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Eventually, the deal got put back together by Secretary of State John Kerry and the American-educated Iranian foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif. Five Americans were released in Iran over the weekend in exchange for seven Iranians freed by the United States.

But it took 14 months of turbulent talks punctuated by high diplomatic drama and multiple near-collapses that paralleled the final year of nuclear negotiations. The secret negotiations were weighted by the baggage of a bitter history as the Iranian representatives berated their counterparts over past grievances, including the C.I.A.-backed coup in 1953 and American support for Iraq in its war with Iran in the 1980s.

The Iranians were not the only ones grappling with divisions in their government about a possible deal. The Obama administration was engaged in a vigorous debate about whether to trade Iranian prisoners and, if so, which ones, with Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch objecting to any deal that equated innocent Americans seized for political gain with Iranian criminals indicted or convicted under Western legal traditions.

In the end, officials said President Obama decided that to spare the Americans years — if not life — in an Iranian prison, he would make what he called a “one-time gesture” by releasing Iranians who had been accused or convicted of violating sanctions that he was lifting anyway as part of the nuclear agreement.

Republican critics, while celebrating the release of the Americans, questioned the cost. “I think it’s a very dangerous precedent,” Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a leading Republican presidential candidate, said on “Fox News Sunday.” “The result of this, every bad actor on earth has been told to go capture an American. If you want terrorists out of jail, capture an American and President Obama is in the let’s-make-a-deal business.”

Mr. Obama authorized a secret diplomatic channel to Iran to negotiate for their release, even as he was seeking a deal on Tehran’s nuclear program. Mr. McGurk, a top State Department official who had just brokered the departure of Iraq’s problematic prime minister, was tapped in October 2014 to lead the new talks with Iran.

Brought together by the Swiss, who represent American interests in Tehran, Mr. McGurk’s team sat down with their Iranian counterparts in Geneva for the first time in November 2014, according to an account by several American officials on the condition of anonymity.

"I will be leaving office," Fabius said.

This is a sensitive time for Hollande, whose plan to strip French citizenship from people convicted of terrorism is far from certain to be adopted despite passing a first hurdle in parliament on Tuesday.

But analysts said a reshuffle was unlikely to do much to help Hollande's popularity, which has been eroded by a debate on stripping dual nationals of their French passports in case of terrorism convictions - one of the key measures he announced after 130 people were killed by Islamist militants in Paris on November 13.

He is due to stay on as chair of U.N. climate talks until late 2016, monitoring implementation of the agreement to shift from fossil fuels to cleaner energies.

He reciprocated in kind. “How do you describe coming into a warm room from out of the cold?” he once said. “Never waking up bored? The only thing wrong is, she’s made a coward out of me. Whenever she’s out of sight, I’m a worrier about her.”

But this was a convention in a day when women were not encouraged to have careers outside the home. In his book “Reagan’s America: Innocents At Home,” Garry Wills disputed the prevalent view that Miss Davis had just been marking time in Hollywood while waiting for a man. She was “the steady woman,” he wrote, who in most of her 11 films had held her own with accomplished actors.

In the late 1940s, Hollywood was in the grip of a “Red Scare,” prompted by government investigations into accusations of Communist influence in the film industry. In October 1949, the name “Nancy Davis” appeared in a Hollywood newspaper on a list of signers of a supporting brief urging the Supreme Court to overturn the convictions of two screenwriters who had been blacklisted after being found guilty of contempt for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee.Such newspaper mentions could mean the end of a career, and Nancy Davis sought help from her friend Mervyn LeRoy, who had directed her in “East Side, West Side.” LeRoy found it was a case of mistaken identity: another Nancy Davis had worked in what he called “leftist theater.” He offered to call Ronald Reagan, president of the Screen Actors Guild, to make sure there would be no problems in the future. Instead, Miss Davis insisted that LeRoy set up a meeting with Mr. Reagan.

From the first, Mrs. Reagan was part of the campaign planning. “They were a team,” said Stuart Spencer, who with Bill Roberts managed the Reagan campaign. New to politics, she said little at first. But Mr. Spencer found her “a quick learner, always absorbing.” Before long she was peppering Mr. Roberts and Mr. Spencer about their strategy and tactics.

The mansion episode, and Mrs. Reagan’s unalloyed preference for Southern California, aroused parochial resentment in Sacramento. She in turn disliked the city’s locker-room political culture, which required her to socialize with the wives of legislators who had insulted her husband. She bristled at press scrutiny, which became more intense after Joan Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, wrote an unflattering article, “Pretty Nancy,” in The Saturday Evening Post in 1968. The article described Mrs. Reagan’s famous smile as a study in frozen insecurity.

