a problem with a phone app, which precincts use to send their vote totals to the party, was responsible.

The Bernie Sanders campaign released “internal reporting numbers”, which it said represented the results from about 40% of precincts in Iowa. The data showed Sanders in the lead with 30% of the vote, Pete Buttigieg in second place with 25%, and Elizabeth Warren third on 21%.

At a time when Trump is pushing the nation closer to more reckless wars, I think people will start to look much closely at the records of the Democrats running to replace him to see which candidate they would feel safer with,”

The initial response from the party’s presidential field was to condemn Trump for what candidates viewed as a reckless action that escalated tensions in the Middle East and could lead to an unintentional war with Iran. In the days that followed, however, the Democrats have amplified their disagreements, setting up what could be the first substantive debate among the candidates about the role of American power.

Biden has billed his long record on foreign affairs and stature on the global stage as assets in a world rattled by Trump’s erratic foreign policy.

But while Biden presents his experience as an asset, his closest rivals have assailed that record, particularly his 2002 vote to authorize the war in Iraq and his role in shaping its aftermath. Sanders, who opposed the war in Iraq, recently suggested that the Biden’s foreign policy record could be a political liability against Trump should he be the nominee.

While polls tend to show that foreign policy is a low priority for voters, it has played a significant role in presidential elections since the September 11 terrorist attacks.

While that message resonates with antiwar Democrats and independents, Sanders has yet to be seriously challenged on his views.

Elizabeth Warren shares Sanders’ anti-interventionist sentiments but finds herself on the defensive from critics on the left and the center as she attempts to reclaim her standing in the race.

Buttigieg has used the occasion to highlight his military service and allay concerns about his youth and relative inexperience on the world stage. He has also assailed Biden supporting the “the worst foreign policy decision made by the United States in my lifetime”.

“This is an example of why years in Washington is not always the same thing as judgment,” Buttigieg said during an appearance on Iowa Press last month.

In a CNN poll from November, 48% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters said Biden was best suited to handle matters of foreign policy. By comparison, Sanders ranked a distant second at 14%, while 11% said Warren and only 6% chose Buttigieg

Sanders meanwhile has seized on the rapidly unfolding conflict to emphasize his longstanding opposition to foreign wars as well as his efforts to end US military involvement in Yemen and prevent further action in Iran.

In 2004, growing opposition to the Iraq war helped to propel John Kerry to the presidential nomination. Four years later, Barack Obama wielded Hillary Clinton’s past support for the Iraq war as a cudgel, lifting him to the nomination. During the 2016 presidential election, Sanders and Trump tapped into a weariness over America’s “forever wars” and both attacked Clinton for her early support for the war.

“As voters contemplate how a confrontation with Iran could spiral out of control, they will contrast the erratic, unpredictable impulsive nature of the Trump presidency with the steady hand that Biden brings to the foreign policy arena,”

voters were tired after nearly two decades of war and hungry for a nominee who “offers a very different vision” of American foreign policy.

McCoy pointed to research that showed the communities most devastated by casualties of America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq voted for Trump. The study found that “if three states key to Trump’s victory – Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin – had suffered even a modestly lower casualty rate, all three could have flipped from red to blue and sent Hillary Clinton to the White House”.

“It’s common among pundits to say that voters don’t care about foreign policy. But that misses the truth,” he said. “Voters don’t care about the minutiae of treaty negotiations but they sure do care about whether the people they know and love are dying in forever wars.”

Later, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Mark Milley, said the nature of the missile damage at the targeted bases suggested the attack was intended to take US and allied lives.

A few hours after the president spoke, the fortified diplomatic area in Baghdad, the Green Zone, was hit by two rockets. Initial reports suggest they were fired locally, and caused no casualties, but they were a reminder of the threat of Iraqi militias, some with close ties to Tehran.

Trump’s speech was notably more sober than his more bellicose statements and tweets in the immediate aftermath of Suleimani’s killing, in which he threatened to bomb Iranian cultural sites, a potential war crime. The United States, in recent days, deployed 3,500 paratroopers to the Middle East and Americans were urged to leave the region over safety concerns.

