Heather Nauert’s promotion to America’s UN ambassador will solidify one of the more notable trends in Donald Trump’s presidency – the remarkable influence of Fox News. 

Ms Nauert, who takes up the role from after being top spinner at the US State Department, spent more than a decade at the Right-leaning cable news channel before hopping into government two years ago. 

Her lack of top-level diplomatic experience has left critics seething, questioning whether she really has the credentials to replace Nikki Haley at the UN top table in New York, where she will be expected to face down America’s foes and lobby to pass crucial resolutions. 

But the big brand on her CV – Fox News – is one that Mr Trump has proved especially drawn to since he entered the Oval Office, not least in his top hires. 

Earlier this year, John Bolton, the mustachioed foreign policy hawk and a former US ambassador to the UN himself, was picked for the position of White House national security adviser despite his ties to former president George W Bush, usually a negative point for Mr Trump. 

His repeated appearances on Fox News, banging the drum for a hard line on Iran and North Korea, were said to have caught Mr Trump’s eye – offering a marked contrast to the formal military style of HR McMaster, the man who held the role at the time. 

(Mr Trump would get bored during briefings from Mr McMaster and once mocked his dress sense, according to Bob Woodward’s book Fear, which quotes the president saying his cheap suits made him look “like a beer salesman”.)

Two months later Mr Trump appointed another Fox name to his inner circle –  Bill Shine, a former executive at the broadcaster with two decades of experience there.  

Mr Shine was given the title of White House director of communications and is known to have played a hand in the staging of many of Mr Trump’s set-piece interviews since joining. 

It is not just appointments where the influence of Fox News can be seen. Mr Trump enjoys a close relationship with many of the channel’s top stars. 

Sean Hannity, whose evening show is often the highest rating on cable news, is an arch supporter of the president and enjoys access few other media figures can rival. 

Mr Hannity and Mr Trump frequently share late-night phone calls, usually after his 9pm programme has aired, where they chat through the latest developments making the headlines, according to a deep dive into their relationship published by New York Magazine. 

It is Mr Hannity who often gets the Trump interviews. The president in turn is known to urge his 56 million-plus followers on Twitter to tune into his ally’s show. 

And in the final days of the November midterm elections campaign Mr Hannity even appeared on stage at one of the president’s rallies, prompting a rare public rebuke from his employers. 

In fact it is Fox – whose editorial line chimes with Mr Trump, not least on demands for a harder stance on immigration and law enforcement – that almost always gets the interviews. 

CBS’s White House correspondent keeps a tally of the numbers. Last month, he noted that Mr Trump had given 40 interviews to Fox as president. That compared with four for CBS, three for ABC and zero for CNN. 

But the channel’s influence spreads wider than that. Mr Trump, who records cable news shows and watches them back via his TiVo box, is an avid consumer of the channel’s output. 

One of his favourite programmes is Fox & Friends, the breakfast show. Another is Lou Dobbs Tonight, a nightly programme on Fox Business. 

Mr Trump will tweet quotes from these shows wholesale, using the quotation marks to hammer home points he appears to endorse without directly putting them in his own name. 

Often, the remarks of Fox News talking heads appear to directly lead to the president taking some form of action. 

Back in January, Congress was due to sign-off a bill renewing surveillance powers for intelligence agencies. Bipartisan support had been secured, with the White House backing the bill. 

Then, on the day of the vote, Mr Trump unexpectedly tweeted that the act “may have been used, with the help of the discredited and phony dossier, to so badly surveil and abuse the Trump Campaign”. 

It caught the Republicans on Capitol Hill totally off guard. Why was the US president suddenly lashing out against a piece of legislation he was meant to be backing? 

Soon an explanation was found. Forty-seven minutes earlier a talking head had said on Fox & Friends: “I don’t understand why Donald Trump is in favor of this. His woes began with unlawful foreign surveillance and unconstitutional domestic surveillance of him…”

It took a phone call from Paul Ryan, the Republican leader in the House of Representatives, which reportedly lasted 30 minutes for the president to eventually relent. 

He tweeted somewhat sheepishly two hours later: “With that being said, I have personally directed the fix to the unmasking process since taking office and today’s vote is about foreign surveillance of foreign bad guys on foreign land. We need it! Get smart!”

Another example came in March during negotiations for government spending – something decided by Congress but ultimately approved by the White House. 

After weeks of wrangling, a $1.3 trillion spending bill was passed by Congress (both parts of which were controlled by Republicans at the time). Mr Trump was expected to sign it into law. 

But the lack of funding for his Mexico border wall – just $1.9 billion had been set aside, well short of the $25 billion being sought – left Fox News hosts fuming. 