Mr. Reagan decided to debate and did so well that he surged ahead in the polls and won convincingly a week later.

After the assassination attempt, Mrs. Reagan turned to Joan Quigley, a San Francisco astrologer, who claimed to have predicted that March 30 would be a “bad day” for the president. Her relationship with Ms. Quigley “began as a crutch,” Mrs. Reagan wrote, “one of several ways I tried to alleviate my anxiety about Ronnie.” Within a year, it was a habit. Mrs. Reagan conversed with Ms. Quigley by telephone and passed on the information she received about favorable and unfavorable days to Mr. Deaver, the presidential assistant, and later to the White House chief of staff, Donald Regan, for use in scheduling.

Mr. Regan disclosed Mrs. Reagan’s astrological bent in his 1988 book, “For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington,” asserting that the Quigley information created a chaotic situation for White House schedulers. Mrs. Reagan said that no political decisions had been made based on the astrologist’s advice, nor did Mr. Regan allege that any had been.But the disc

losure was nonetheless embarrassing to Mrs. Reagan; she and many commentators saw it as an act of revenge for the role she had played in forcing Mr. Regan out after the Iran-contra disclosures. Mrs. Reagan’s low opinion of Mr. Regan was well known; she had said tartly that he “liked the sound of chief but not of staff.”

Some of Serbia’s most important religious sites are located in Kosovo, which many Serbs regard as the cradle of their identity and Orthodox Christian faith. Many have been damaged by ethnic Albanians since the 1999 war.

In remarks on Thursday reported in Blic, he criticized what he said were new demands that Serbia file reports to Kosovo’s government regarding funding for ethnic Serb-run bodies inside Kosovo.

Serbia's presidency is a largely ceremonial position, but Nikolic is from the ranks of the ruling Progressive Party, now led by Vucic, and has sway over hardliners in the party.

Observing the strange calm of the Italian public amid the growing international tension, a young Italian officer tells Origo: “‘Look what Fascism has done for our people! … Compare their calm with the feverish tension in France and England!’ But it isn’t exactly calm. It is a mixture of passive fatalism, and of a genuine faith in their leader: the fruits of 15 years of being taught not to think. It is certainly not a readiness for war, but merely a blind belief that, ‘somehow,’ it won’t happen.”

A few days later, Origo describes the scene at a dinner in Rome as the wealthy, well-connected guests await the arrival of Mussolini’s son-in-law, Italy’s foreign minister Galeazzo Ciano, while Mussolini is trying to broker a peace plan. “When at last he arrived,” Origo writes, “he was beaming. ‘You can set your minds at rest,’ he said. ‘France and England have accepted the Duce’s proposals. … So go to bed tonight with your minds at rest!’ The guests followed his advice, and woke the next morning to the news of the invasion of Poland! Neither the Duce nor his son-in-law were told of it until two hours before the event.”

The radio, which the Fascist regime used with great skill, plays a large role in Origo’s account, and it is hard not to see some parallels with our current situation, with its constant claims of “fake news.” “The ultimate result of unceasing propaganda has now been to cancel out the effect of all news alike,” Origo writes. “One man said to me, ‘The radio has made fools of us all.’”

the day before Mussolini’s official declaration of war, Origo poses a question that seems deeply important in this time of resurgent nationalism: “Is it possible to move a country to war, against its historical traditions, against the natural instincts and character of the majority of its inhabitants, and very possibly against its own interests? Apparently it is possible.”

beachfront property is not necessarily declining in value. Rather, the studies suggest that more-exposed properties — including properties that have not yet experienced direct flooding — simply are not appreciating as rapidly as their inland neighbors.

A large part of that rise has come in the last 25 years, said Norm Levine, director of the Lowcountry Hazards Center at the College of Charleston. As a result, roughly 1 percent of buildings in the Charleston area are now seeing annual flooding, Levine said. “Our 50-year estimate is that it will be 15 percent of the inventory of buildings.”

Owen Tyler, the managing broker of the Cassina Group, a realty company that sells million-dollar-plus historic homes in Charleston, agrees. Home buyers are asking increasingly savvy questions about flooding, Tyler said, “a dramatic change from three years ago or five years ago.

“I definitely feel like something has changed,” Boineau said when asked about sea level rise and whether flooding in Charleston is getting worse. “And I think that we all have a lot to be concerned about.”