Trump said the United States would continue evaluating options “in response to Iranian aggression” and that additional sanctions on the Iranian regime would be imposed.

Iran is already so heavily sanctioned that few experts believe that further US measures would make much economic difference.

The president stressed the considerable power of the United States military but said that his administration did not seek conflict.

The president, who is campaigning for re-election in November, has faced fierce criticism from senior Democrats in recent days over his administration’s handling of the standoff.

“There were so many important questions that they did not answer,” said Democratic senator Chuck Schumer. “As the questions began to get tough, they walked out.”

Republican senator Mike Lee called it “the worst briefing I’ve had on a military issue in my nine years” in the Senate, according to CNN. Lee called the administration’s handling of the crisis “un-American” and “completely unacceptable”.

On Thursday, the House of Representatives will vote on a war powers resolution that demands an end to US military action against Iran without congressional approval.

Iran launched more than a dozen missiles at Iraqi bases hosting US and coalition troops. Al-Asad airbase in Iraq’s Anbar province was hit 17 times, including by two ballistic missiles that failed to detonate, according to the Iraqi government. A further five missiles were targeted at a base in the northern city of Erbil in the assault, which began at about 1.30am local time on Wednesday.

the Iranian ambassador to the United Nations, Majid Takht Ravanchi, described the strikes as a “measured and proportionate” act of self-defence permitted under the UN Charter, adding that Iran “does not seek escalation or war”

However, while both sides appeared to step back from confrontation in the short term, analysts have warned that the standoff may continue to play out through proxies in the Middle East. Security experts have also warned of possible Iranian cyber attacks on critical infrastructure.

The Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, said the “final answer” to the assassination would be to “kick all US forces out of the region”.

In his Wednesday address, Trump again vowed that he would not allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon and urged world powers to quit a 2015 nuclear accord with Iran that Washington abandoned in 2018 and work for a new deal, an issue that has been at the heart of rising tensions between Washington and Tehran. Iran has denied it seeks nuclear weapons, and rejected new talks.

Trump also said he would ask Nato to “become much more involved in the Middle East process”, without elaborating. Trump in the past has repeatedly criticized the alliance and further alienated his European partners by failing to warn them about the Suleimani killing.

Ned Price, a former CIA official who also worked on the National Security Council during Barack Obama’s administration, said that the speech had moved the United States somewhat away from the brink of war with Iran.

But Price also noted that by authorizing the Suleimani killing, Trump had “galvanized Tehran’s proxy and military forces into action”. “If history is any guide, they will seek to take on a months’ or even years’-long effort to seek vengeance for Suleimani’s death, taking advantage of their presence throughout the region and even beyond,” Price added.

Though the Iraqi debate that called for the US exit is not binding, and would require a one-year notice period, the fact that the move was led by a prime minister regarded as a US ally showed just how divisive the killing has become, and how quickly US interests in the region could unravel as a result.

Shortly after Abdul Mahdi’s statement, the US announced that it was suspending operations against the Islamic State (Isis) in Iraq and a five-year-old training mission to equip local forces. A US statement claimed the suspension was a reaction to rocket attacks on US bases, carried out in recent weeks by Shia militia members.

Suleimani was the second most powerful person in Iran and the most influential Iranian outside the country, travelling the region like a Persian viceroy as he directed conflicts in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, and as far away as Yemen. The extraordinary scenes of mourners thronging Iranian cities were a powerful testament to his popularity at home and the anger directed at the US for his killing a figure so central to Iran’s presence on the regional stage.

“The US army has killed these people,” Nasrallah said, referring to Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, an ally of Suleimani also hit in the airstrike in Baghdad in the early hours of Friday. “We do not at all mean the American people and citizens across our region … It is up to anyone from the axis of resistance to deliver a fair punishment after Soleimani’s assassination.”

Withdrawing US forces from Iraq would be damaging to Washington’s interests in a region still recovering from the invasion of Iraq 17 years ago and the rampage of Isis, which forced millions of people from their homes and led to widespread destruction across the country. While Isis has been defeated on the battlefields of Iraq and Syria, it remains a residual insurgent threat and there are growing signs that the terror group is reorganising, despite being on its knees in its former heartland.

