Can Iowa stop Donald Trump?

THE World Health Organization is alarmed by how the Zika virus is "spreading explosively" across the Americas and is weighing whether to declare the situation a global public-health emergency. US federal agents sealed off an Oregon wildlife refuge occupied by armed protesters after one of the occupiers was killed in a shootout with the authorities. And the Federal Reserve, after predicting last year rising inflation, now acknowledged slower economic growth and left interest rates unchanged last week.

These are the kind of reports that under normal conditions would have dominated American television news and ignited public debate. But these are not normal times. So don't blame Americans, who receive their news from cable television and the Internet, for being under the impression that the most earth-shaking event last week was the war between Donald Trump and Fox News Network (FNN), not the one between the Sunnis and the Shiites.

Yes. As voters in the small state of Iowa were participating on Monday in the first act of the 2016 presidential race - the Republican and the Democratic caucuses - it has been Trump All the Time, the latest being the tit-for-tat feud between the Donald and FNN which on Thursday hosted the final Republican presidential debate before Monday's caucuses in Des Moines, Iowa.