But what we really need — and it is not clear what Facebook has in mind — is privacy for true person-to-person messaging apps, not messaging apps that also allow for secure mass messaging.

Once end-to-end encryption is put in place, Facebook can wash its hands of the content. We don’t want to end up with all the same problems we now have with viral content online — only with less visibility and nobody to hold responsible for it.

encrypted messaging, in addition to releasing Facebook from the obligation to moderate content, wouldn’t interfere with the surveillance that Facebook conducts for the benefit of advertisers. As Mr. Zuckerberg admitted in an interview after he posted his plan, Facebook isn’t “really using the content of messages to target ads today anyway.” In other words, he is happy to bolster privacy when doing so would decrease Facebook’s responsibilities, but not when doing so would decrease its advertising revenue.

Mr. Zuckerberg emphasized in his post was his intention to make Facebook’s messaging platforms, Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram, “interoperable.” He described this decision as part of his “privacy-focused vision,” though it is not clear how doing so — which would presumably involve sharing user data — would serve privacy interests.

Merging those apps just might, however, serve Facebook’s interest in avoiding antitrust remedies. Just as regulators are realizing that allowing Facebook to gobble up all its competitors (including WhatsApp and Instagram) may have been a mistake, Mr. Zuckerberg decides to scramble the eggs to make them harder to separate into independent entities. What a coincidence.

This supposed shift toward a “privacy-focused vision” looks more to me like shrewd competitive positioning, dressed up in privacy rhetoric.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, likes to say that the company’s problem is that it has been “way too idealistic.” I think the problem is the invasive way it makes its money and its lack of meaningful oversight

It includes and rests upon a critical redefinition of what is known as “sex.” We usually think of this as simply male or female, on biological grounds (as opposed to a more cultural notion of gender). But the Equality Act would define “sex” as including “gender identity,” and defines “gender identity” thus: “gender-related identity, appearance, mannerisms, or characteristics, regardless of the individual’s designated sex at birth.”

What the radical feminists are arguing is that the act doesn’t only blur the distinction between men and women (thereby minimizing what they see as the oppression of patriarchy and misogyny), but that its definition of gender identity must rely on stereotypical ideas of what gender expression means. What, after all, is a “gender-related characteristic”? It implies that a tomboy who loves sports is not a girl interested in stereotypically boyish things, but possibly a boy trapped in a female body

So instead of enlarging our understanding of gender expression — and allowing maximal freedom and variety within both sexes — the concept of “gender identity” actually narrows it, in more traditional and even regressive ways. What does “gender-related mannerisms” mean, if not stereotypes?

it bans single-sex facilities like changing, dressing, or locker rooms, if sex is not redefined to include “gender identity.” This could put all single-sex institutions, events, or groups in legal jeopardy. It could deny lesbians their own unique safe space, free from any trace of men

This is the deeply confusing and incoherent aspect of the entire debate. If you abandon biology in the matter of sex and gender altogether, you may help trans people live fuller, less conflicted lives; but you also undermine the very meaning of homosexuality.

If you follow the current ideology of gender as entirely fluid, you actually subvert and undermine core arguments in defense of gay rights. “A gay man loves and desires other men, and a lesbian desires and loves other women,” explains Sky Gilbert, a drag queen. “This defines the existential state of being gay. If there is no such thing as ‘male’ or ‘female,’ the entire self-definition of gay identity, which we have spent generations seeking to validate and protect from bigots, collapses.”

Boot argues that the U.S. should literally be the world’s policeman: “U.S. troops are … policing the frontiers of the Pax Americana. Just as the police aren’t trying to eliminate crime, so troops are not trying to eliminate terrorism but, instead, to keep it below a critical threshold that threatens the United States and our allies.”

We can respect the right of certain people to be identified as the gender they believe they are, and to remove any discrimination against them, while also seeing biology as a difference that requires a distinction.

We can believe in nature and the immense complexity of the human mind and sexuality. We can see a way to accommodate everyone to the extent possible, without denying biological reality. Equality need not mean sameness.

We just have to abandon the faddish notion that sex is socially constructed or entirely in the brain, that sex and gender are unconnected, that biology is irrelevant, and that there is something called an LGBTQ identity, when, in fact, the acronym contains extreme internal tensions and even outright contradictions.

What we may not be able to do for much longer is work profitably. If a universal basic income emerges, or if technology renders our bodies and minds unnecessary for the success of our societies, we will still need to work, to do things. But we will almost certainly have to to reimagine what work is like, what work outside of the motives of profit or efficiency can mean, what value we attach to what we do each day, and how we do it.