In Iraq’s parliament, the resolution urging a US exit was passed by 170 votes to nil.

Experts including Mittelstadt, however, have said reinstating the draft might in fact help build a more inclusive society.

Despite playing an increasing role in the US military and filling combat roles, women are not required to register.

A more inclusive military draft … would compel everyone in the nation to stop and rethink about who we send to wars, how we fight – and why we fight them at all.

All American men aged 18 to 25 are required by law to register with the SSS. Many do so when applying for a driver’s license or applying for student loans. Those who do not register cannot receive federal financial aid or work for the federal government.

Should the US and Iran go to war, America’s fighting will be done by its volunteer military, about 1.3 million strong and dominated in the enlisted ranks by recruits from working-class and minority groups.

A return to the draft may remain unlikely, but the SSS says it is prepared to “rapidly provide personnel in a fair and equitable manner while managing an alternative service program for conscientious objectors”

Indian government has faced weeks of acrimonious and, at times, violent protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which was passed by Modi’s government in December.

The Hyderabad protesters held placards with slogans including “withdraw CAA immediately”, and “India’s only religion is secularism”.

the protest remained peaceful, and estimated that more than 100,000 people were in attendance

The new law eases the path for non-Muslim minorities from the neighbouring Muslim-majority nations of Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan to gain Indian citizenship. But, if combined with a proposed national register of citizens, critics of the CAA fear it will discriminate against minority Muslims in India and chip away at India’s secular constitution.

Modi’s government maintains the new law is necessary to help minorities facing persecution in Muslim-majority nations, and it has called the pan-India protests politically motivated.

Protests against the CAA also went ahead in several other Indian cities on Saturday, with hundreds turning out in cities in the southern state of Karnataka.

Two dozen others had turned out to see the Minnesota senator in tiny Ida Grove that same day, a county that doesn’t even have 1,000 registered Democrats. But most striking to Klobuchar was a crowd of around 50 packing the Sac County Cattle Company on a Sunday night just before Christmas.

Klobuchar is blunt about her shared background with Iowa’s voters. She brags about being from the midwest, and how she can win in rural Minnesota counties that Trump took by 20 points.

Klobuchar said those gatherings are a sign of what to expect on Iowa’s caucus day on 3 February. Klobuchar sits at about 6% support among probable Iowa caucusgoers, according to the most recent Des Moines Register Iowa poll in October, but a strong debate showing in Los Angeles brought her notice

A crowd that size in Sac City, anywhere in rural America, means something

The proprietor said Klobuchar’s crowds were at least the size of King’s, or any other Republican who has come calling.

Her entire argument is built around electability in midwest swing states such as Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan and Ohio

“He’s treating farmers like poker chips in one of his bankrupt casinos,” she said to the delight of her audience at one stop

The question is whether her momentum, which is mainly confined to Iowa, is too little too late. In less than six weeks, caucusgoers will trudge through a frigid night to precinct meetings in schoolhouses and courthouses – while she may be chained to Trump’s impeachment trial in the US Senate, which is set to start sometime in January and last for an unknown time.

“In an ironic way, her stardom in the Senate will hurt her campaigning in Iowa, where she desperately needs to do well.”

Klobuchar says a doubling of office spaces in Iowa and positive responses in Des Moines Register/CNN Iowa polls are signs of hope. Best says her strongest advantage is that overwhelming majorities of probable caucusgoers have favorable opinions of her and list her in their top three selections.

She says people there have a thirst for economic prosperity that can be achieved realistically, not with promises like Medicare for All. She never mentions challengers from the progressive wing by name. “We can win them back telling the truth. We can bring those people back.”

voters in rural areas like Sac City and Rockwell City are easier to organize than in Democratic metro strongholds such as Des Moines or Iowa City. Those who show up in Rockwell City are reliably Democratic and less issue-focused. Rarely do they see a candidate with Klobuchar’s resume. When they do, they leave with a strong impression.

“It’s a lot easier to get viability in Sac county than Polk county,” said Scholten. “She recognizes that people are familiar with her. Sac City isn’t a long way from the Iowa-Minnesota border.”