Laura Ingraham, who has her own show on the channel, called it a “legislative scam”. Ann Coulter, another leading conservative name and regular Fox guest, warned the president he would be impeached if he followed through. 

In the face of the conservative onslaught, Mr Trump announced he was considering vetoing the legislation. He eventually relented, but his sensitivity to the criticism was plain to see.

So why the closeness with Fox News? The president’s admiration for its Australian owner Rupert Murdoch is one possible explanation. Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury details how Mr Trump sees him as one of the last great media titans and was hurt by his lack of interest before he ran for the White House. 

Another is the overlap in agenda. Many of the touchstones of Mr Trump’s presidency are championed by the news channel. His presidency gets a sympathetic hearing. 

A third is its audience. Fox viewers are Trump voters. The channel contributed to his unprecedented rise from reality TV star and business mogul to president. 

To keep his supporters on side, and to remain in tune the conservative movement he attached himself to with such success, Mr Trump turns to Fox News. 

When Ms Nauert takes her seat at the top UN table, America’s voice will be that of a Fox News correspondent with just two years’ diplomatic experience – and the mindmeld will become that bit more pronounced. 

Moscow has named a square in honour of Kim Philby, one of Britain’s worst traitors, in a seemingly provocative response to condemnation of the Kremlin over the nerve agent attack in Salisbury.

Sergei Sobyanin, the Moscow mayor and one of Vladimir Putin’s closest allies, personally ordered that an obscure intersection in the south west of the city be renamed ‘Kim Philby Square’. 

The decree was published on Moscow city’s local government website on Tuesday.

Local residents expressed bewilderment that the junction was being renamed after Philby when he never lived in the neighbourhood. A Moscow city hall spokesman declined to comment on why the road junction was being renamed after Philby and the timing of it.

But eyebrows will be raised that Moscow is doing so just weeks after the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence unit, was identified as being behind the attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in March. Colonel Skripal, 67, was poisoned with novichok nerve agent but survived the attack along with his daughter Yulia, 33.

In the wake of the attack, Theresa May pledged to dismantle the GRU while the two men who carried it out were unmasked as senior GRU agents who had been awarded Russia’s highest honour by Mr Putin.

Col Skripal was a senior officer in the GRU who had been caught selling secrets to MI6 and sent to the UK in a spy swap. Philby is reckoned to have been the most successful member of the Cambridge spy ring that betrayed MI6 and provided secret information to the Soviet Union over three decades.

Philby, along with other members of the ring, were recruited at Cambridge University in the 1930s. He died in Moscow in 1988 aged 76, having been awarded the Order of Lenin in 1965.

After his defection Philby lived in central Moscow, far from the windswept intersection in a relatively new part of the city that is almost exclusively made up of residential towers.

The square is however close to the sprawling campus of the SVR, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service.

The agency has maintained Philby’s legacy, with a page on its website dedicated to him and the intelligence he provided during the Second World war.

Sergei Naryshkin, the SVR director, spoke at an event last year to mark the unveiling of a portrait of Philby at a gallery in Moscow.

Intelligence veterans suggested at that event that a street should be named after the defector because he enjoyed walking around the city.

But several residents of Yasenevo district said on a neighbourhood Facebook group they had no idea who Philby was and wondered if Moscow had run out of names of Russian writers to use.

“They should have named the ramp leading to their campus after him instead,” wrote user Katerina Reatsea, referring to the intelligence agency.

The irony of naming the junction after Philby will not be lost on Mr Putin’s critics. The Russian president had previously called Col Skripal a “scumbag” for betraying his homeland while the kremlin does not seem to take the same view of Philby.

While Col Skripal and his daughter survived the nerve agent attack, a British woman Dawn Sturgess was killed after inadvertently spraying herself with novichok contained in a perfume bottle discarded by the GRU hit squad.

Drug baron Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman ordered hits on his own family and his weapons of choice were a diamond-encrusted pistol and a gold-plated AK-47, a US court has heard.

Guzman, considered the world’s largest drug trafficker since the death of Colombia’s Pablo Escobar, is on trial in New York under draconian security arrangements after twice escaping from prison in Mexico.

Prosecutors branded Guzman a ruthless criminal boss who murdered in cold blood, with Assistant US Attorney Adam Fels claiming Guzman used a small private army consisting of hundreds of men “armed with assault rifles” to take out his rivals.

“He ordered his hit men to locate, kidnap, torture, interrogate, shoot and kill those rivals,” Mr Fels told the court. “Not even Guzman’s own family members were immune.”

Guzman’s defence team have sought to paint him as the "scapegoat" of a cartel that bribed Mexican presidents.