The world we live in is a product of a capitalism that has made us all immeasurably better off, even as it has made us more and more unequal. But that world is clearly beginning to repeal itself, to render unnecessary the vast bulk of humanity’s labor, and the vast capitalist system has only existed for a blink of an eye in humanity’s long history. We are fools if we think it will go on forever. We will have to generate a new culture of work

In fact, Boot deserves great kudos for his honesty. Richard Haass, the Pope of the Blob, deserves credit too for recognizing that “the situation on the ground is something of a slowly deteriorating stalemate … Although the U.S. and its European partners cannot expect to win the war or broker a lasting peace, it should be possible to keep the government alive and carry on the fight against terrorists.” How’s that for a pep talk!

There is a solution to this knotted paradox. We can treat different things differently. We can accept that the homosexual experience and the transgender experience are very different, and cannot be easily conflated. We can center the debate not on “gender identity” which insists on no difference between the trans and the cis, the male and the female, and instead focus on the very real experience of “gender dysphoria,” which deserves treatment and support and total acceptance for the individuals involved.

My guess is that this ever-extending police project is unstoppable in the foreseeable future. And that is true of most empires: They never unwind voluntarily. They devolve into stalemates, and collapse only when the imperial power has so bankrupted itself morally, politically, and financially that the only choice is defeat at a time not of our choosing.

diplomat with a 30-year career behind him, Ri Yong Ho is a former ambassador to the United Kingdom. Fluent in English, only last year Ri stood in front of the U.N. General Assembly and called Trump “President Evil” and “Commander-in-Grief.”

The liberal Moon swept into power after the divisive impeachment of his predecessor, and promised to pursue better relations with his northern neighbor. A human rights lawyer by trade, Moon was imprisoned as a student for his role in protesting against military strongman Park Chung-hee. Moon also served in South Korea’s special forces in the DMZ during a period of exceptionally high tensions. He promised to pursue a policy toward North Korea following in the pattern of the “Sunshine Policy” of his liberal predecessors. His challenge has been to persuade the Trump administration — and conservatives inside South Korea — of his dedication to the Seoul-Washington alliance.

South Korea’s top spy has been the architect of previous summits involving North Korea, and is viewed as an honest broker by Pyongyang. In the 1990s he lived in North Korea for two years, working on an international agreement that would have supplied the country with a non-military nuclear power reactor. Having studied at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies, Suh is also comfortable in Washington D.C., where he is well-known and respected.

She’s not sure what should happen in Syria or when, saying that Americans have to trust the leaders they elected to make such decisions.

He had joined other military officers in demanding the resignation of Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez, and was forced into hiding. He eventually slipped across the border into Colombia and got a plane ticket to Miami. He thought his training with the U.S. military would help him when he arrived.

Colina discussed U.S. policy as he sat in El Arepazo, a bustling restaurant connected to a Doral gas station that serves Venezuelan comfort food. He is grateful that Trump has placed heavy sanctions on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro — but he hopes Trump will also establish an oil embargo, challenge Maduro’s authority and make it easier for refugees like him to move to the United States.

“I don’t think Haitian immigrants should be rejected if they’re trying to get to this country,” said Brown, 51, a longtime community organizer in Chicago who votes for Democrats but doesn’t think the party does enough for African Americans. “I think that our immigration policy should be humane.”

The data required to serve you any single ad may pass through many companies’ systems in milliseconds—from data broker to ad marketplace to an agency’s custom system.

Another way you can be tracked without your knowing it is through any open Wi-Fi hot spot you might pass. If your phone’s Wi-Fi is on, you’re constantly broadcasting a unique MAC address and a history of past Wi-Fi connections.

is that with most individual data vendors holding only parts of your data, your complete, identifiable profile is never all in one place. Giants like Google and Facebook , who do have all your data in one place, say they are diligent about throwing away or not gathering what they don’t need, and eliminating personally identifying information from the remainder.

There are plenty of ways to track you without getting your permission. Some of the most intrusive are the easiest to implement. Your telco knows where you are at all times, because it knows which cell towers your phone is near. In the U.S., how much data service-providers sell is up to them.

A map of the U.S., showing areas of unusually high visits to sites where location-based advertising firm Groundtruth pushes ads to mobile devices.

Retailers sometimes use these addresses to identify repeat customers, and they can also use them to track you as you go from one of their stores to another.