Those who hear Klobuchar’s message like her focus on the midwest.

he documents were revealed to have come from Brittany Kaiser, an ex-Cambridge Analytica employee turned whistleblower, and to be the same ones subpoeaned by Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election

The documents were retrieved from her email accounts and hard drives, and though she handed over some material to parliament in April 2018, she said there were thousands and thousands more pages which showed a “breadth and depth of the work” that went “way beyond what people think they know about ‘the Cambridge Analytica scandal’”.

“on our current trajectory these problems are likely to get worse, not better, and with crucial 2020 elections in America and elsewhere approaching, this is a very scary prospect. Something radical needs to be done about it, and fast.”

The unpublished documents contain material that suggests the firm was working for a political party in Ukraine in 2017 even while under investigation as part of Mueller’s inquiry and emails that Kaiser says describe how the firm helped develop a “sophisticated infrastructure of shell companies that were designed to funnel dark money into politics”.

more sophisticated actors will have been emboldened to interfere in our elections and sow social divisions

authorities in the west had failed to punish those practising social and other media manipulation

There are emails between these major Trump donors discussing ways of obscuring the source of their donations through a series of different financial vehicles. These documents expose the entire dark money machinery behind US politics.

“The documents reveal a much clearer idea of what actually happened in the 2016 US presidential election, which has a huge bearing on what will happen in 2020. It’s the same people involved who we know are building on these same techniques,”

“There’s evidence of really quite disturbing experiments on American voters, manipulating them with fear-based messaging, targeting the most vulnerable, that seems to be continuing. This is an entire global industry that’s out of controlbut what this does is lay out what was happening with this one company.

The legislation approved by Congress this week would impose sanctions on Chinese officials who commit human rights abuses in the semiautonomous island territory and place Hong Kong’s special economic status under greater scrutiny.

Security forces in Hong Kong have escalated their crackdown on pro-democracy protesters this month, prompting Congress to approve a Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act it had been considering for months.

Mr. Trump said that the protests were a complicating factor in his trade negotiations with Beijing, which have stalled ahead of an important Dec. 15 deadline, when Mr. Trump must decide whether to issue yet more tariffs on Chinese goods.

he also took credit for the fact that China had not extinguished the protests with a sweeping and violent crackdown.

Mr. Trump and other administration officials have warned that an overwhelming Chinese response would have wider repercussions in the relationship between China and Beijing, including in the trade talks.But analysts say there are many reasons China’s government has refrained from an all-out violent crackdown like the one that snuffed pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989. They include the risk of an enormous international backlash and lasting damage to Hong Kong’s powerhouse economy.

Congress passed its Hong Kong bill with an overwhelming majority, meaning that it could probably override a presidential veto easily, the first override of his presidency. Mr. Trump could also choose not to sign the bill without vetoing it, in which case it would also become law.

More than 80 members of Congress, 55 civil rights groups and Democratic presidential candidates have demanded Miller resign in response to the leaked emails.

Miller’s extreme language in public is under renewed scrutiny following a series of reports by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) that revealed how leaked emails showed the White House aide espousing white nationalist views and injecting that agenda into Breitbart.

Much of Miller’s interview with Bannon is centered on attacking two of Trump’s Republican rivals in the 2016 presidential race, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz.

Miller spent most of the interview criticizing Rubio, who was part of a coalition of four Republicans and four Democrats in the Senate, known as the Gang of Eight, who attempted to pass bipartisan immigration reform. Miller said if the bill they put forward had passed in Congress and become law, “America would be decimated”.

He also said Rubio’s election would lead to open borders and “the destruction of US sovereignty”.

An SPLC report published on Tuesday alleges Miller had an outsized influence on the output at Breitbart, pushing stories the site should cover and suggesting where those stories should be arranged on the homepage. The emails show that Miller specifically pushed articles attacking Rubio, who Trump has called a “great friend” since becoming president.