The substantive phase of the case finally began with opening statements in what is expected to be one of the most expensive trials in US history after two jurors were dismissed at the last minute.

One woman was struck  after complaining that the trial was causing her health problems, along with a man who claimed financial hardship, forcing lawyers and the judge to find two replacements before the full panel was sworn in.

Guzman faces 11 trafficking, firearms and money laundering charges that will likely see him incarcerated for the rest of his life in a maximum security US prison if he is convicted at the end of the more than four-month trial.

He is accused of leading the Sinaloa cartel, turning it into the world’s largest criminal group and of smuggling enough cocaine "for 328 million lines" – equivalent to more than one per every person in the United States.

But in opening statements, the defense alleged that Guzman’s co-defendant who remains at large, Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada, was the real culprit.

"The truth is he (Guzman) controlled nothing, Mayo Zambada did," Jeffrey Lichtman told the US federal court in Brooklyn.

Zambada, he alleged, bribed everybody, "including the very top, the current president of Mexico and the former," he added in reference to Mexico’s outgoing President Enrique Pena Nieto and his predecessor, Felipe Calderon.

Both Mr Calderon and Mr Pena Nieto swiftly denied taking any bribes from the Sinaloa cartel, the former calling the allegation "absolutely false and reckless" and the latter saying it was "completely false and defamatory."

Guzman, who has been held in solitary confinement for nearly two years, is a "scapegoat," Mr Lichtman added. "Why does the Mexican government need a scapegoat? Because they’re making too much money being bribed by the leaders of drug cartels."

Gold-plated AK-47

Prosecutors say that from 1989 to 2014, the Sinaloa cartel smuggled 340,892 pounds (154,626 kilograms) of cocaine into the United States, as well as heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana, raking in $14 billion (£10.7 billion).

"Money, drugs, murder; a vast global narcotics trafficking organization. That is what this trial is about and that is what the evidence in this case will prove," Mr Fels told the court.

Guzman, he alleged in his opening statements, had his "own private army" of hundreds of armed men, as well as his own diamond-encrusted pistol branded with his initials and a gold-plated AK-47.

US prosecutors have spent years accumulating more than 300,000 pages and at least 117,000 recordings in evidence against Guzman. They claim that Guzman ordered or committed at least 33 murders.

"You’ll see how Guzman pulls the trigger," Mr Fels told jurors. "He was indeed the boss of his organisation."

‘Mythical figure’

Prosecutors promised to lay out "this global narco empire in his own words," from text messages and letters, and from witnesses detailing how he would receive $10 million (£7.6 million) from a single shipment of cocaine.

More than a dozen of those who are expected to testify are in witness protection programmes or already in jail.

On Wednesday an admitted former member of the cartel identified Guzman as one of the organisation’s leaders in court, while prosecutors gave the jury a video tour of a tunnel between Mexico and an Arizona warehouse.

The defence sought to undercut the government’s cooperating witnesses, saying that they were murderers who would "make your skin crawl."

Mr Lichtman suggested "El Chapo is the biggest prize this prosecution has ever dreamed of", adding, "he’s a mythical figure."

Guzman twice escaped from prison in Mexico, once hidden in a laundry cart and the second time slipping down a tunnel that reached his prison shower.

In New York, he has been held in solitary confinement since January 2017. His beauty queen wife, Emma Coronel, with whom he has been banned from having any direct contact or communication, attended court.

Exiting the building in the evening, she stopped to take a couple of selfies.

Florida is once again at the centre of election controversy, but this year there are no hanging chads or butterfly ballots, like in 2000. And no angry mobs in suits – at least not yet.

The deeply purple state will learn on Saturday whether recounts will be held in the bitter, tight U.S. Senate race between Republican Gov. Rick Scott and incumbent Democrat Bill Nelson; and in the governor’s race between former Republican U.S. Rep. Ron DeSantis and the Democratic mayor of Tallahassee, Andrew Gillum.

The state’s recount procedures have been revised since Florida held the country hostage for a month 18 years ago, when George W. Bush edged Al Gore for the presidency. Among other things, the infamous punch-card ballots are no longer.

Yet, Mr Scott and President Donald Trump on Friday alleged fraud without evidence, even as the often-laborious process of reviewing ballots in a close race continued ahead of the Saturday noon deadline. Both Mr Scott and Mr Nelson sought to get the courts to intervene.

Mr Scott said "unethical liberals" were trying to steal the election in Democratic strongholds of Broward and Palm Beach counties. He suggested something was awry because vote-counters were taking longer there than in other jurisdictions, and his thin lead has kept narrowing since election night. Late on Friday, he led by 0.18 percentage points, low enough to require a recount.