WeatherBug, one of the most popular weather apps for Android and iPhone, is owned by the location advertising company GroundTruth. It’s a natural fit: Weather apps need to know where you are and provide value in exchange for that information.

Every month GroundTruth tracks 70 million people in the U.S. as they go to work in the morning, come home at night, surge in and out of public events, take vacations, you name it.

Companies like Acxiom could be prime targets for hackers, said Chandler Givens, chief executive of TrackOff, which develops software to protect user identity and personal information

Nearly every year, a bill comes up in the Senate or House that would regulate our data privacy—the most recent was in the wake of the Equifax breach—but none has passed. In some respects, the U.S. appears to be moving backward on privacy protections.

Mr Abbas had already rejected Mr Trump's proposals last month, after the UN General Assembly voted to express regret at US recognition of Jerusalem.

Israel claims the whole of the city as its capital. The Palestinians want East Jerusalem, occupied by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war, to be the capital of a future Palestinian state.

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

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

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

An arranged marriage to Margaret of Valois, daughter of Henry II and Catherine de' Medici, brought Parisian Catholics and visiting Huguenots together

Upon the death of François, Duke of Anjou, in 1584, Henry of Navarre became heir to the throne of France

Henry of Navarre became King Henry IV, but it would take a nine-year siege of Paris to secure his crown from the influence of the Holy League and Spanish interference

The situation brought about the War of the Three Henrys, pitting Henry of Navarre against King Henry III of France and the staunchly Catholic Henry, Duke of Guise. Henry of Navarre acted boldly, defeating the army of Henry III

Spanish interference with French succession prompted Henry III to join forces with Henry of Navarre to take control of Paris and the French countryside

Henry III was stabbed on August 1, 1589, and died the next day after declaring Henry of Navarre his successor

He was opposed by the Holy League

Paris finally capitulated on March 22, 1594. Pope Clement reversed Henry's excommunication, and Henry brokered the Peace of Vervins between France and Spain on May 2, 1598

Having united the kingdom and attained peace at home and abroad, Henry IV proceeded to bring prosperity back to France. He lowered taxes on French citizens, made peace with the Ottoman Empire and opened up trade routes to East Asia

Despite his accomplishments, Henry IV endured multiple assassination attempts

He was stabbed to death by a Catholic fanatic on May 14, 1610

By the late 1980s, many segments of society were frustrated with the party leadership's corruption. For example, many party leaders and their children were vested in the joint-ventures that China had brokered with foreign companies.

One of the few leaders who was viewed as incorruptible was Hu Yaobang. His death in April 1989 was the last straw and galvanized the Tiananmen Square protests. Genuine mourning turned into protesting against the government.

In Toksook Bay, federal grants helped pay for a permanent path to the nearby village of Nightmute, according to Mr. Pitka. “Now people aren’t making their own trails and tearing up the environment with their A.T.V.s.,” he said.

“When a small tribe puts its own money into getting all members to participate and it gets back information that it has a population of zero, it’s certainly not going to be willing to promote the census in the future,” said Norm DeWeaver, a consultant for Native American tribes on data issues.

Census officials have already exempted state population totals from the algorithm’s effects, so congressional apportionment will remain as accurate as possible. Dr. Abowd said that the census plans to increase accuracy for the populations of some small areas, such as reservations, and that the undercount of Native Americans in the test run is “unacceptable.” There is still time to modify the algorithm — the bureau has more than a year before it releases results to the states for redistricting.

The goal of the Census Bureau is to “count everyone once, only once and in the right place.” Trudging through the snow, enumerators in rural Alaska are helping the government reach that standard. But if the bureau uses its privacy algorithm without hearing from small communities like Toksook Bay, it risks undermining their efforts and damaging the census’s reputation for decades to come.

Kolfage himself is new to the medical supply industry. His company has only been around for a few weeks; before that, he’d spent tens of millions of dollars crowdfunded from Trump supporters to plan and build two segments of steel bollard fencing on private land at the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas. The project is billed as an effort to help the President complete his promised wall.

But upon hearing the truth about his Instagram post on a phone call Wednesday, Kolfage shrugged it off. “That’s the nature of this market, there’s so much uncertainty,” he said. “Ninety or 95% of all deals are scams.”

The market has been been upended by a bottomless pit of coronavirus-related demand, and entrepreneurs like Kolfage have jumped to fill the void, even if they’re not totally sure of what’s real, and what’s not.

“You’re doing these contracts that involve a lot of money,” Kolfage told TPM. “That could have been a billion dollars worth of money on the table — setting up an escrow for a billion dollars and still you don’t know that it’s real or fake.”

