The Trump administration has proposed spending $18bn over 10 years to significantly extend the border wall with Mexico, providing one of its most detailed blueprints of how the president hopes to carry out a signature campaign pledge.

Russian election influence, the sexual harassment scandal, mass shootings and the opioid epidemic have helped elevate "complicit" as Dictionary.com's word of the year.

New Zealander Hori Morse served as an Auxiliary in Tralee, Co Kerry, during the War of Independence, when the town was international news. In 1921, he began an affair with a married woman and would himself become a front-page story, says Ryle Dwyer

US senator John McCain had a blunt message for demonstrators chanting for the arrest of Henry Kissinger at a Senate Armed Forces Committee hearing: “Get out of here, you low-life scum.”

US and Russian diplomats met yesterday to try to accelerate frustratingly slow peace efforts in Syria, where the signs point only to a worsening conflict.