need to make their voice heard."

"Studies have shown that a disproportionate number of Black Democrats, particularly older voters, vote for only one candidate, so a Black candidate that finishes ahead with first place votes can ultimately lose if White voters fully avail themselves of the RCV option," Hazel wrote. "In essence, those votes by White voters would count more than the older Black single candidate voters since the Black voters' second choices would not come into play."

Despite those concerns, Dukes wrote that she was committed to helping educate voters about the process to "ensure voters know what to expect when they go to the polls this June."

"We're hoping that it will be a positive experience in the end," Quigg said. "That people can see 'maybe my first choice candidate didn't win, but hey look my second or third choice candidate won and so that effort that I put into figuring that out made a difference.'"

"I think a lot of a lot of voters have sort of 2020 fatigue, if you will and are frankly, still a little traumatized from that election cycle. So, you know, a lot of people just haven't really been tuning in yet," she said. "I think a lot of New Yorkers want to participate, but they just need to know about it and they need to know that it's actually not that complicated."

This will take some days or even weeks for the group of House lawmakers who will make the case against Trump and his lawyers to answer. So a trial can't practically happen until after President-elect Joe Biden is inaugurated on January 20.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has indicated he will not bring senators back until the last day of Trump's term -- January 19 -- at the earliest.

Senators take an oath before the proceedings. There's a call to order each day. The Chief Justice has specific duties. There are set time limits for arguments and rebuttals and all questions from senators for the House and Trump attorneys must be submitted in writing and read by the Chief Justice.

What's the historical precedent?There have been three previous presidential impeachments, including Trump's first. President Andrew Johnson was impeached, but survived the Senate trial by one vote after seven Republicans broke ranks with their party. Johnson did not win election after his impeachment. President Bill Clinton was impeached in his second term and was easily acquited; less than a majority of senators supported removing him from office, far from the 2/3 required.

They will be busy with confirmation hearings for Biden's Cabinet nominees -- at least four are already scheduled for the week of January 20, for Secretary of State nominee Antony Blinken, Defense Secretary nominee Lloyd Austin, Treasury Secretary nominee Janet Yellen and Secretary of Homeland Security nominee Alejandro Mayorkas. Senators could be called on to draft legislation having to do with the pandemic or economic relief -- Biden wants to increase relief checks to $2,000.

Impeachment failed the first time against Trump. What's different now?In a word, Republicans. In the first Trump impeachment trial, only one Republican senator -- Mitt Romney of Utah -- voted to remove him from office. This time, McConnell, rather than protecting Trump, is said to be happy about the effort as a way to excise Trump or purge him from the GOP.

How many votes are required to convict Trump?Great question! Conviction requires 2/3 of those present. If all 100 senators are present, that's 67 senators. Assuming those two Georgians are seated, that means there are 50 senators from each party and 17 Republicans would be required.

There is precedent for impeaching former officials. Read about that -- it's called a "late impeachment" -- here. While the main penalty for a guilty verdict in an impeachment trial is removal from office, senators could vote to bar Trump from holding office in the future -- remember, he has not ruled out running for president in 2024. He could also lose his six-figure pension and other post-presidential perks.

If those two Democrats from Georgia are not yet seated, it might require 66 senators. If some number of Republicans didn't want to vote against Trump but also didn't want to vote to convict, they could skip the vote and change the ratio. That kind of thing has been known to happen, although not during impeachment proceedings.

President Donald Trump has been impeached again -- the first leader in US history to be impeached twice by the House.

The House introduces and passes the articles of impeachment, but the Senate is where the person being impeached faces a trial -- and potential punishment.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has indicated he will not bring senators back until the last day of Trump's term -- January 19 -- at the earliest.

This will take some days or even weeks for the group of House lawmakers who will make the case against Trump and his lawyers to answer. So a trial can't practically happen until after President-elect Joe Biden is inaugurated on January 20.

While the main penalty for a guilty verdict in an impeachment trial is removal from office, senators could vote to bar Trump from holding office in the future -- remember, he has not ruled out running for president in 2024. He could also lose his six-figure pension and other post-presidential perks.

While McConnell sets the schedule as Senate majority leader now, he'll lose that status as soon as the results of Georgia's January 5 Senate runoff elections are certified and the two new Democratic senators, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, are seated. At that point, New York Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer will become Senate majority leader and will have more control over the proceedings.

This time, McConnell, rather than protecting Trump, is said to be happy about the effort as a way to excise Trump or purge him from the GOP.

President Donald Trump has been impeached again -- the first leader in US history to be impeached twice by the House.

The first is slated for Friday, when the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hears from Avril Haines, Biden's pick for director of national intelligence. Then on Tuesday, the day before inauguration, the Senate has scheduled hearings for four nominees: retired Army Gen. Lloyd Austin for defense secretary, Janet Yellen for Treasury, Alejandro Mayorkas for homeland security and Antony Blinken for state.

Now, the rush to consider and vote on his Cabinet will collide with Biden's push for a massive coronavirus relief package — as well as congressional investigations into the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, and the impeachment process for Trump

"I hope that the Senate leadership will find a way to deal with their constitutional responsibilities on impeachment while also working on the other urgent business of this nation," Biden said