If he’d found a buyer, Kolfage said he would have used a third-party vendor to confirm that the Japanese salesmen he was in touch with were serious. But he never did.

What ultimately happened to the supposed stash of masks is another complicated story: Kolfage claimed on Instagram at the time that the U.S. government had acted too slowly and that “someone else bought” the supply. But he eventually relayed to TPM that the Japanese government had seized the shipment from his supplier.

Indeed, these are flush times in the mask industry. Prices for coveted N95 masks like the ones Kolfage was trying to sell are 10 times what they were before the pandemic.

Kolfage told TPM that’s he’s supplying retailers with 4–5 million surgical style masks every single week, and that he has “full contract deals with foreign countries to supply them masks.” He told Reuters, which first reported his new hustle, that he was selling the masks for about $4 each. And he said Wednesday that his company typically takes a 1–3% commission.

“I’m still very bullish on 2020. I think Trump’s going to have a very difficult time winning re-election,” said the former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe.

Money money money!

Incumbency

“I don’t think it’s going to be hard to raise all the money you need but that early advantage is not inconsequential given that this is coming down to a few voters in a few states,” Emanuel said.

$20m on more than 218,000 Facebook ads. And Democrats have noticed.

“I think someone who’s not worried about the money is crazy. Trump’s sitting on $100m right now and we’re nowhere close to having a nominee and they will be able to raise money but we’re still so fractured,”

But Trump is a divisive figure, to put it mildly. Democrats point to their gains in suburban districts across the country and flipping seven governor’s mansions in the 2018 midterm elections. They see that as a herald of Democratic competitiveness in Republican-leaning parts of the country. Democratic strategists hope fatigue from seemingly daily national crises will see reluctant moderates and swing voters vote Trump out of office.

Emanuel said the deciding issues will be the key aspects of the economy versus a set of issues Democrats have run and won on in recent years.

The most persistent source of Democratic handwringing is a traditional aspect of any presidential cycle: the months-long primary where fellow candidates turn on each other. After months of relatively respectful campaigning, the knives are finally coming out just before the first vote in Iowa next week.

Running out of money – and a brokered convention?

Democrats worry a long, bloody primary could advantage Trump. It could also drain Democrats’ resources.

ppealing to swing voters A persistent fear throughout the Democratic primary has been picking a viable nominee. The 2020 Democratic primary has been full of ideological and policy debates over Medicare for All, immigration, a Green New Deal and whether a veteran or young charismatic leader can beat Trump.

“The thing that concerns me the absolute most right now is Bernie being the nominee,” a veteran Democratic strategist with ties to multiple candidates said.

The veteran Democratic strategist pointed to questions about where Warren stands on healthcare and Medicare for All. “I think Warren’s a problem. I think any candidate who would lose the healthcare debate to Trump is a problem. I think her stance is a problem. I think a lot of what’s ailing her is correctable. I think it’s not correctable with Bernie and he has no desire to correct it.”

When asked if the the state legislature’s session – suspended since 12 March – would also resume, the governor told WGAU’s Tim Bryant lawmakers were “waiting to come back until it’s a safe environment to do so, and have the proper protocols where, you know, we can make sure that that’s not a dangerous situation for anyone that would need to be at the Capitol”.

Critics say he is making decisions with politics uppermost in his mind, stirring a rightwing base in the hope of retaining power – much like Donald Trump.

The opposing sides taken by the owners of Manuel’s – and many others like them in Georgia – and the state’s Republican leaders, backed by a few rightwing protest groups, are a microcosm of the controversy starting to play out across the US as some states push to reopen their economies in the face of dire warnings by many healthcare professionals.

Many of the governor’s critics say his decision to allow certain businesses to reopen will affect minority communities disproportionately, giving the dispute a racial tinge in a region already rife with such issues.

“This virus has disproportionately impacted the lives of black and brown people. We cannot and will not stand silently by and watch the premature opening of businesses that are mostly in the African American communities,” the Georgia Legislative Black Caucus (GLBC) said in a group statement.

“Our first concern is ensuring the safety of our employees and patrons. While we obviously want to reopen, and we have an incentive to do so as business owners, we do not want to contribute to the spread of the virus,” he said in a statement to the Guardian.

“We’re asking people to continue to not travel or run errands unless they need to. Certainly they can go to these establishments that I just talked about and other ones that are necessary,” he added about soon-to-be open nail salons and bowling alleys.