From aiming to register hundreds of thousands of new voters to earlier and better on-the-ground canvassing, and from investing millions of dollars in recruiting local organizers to more finely focused outreach efforts on a sizable Hispanic and African American communities, Democrats are going all out to reverse the notion that Florida is unassailable Trump country

There was a great sense of dissatisfaction amongst a lot of Democratic voters after the primary. A lot of them stayed home, a lot of them voted for Trump as a protest, so you look at the turnout and adjust it for population growth, it’s one of the lowest turnouts we’ve ever had

We can’t make that mistake again. Vote for who you want in the primary, but come together afterwards

party leaders agree it will take more than just the unquestioned loyalty of existing supporters to turn Florida blue. New voters are needed, lots of them, and in May the party announced a “monumental” $2m investment to register 200,000 statewide before the 2020 election

Florida is one of the seven key battleground states targeted by Democrats nationally as part of their Organizing Corps 2020 campaign launched earlier this year

In Palm Beach county we have passed 400,000 Democrats for the first time ever. We are out-registering the Republicans and pulling away. And that’s a blue county. The Republicans are making an effort there

For those already knocking on Floridians’ doors, the key issues are clear. “The first thing is healthcare, then affordable housing and jobs and the economy,” said Melanie McRae, a Miami-based electoral field organizer for New Florida Majority, an independent political action and advocacy group that works mostly with “marginalized and excluded” communities.

A study published in April by the Miami Urban Future Initiative, a collaboration between Florida International University and urban researchers at the Creative Class Group, found that there were stark racial dimensions to the city’s high rate of poverty.

14.3% of Miami residents lived in poverty, affecting African Americans at two and a half times the rate of white Americans and Hispanics at twice the rate of whites.

McRae, who organizes small teams of canvassers knocking on up to 100 doors a day in Miami’s ethnically diverse neighborhoods, stresses that her organization is non-partisan. “We are not the Democratic party, we are not politicians, so we don’t come to ask for your vote. We’re here year-round motivating, educating and advocating for a better Florida,” she said.

many of New Florida Majority’s ideals – including racial and social equality, criminal justice reform, care of the environment and tackling the climate crisis – are shared by most Democrats and will be huge motivating factors for voters in next year’s election

What I’m getting from voters is anger, disgust, a little bit of hopelessness, which we’re trying to use as fuel to get them out,” she said. “We’re not preparing for 2020. 2020 is already here.”

Educating voters so they know the issues is going to be critical. Healthcare is number one for Floridians and Republicans are attempting to wipe out the Affordable Care Act. The environment is another huge issue where Democrats are full of positive change, while the Trump administration wants to have offshore drilling off Florida.

Ultimately, as in so many recent elections, the result in Florida is going to be a simple numbers game. The party that engages and recruits more supporters will carry off the state’s 29 electoral college votes, and with them probably the White House.

“From my perspective, I think that the Amazon money was a big distraction when we were trying to make our closing arguments with voters,” said Orion.

ome top local-based global giants such as Amazon, Boeing and Microsoft also contributed to Orion’s campaign.

“We have run a historic grassroots campaign, with working people, community members rejecting Amazon and billionaires’ attempt to buy this election, and that doesn’t mean we’re going to win every battle against the billionaires,” said Sawant..

At a time when many Seattleites are already critical of Amazon’s influence in the city – with many pointing to the role it has played in Seattle’s rising cost of living and growing income inequality – the contributions left an unsavory taste in some residents’ mouths.

“It’s supposed to be a democratic process and it’s not a democratic process when Amazon can contribute that much to basically a small election,” she said.

But her battle against the influence of big business came to a head with her push last year for the Head Tax. The proposal would have implemented a per-employee tax on corporations making more than $20m each year to fund housing and services for the homeless in a city that has the third largest homeless population in the US, according to a 2018 federal report. With about 45,000 workers in Seattle, Amazon would have probably had to pay millions each year through the tax.

The nine-member council unanimously approved the tax. But after Amazon, another locally based global giant, Starbucks, and other companies contributed financially to the campaign to kill it, called No Tax on Jobs, all but two members of the council then quickly voted to repeal it.

the company was considering extending the ban beyond political advertising to “issue ads”. Gadde said the company was considering outlawing “ads that advocate for or against legislative issues of national importance (such as climate change, healthcare, immigration, national security and taxes)”.

“[Her point] is one of the key issues many miss about banning political ads on any platform. You can’t ban these ads without significantly inhibiting the ability of activists, labour groups and organisers to make their cases too.”