A recount is mandatory if the winning candidate’s margin is less than 0.5 percentage points when the first unofficial count is verified on Saturday by Florida’s secretary of state. If the margin is less than 0.25 percent, the recount must be done by hand.

In Washington, Mr Trump took Mr Scott’s side, telling reporters that the federal government could get involved and adding: "All of the sudden, they are finding votes out of nowhere."

"What’s going on in Florida is a disgrace," he said.

Mr Scott asked the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to investigate the counties’ election departments. However, a spokeswoman for the agency said there were no credible allegations of fraud; therefore, no active investigation.

The governor, meanwhile, filed lawsuits in both counties seeking more information on how their ballots were being tallied. Mr Nelson filed his own federal lawsuit on Friday, seeking to postpone the Saturday deadline to submit unofficial election results.

A judge on Friday sided with Mr Scott and ordered Broward County’s election supervisor to release the voter information sought by the governor.

The ruling came as the Broward Canvassing Board met to review ballots that had been initially deemed ineligible. Lawyers from the campaigns, journalists and citizens crowded into a room to observe.

The county has not answered questions about its process and how many votes it has left to count.

Republican U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio suggested that Brenda Snipes, the Broward supervisor of elections, should be removed from office once the dust settles on the race. Mr Rubio said Ms Snipes’ failure to count all ballots in a more timely manner violates state law.

"She’s certainly a candidate for removal. … This is not one bad cycle, this is a pattern," Mr Rubio said in a conference call with reporters.

Mr Nelson issued barbs of his own.

"No one should stand in the way of the people of our state exercising their right to vote and to have their voice heard," the senator said in a statement. "Clearly, Rick Scott is trying to stop all the votes from being counted and he’s impeding the democratic process."

In the undecided race for governor, DeSantis was leading by 0.43 percentage points late Friday. That margin, if it holds, would require a recount, but DeSantis has mostly stayed out of the fray, saying he was working on plans for taking office in January.

Gillum conceded on election night, but as the vote margin began to narrow, he said he wanted to see every vote counted, strongly indicating he would not stand in the way of a recount.

A third statewide race that could go to a recount – the agriculture commissioner race between Democrat Nikki Fried and Republican Matt Caldwell – is the tightest of all, with Fried holding a 3,120-vote lead – a margin of 0.039 percent.

In 2000, Broward and Palm Beach each played central roles in the Bush-Gore race.

At the time, both counties used punch card ballots – voters poked out chads, leaving tiny holes in their ballots representing their candidates. Some didn’t press hard enough, leaving hanging or dimpled chads that had to be examined by hand, a long and tiresome process.

Palm Beach also was home to the infamous "butterfly ballot" that many Democrats believe cost Gore the election. An election official’s attempt to make the candidate’s names bigger and easier to read for senior citizens resulted in them being listed in two columns instead of one. Analysts later said the new redesign may have confused voters and probably cost Gore votes.

As for the angry mobs in suits: In late November 2000, Republican operatives in suits stormed the Miami-Dade canvassing board’s meeting, causing the members to permanently stop their recount, even after police officers restored order. The melee became known as "The Brooks Brothers Riot."

A convicted murderer has confessed to 90 murders spanning four decades, making him one of America’s most prolific serial killers.

Samuel Little, 78, is already serving a life sentence after being convicted of killing three women in 2014 but is now being investigated in connection to dozens more unsolved cases.

In a report released this week, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said Little was able to evade detection by preying mainly on drug addicts and prostitutes in a murder spree that stretched from coast to coast.

A former boxer, Little would stun his victims with a powerful blow before strangling them, meaning many of the deaths were attributed to drug over doses or natural causes, the agency said.

A large number of the murders were also committed in the 1970s and early 1980s, before DNA profiling was common practice. 

The FBI is now working to match his confessions to the deaths of 34 women from 1970 to 2005. Little, also known as Samuel McDowell, was arrested at a homeless shelter in Kentucky in 2012 and taken to California where he was wanted on a drugs charge. 

Once there, DNA evidence linked him to three murders in Los Angeles between 1987 and 1989. All three women were beaten and strangled. 

Little was convicted and sentenced to life in prison in 2014 but transferred to a Texas prison in connection with an investigation into another murder.

Bobby Bland, a district attorney in the state, said Little eventually confessed to the 1994 murder of Denise Christie Brothers in Odessa, Texas.

Shortly afterwards, a Texas ranger was able to gain Little’s trust and the killer began confessing to dozens of other murders committed between 1970 and 2005. 

