The chances that Donald Trump will appoint Newt Gingrich as his running mate for the 2016 US election just got a lot higher, after reports that Fox News has suddenly suspended its contract with the former Speaker of the House.
Mr Gingrich, who contested the party's nomination in 2012, is already on Mr Trump's vice president shortlist, alongside the governors Chris Christie and Mike Pence.
Mr Trump is set to announce his pick before the start of the Republican National Convention on 18 July, where VPs are traditionally confirmed.
If the rumours that have been fuelled by Mr Gingrich's Fox News suspension are true, then America faces one of the most eccentric and controversial GOP tickets in its 240-year history. Mr Trump has made a myriad of bizarre comments during his campaign, yet many of them pale in comparison to what Mr Gingrich has said in the past. Here are 12 of the most controversial from the man who could soon be a heartbeat away from America's nuclear codes:
1. On his first wife (according to a former aide): “She's not young enough or pretty enough to be the wife of the President. And besides, she has cancer.”
2. On his vision for the future: “By the end of my second term, we will have the first permanent base on the moon. And it will be American”
3. On the November 2015 Paris attacks: “Imagine a theatre with 10 or 15 citizens with concealed carry permits. We live in an age when evil men have to be killed by good people.”
4. On President Barack Obama: “What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]? That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.”
5. On women fighting on the front line: “Females have biological problems staying in a ditch for 30 days because they get infections, and they don't have upper body strength.”
6. On religious freedom: “There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia… [it] would be like putting a Nazi sign next to the Holocaust Museum.”
7. On corporate lobbying: “The idea that a congressman would be tainted by accepting money from private industry or private sources is essentially a socialist argument.”
8. On freedom: “A mere 40 years ago, beach volleyball was just beginning. No bureaucrat would have invented it, and that’s what freedom is all about.”
9. On Hurricane Katrina: “How can you have the mess we have in New Orleans, and not have had deep investigations of the federal government, the state government, the city government, and the failure of citizenship in the Ninth Ward, where 22,000 people were so uneducated and so unprepared, they literally couldn’t get out of the way of a hurricane.”
10. On child labour: “It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in, first of all, child [labour] laws, which are truly stupid. Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor, and pay local students to take care of the school.”
11. On national security: “Andrew Jackson had a pretty clear idea about America's enemies. Kill them.”
12. On himself: “I'm not a natural leader. I'm too intellectual; I'm too abstract; I think too much.”