About a year and a half ago, she joined a group called Mothering Justice that is working to expand the rights and wellbeing of women and families, particularly women of color who are often “last in line” to get rights or help

Add in the lingering effects of the housing crisis: The banks have regained profitability, but many low-income borrowers have not been made whole.

Since the 2008 housing crisis, Detroit has moved from being a majority homeowner city to being one that is majority renter. Indeed, the city’s much-touted economic recovery – after its emergence from bankruptcy in 2014 — has bypassed many of the city’s neighborhoods.

But women like Dumas could be influential voters in the 2020 US election. African American women constitute the most loyal block of Democratic voters, with 94% voting for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Mothering Justice plans to magnify their members’ sway. Each one is being asked to identify 50 friends and family in her “electoral universe” who may need an extra push, according to Atkinson. They will start nudging them in January.

According to Böhme, the findings suggest that our upright posture can be traced to a common ancestor of humans and great apes that lived in Europe rather than Africa.

The clay pit haul of fossils included teeth, pieces of jaw and spine, and a big toe that would have been handy for grasping tree branches. Arguably the most important fossils were a forearm and shin bone, which informed the scientists’ speculation about how the ape moved around.

The most complete skeleton, with 21 bones, was thought to belong to a male that stood a metre high and weighed about 30kg. He had a broad chest and the curved, S-shaped spine seen in humans.

Some researchers believe dryopithecins were the ancestors of the ancient African apes who ultimately gave rise to great apes more generally, including the gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees, bonobos and humans.

Writing in the journal Nature, the scientists make the case for danuvius employing what they call “extended limb clambering” to get around. Rather than swinging from branches or walking cautiously on branches, extended limb clambering uses both arms and legs equally.

“Together, the mosaic features of D guggenmosi arguably provide the best model yet of what a common ancestor of humans and African apes might have looked like. It offers something for everyone: the forelimbs suited to life in the trees that all living apes, including humans, still have, and lower limbs suited to extended postures like those used by orangutans during bipedalism in the trees.”

“Danuvius is not a fossil hominin, but it does help inform how humans may have evolved.”

Some of the most compelling evidence for upright walking in human ancestors comes from Ardipithecus ramidus, a female skeleton dating back 4.4m years that was found in Ethiopia. Ardi, who stood about a metre tall, may not have been the most accomplished of walkers, but much of her skeleton shows adaptations to walking on two feet.

The former Speaker is stepping down as an MP after representing the constituency of Buckingham for the Conservatives since 1997.

In recent months, he has been accused of bending the rules to allow rebel backbench MPs such as Dominic Grieve and Hilary Benn to constrain the government’s room for manoeuvre – including by passing the so-called Benn act, which forced Johnson to request a delay to Brexit.

Bercow said: “I respect the prime minister and he has the right to do what he did also in the House of Commons. But my job was to stand up for the rights of the House of Commons. No apology for championing the rights of parliament.”

Three other witnesses summoned by the House committees were not expected to appear.

David Hale, the third most senior official at the state department, began his testimony at congressional impeachment hearings on Wednesday. He will reportedly seek to explain the agency’s failure to defend the ambassador to Ukraine as an act of realpolitik.

All the state department witnesses, who have defied administration orders not to cooperate with the investigation, have corroborated a whistleblower report about an attempt by Trump and his circle to pressure the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, into announcing specific investigations.

The congressional committees are examining whether the president abused his office by seeking to use leverage on Ukraine to investigate his political opponents. Part of the inquiry concerns the removal of Yovanovitch from her ambassadorial post, after she refused to take part in Giuliani’s effort to implicate former vice-president Joe Biden and his son in corruption.

Several witnesses have also testified that security assistance to Ukraine was suspended in July as part of a pressure campaign on Kyiv to investigate the energy firm that hired Biden’s son, Hunter.

Hale was reportedly planning to tell investigators that the state department’s leadership decided that battling Giuliani and the White House over Yovanovitch would expend political capital it needed to persuade Trump to restore the military aid.

Sondland was accused on Wednesday of making up meetings and conversations.