A total of 90 murders in all, of which law enforcement has so far verified 34 killings.

"Little will be confirmed as one of, if not the most, prolific serial killers in US history," Mr Bland said.

The deadliest known US serial killer is believed to be Gary Ridgway, the so-called "Green River Killer" convicted of 49 murders who is serving a life sentence in Washington state.

According to the FBI, Little "remembers his victims and the killings in great detail" but is "less reliable, however, when it comes to remembering dates."

“Talking with him, you can hear he actually gets excited about describing his homicides and describing how he strangled his victims,” Bernie Nelson, a police detective, told the Washington Post. 

“He looked you right in your eye and said he couldn’t help himself. He’s a monster.”

The FBI said Little is in poor health and is likely to spend the remainder of his days in prison in Texas.  

 An Australian court on Thursday overturned the conviction of a former archbishop who had been the world’s most senior Catholic cleric held guilty of concealing child sex abuse, saying prosecutors failed to prove their case beyond reasonable doubt.

Judge Roy Ellis ruled in favour of an appeal by Philip Wilson, the former archbishop of Adelaide and a former president of the Catholic Church’s top body in Australia, against his conviction in May, court documents show.

"The appeal is upheld," read a summary of the decision emailed to Reuters by a court spokeswoman. "The conviction and the orders of the local court are quashed."

Ellis delivered the decision at Newcastle District Court in New South Wales, freeing Mr Wilson, 68, from detention for a year at his sister’s home, as an alternative to prison, after his conviction for failing to disclose to police abuse by a priest.

The judge held that prosecutors failed to prove beyond reasonable doubt that Mr Wilson had been told of the accusations, and that if he had been told, that he was sufficiently convinced of guilt, but failed to act.

At trial, Mr Wilson had said he could not remember the accusations being raised with him in 1976.

"I’m not up for talking," Peter Creighton, an altarboy at the time of the alleged abuse, who said he had raised the issue with Wilson, told reporters outside the court, as he held back tears.

The Adelaide archdiocese said it welcomed the conclusion of a process that had been long and painful for all concerned.

"We now need to consider the ramifications of this outcome," its administrator delegate, Father Philip Marshall, said in a statement that gave no further details, but added the survivors of child sexual abuse "are in our thoughts and prayers".

Mr Wilson had been accused of covering up the abuse, by Father James Fletcher, after being told about it in 1976 by two victims, one of them an altar boy who allegedly told him in the confessional.

Lawyers for Mr Wilson had maintained he did not know Fletcher had abused a boy. Fletcher was found guilty in 2004 of nine counts of child sexual abuse and died in jail in 2006, following a stroke.

A British radio host on one of Lebanon’s most popular morning shows has been found murdered in his home, police say.

Gavin Ford, who was a long-time host on Radio One, was discovered in the bedroom of his flat in the town of Beit Mery, several miles east of the Lebanese capital Beirut on Tuesday.

Local An Nahar news website channel reported preliminary findings suggested that Mr Ford, 53, had been strangled and his hands tied back his back. Injuries to his face suggested he was also struck.

“His death was the result of a murder,” a source from the Internal Security Forces (ISF) told the Telegraph, without elaborating.

Radio One co-host Alain Bou Jaoude said that Mr Ford, who had joined the radio station in 1996, did not show up for work on Monday.

He said  the station owner went up to the house, where there was no answer. He alerted ISF, who found him dead.

Police sources said Mr Ford was seen on CCTV on a side road with a small group of men next to his car on Sunday evening. His car has since been reported missing.

A picture of the crime scene leaked to media appeared to show Mr Ford’s handcuffed body laying face down on the floor of the bedroom, which is stained with blood.

Tributes poured in on social media for Mr Ford, who had been one of Lebanon’s most loved radio hosts for years.

“Mornings will never be the same without you You always made my day with your humor and jokes and moans… You will be dearly missed,” wrote one listener, Anthony Merchak.

“Who can hurt such a beautiful soul? RIP,” wrote another.

A statement posted on Radio One’s Facebook page confirmed the news, saying: "We are heartbroken to announce the passing of our dear friend and colleague Gavin Ford. The management and team express our deepest sympathies to his family, friends and colleagues. May his soul rest in peace."

Britain’s ambassador to Lebanon, Chris Rampling, said he was "shocked and deeply saddened by the death of Mr Ford, one of Lebanon’s most popular morning breakfast hosts".

"The thoughts of all at the embassy are with his family, friends and colleagues at this terribly difficult time," he tweeted, also posting a photograph of the talk show host.

A British embassy worker was killed in Beirut in December last year. A taxi driver is due to stand trial for her murder.