He was a man that believed in Mexico,” said Jesse, who left Mexico as an undocumented migrant aged 14 and is now a US citizen. “He chose to stay here because he thought that he could change things, you know?

The disappeared are perhaps the dirtiest secret of Mexico’s drug conflict, which has shown no sign of easing since leftist leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador took power last December promising a new era of peace.

In August Mexican authorities, who after years of public pressure are beginning to demonstrate greater interest in investigating such crimes, acknowledged over 3,000 clandestine burial sites. More than 500 had been discovered since López Obrador took power.

As Jesse marched on – shadowed by a rifle-toting police agent – the hidden perils that lay behind his brother’s disappearance became clear. Pickup trucks, apparently sent by cartel bosses to monitor the search party, rattled past on the country lane down which José’s abductors fled. “These assholes are halcones,” Jesse complained, using the Spanish slang word for lookouts.

This kind of activism is about patience, not speed

“We all have the same goal, which is finding our missing ones,” said Ocegueda who became a campaigner after his own son was taken, in 2007, and has recovered more than 120 bodies since.

Sea level rise is going to be an ongoing problem for centuries to come, we will have to keep on adapting over and over again. It’s going to be a whole new expensive lifestyle, costing trillions of dollars.

Sea level has a very long memory, so even if we start cooling temperatures the seas will continue to rise.

About half of the 20cm sea level rise can be attributed to the world’s top five greenhouse gas polluters – the US, China, India, Russia and the European Union – according to the researchers. The US was a key architect of the Paris deal but this week Donald Trump formally triggered its exit from the agreement.

Our results show that what we do today will have a huge effect in 2300. Twenty centimetres is very significant; it is basically as much sea-level rise as we’ve observed over the entire 20th century,

The results reveal the daunting prospect of a near-endless advance of the seas, forcing countries to invest huge resources in defending key infrastructure or ceding certain areas to the tides. Many coastal cities around the world are already facing this challenge, with recent research finding that land currently home to 300 million people will flood at least once a year by 2050 unless carbon emissions are drastically slashed.

the global sea level rise could reach as much as 1.1 metres by the end of the century if emissions aren’t curbed.

“People are going to become less inclined to live by the coast and there are going to be sea level rise refugees,” Clark said. “More severe cuts in emissions are certainly going to be required but the current Paris pledges aren’t enough to prevent the seas from rising for a long, long time.”

Tonight voters in Kentucky sent a message loud and clear for everyone to hear. It’s a message that says our elections don’t have to be about right versus left, they are still about right versus wrong,

Voters in suburban swaths of Kentucky and Virginia sided with Democrats, a trend that would complicate Trump’s path to re-election in 2020 if it holds. And the Democrats who made gains in Tuesday’s election did so by largely avoiding positions such as the government-run healthcare plan “Medicare for All” that have animated the party’s left flank in the Democratic presidential primary race.

Beshear declared himself the winner in Kentucky after securing 49.2% of the vote to Bevin’s 48.8%.

Bevin was elected in 2015 and had portrayed this election as a referendum on Trump, who stumped for the governor at a rally in Kentucky on Monday night and called Beshear “too liberal, too extreme and too dangerous”

A bullish Bevin had told the New York Times last month that he anticipated winning the election by between six and 10 points.

But while Trump won Kentucky with more than 60% of the vote in 2016 and remains popular in the state, with Republicans in other races there doing well on Tuesday, Bevin – who polls as one of America’s most unpopular governors – could not ride that popularity to victory.

Beshear, the state’s attorney general and the son of Kentucky’s last Democratic governor, made public education the cornerstone of his campaign, choosing a public high school assistant principal as his running mate and accusing Bevin of bullying schoolteachers who protested against proposed pension reforms.

Bevin, meanwhile, fought on broader, national and cultural issues, highlighting his relationship with Trump and his support for the second amendment, while touting himself as the “most pro-life” governor in America.

Kentucky’s race was one of several closely watched elections in states across the US on Tuesday. Republican Daniel Cameron made history in a resounding win in Kentucky’s election for attorney general, becoming the first African American to win the office.

Democrats have pledged that when they take power, they will pass an agenda that Republicans have blocked for years, including stricter gun laws, a higher minimum wage and ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment.