First Thing: Pelosi presses on with impeachment

Good morning. If Donald Trump is not removed from office by Mike Pence and the cabinet, the House is prepared to launch impeachment proceedings. This is the message that the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, delivered in a letter to colleagues on Sunday night, describing Trump as an urgent threat to democracy. House Democrats will attempt to pass a resolution asking Pence to evoke the 25th amendment today, which allows the vice-president and cabinet to remove a president deemed unfit to do their job. This timeline gives an idea of how and when the proceedings could play out.

The ultimatum follows Trump’s incitement of the mob that attacked the Capitol last week, an incident that Arnold Schwarzenegger compared yesterday to Kristallnacht, the night in November 1938 when Nazi thugs attacked German Jews and their property. The former California governor, who grew up in Austria in the wake of the second world war and whose father was in the Nazi party, said he had “seen first-hand how things can spin out of control”. Two people were arrested yesterday after they were seen carrying plastic zip-tie handcuffs during the Capitol riot, indicating they may have been planning to kidnap lawmakers.

Play Video

2:33

Schwarzenegger compares Capitol attack to Kristallnacht, brandishes sword – video

Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley are facing calls to resign over their support for Trump despite his role in the Capitol attack. One Republican Senate colleague said they were “complicit in the big lie” and warned that their “reputations have been affected”. Meanwhile, Trump’s support base in the midwest appear to be divided over the incident, with some distancing themselves from the president and others defending him. Tom McCarthy asks what the future of the Republican party will look like in the wake of the attack.

• Twitter stopped the phrase ‘hang Mike Pence’ from trending on Saturday. The phrase was trending on the site after Trump’s account was banned, and was frequently chanted during the storming of the Capitol by the president’s supporters. Many Trump supporters have turned against Pence, wrongly believing that the vice-president had the authority to overturn the election result.

• A major golf championship has been moved from one of Trump’s courses following the Capitol riots. The PGA of America announced it had moved its 2022 contest from the president’s Bedminster course, an arrangement that had been put in place before Trump ran for president.

How will Joe Biden answer the nuclear question?

When Joe Biden takes over as president on 20 January, there will be just 16 days before the New Start treaty with Russia expires – the last binding restriction on the two superpowers’ nuclear arsenals. With pressure also mounting to save the Iran nuclear deal, which has deteriorated since Trump withdrew from it in 2018, Biden will face some tough questions over the future of US nuclear capabilities in his first defence budget request. Julian Borger analyses the nuclear situation Biden inherits, and what he may do with it.

• Three people have been killed in shootings in Chicago by a man who posted nonsensical and expletive-ridden videos shortly before the attack. The motive for the incident, which also left four wounded, is unknown and victims appear to have been chosen at random.

A high proportion of US frontline workers are refusing to have the coronavirus vaccine

Despite clinical trials demonstrating the safety of the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines, up to 40% of frontline workers in LA, 60% of care home workers in Ohio and 55% of New York firefighters surveyed would refuse or have refused to take it . While many insist they are not anti-vaxxers and have taken other vaccines, experts say the figures could mean that “after all this sacrifice, we could still be seeing outbreaks for years”.

France has a remarkably high proportion of vaccine skeptics, and polls suggest 60% of the population do not want to get the coronavirus vaccine. The government has pushed back, making it compulsory for every child to take 11 vaccines to attend school, but coronavirus vaccination rates are far lower in France than elsewhere in Europe. Kim Willsher explores the reasons why, from past medical scandals to a lack of confidence in scientists.

• China has agreed to let the WHO investigate the origins of coronavirus after apparently blocking their arrival earlier this month. The WHO has been attempting to send a team of experts for months to determine how the virus transitioned from animals to humans, and now China has assured the organisation that its team can arrive in the country on 14 January.

Thank you for helping us beat our goal!

We want to say a big thank you to the tens of thousands of readers who contributed to our year-end fundraising campaign. Thanks to them, we managed to beat our $1.25m goal, raising more than $1.5m to fund our journalism, which will remain free and open to all. If you didn’t contribute yet, it’s not too late to support the Guardian in 2021.

In other news …

Play Video

0:56

Divers search for black boxes in debris of Sriwijaya Air crash – video

• Indonesian divers are trying to recover the black box of the plane that crashed this weekend. The flight, carrying 62 people, plunged into the sea minutes after taking off from Jakarta’s main airport. Authorities have found the remains of passengers, crew, and their belongings.

• Vogue magazine has been criticised for “whitewashing” Kamala Harris after it tweeted photographs of the vice-president-elect as its cover star. The magazine denied it had lightened Harris’s skin.

• Sex and the City is coming back, HBO Max has announced. Three of the four stars, excluding Kim Cattrall, will be returning for the rebooted series, which follows the characters as they navigate “life and friendship” in their 50s.

Don’t miss this: Anywhere but Washington

The Guardian’s Anywhere but Washington series explored overlooked people and places, asking what they told us about modern-day America. The team behind the series share how they covered “a bitterly divided country during the most important election in a generation”. Tom Silverstone writes:

Four years ago I filmed our 2016 version of the series and watched as Trump successfully motivated his base with cultural and racial narratives to create anger and division. This time, what Oliver and I encountered was even more extreme.

View from the right: what the GOP thinks about impeaching Trump

“The great majority” of Republicans don’t believe that Trump committed an impeachable offence, while some others think it is unrealistic or unnecessary to impeach him this close to Biden’s inauguration, writes Byron York, the chief political correspondent of the Washington Examiner. However, “members are stunned and distressed by the behavior of their own supporters”, York warns, as he speaks to senior Republicans to offer insight into the party’s response to the Capitol attack.

Last thing: Seoul’s guidance for pregnant women sparks outrage

The Seoul city government has come under fire for its guidance for pregnant women, which includes ensuring their husbands have clean clothes and food prepared for when they give birth. It also told them to hang up their pre-pregnancy clothes to give them inspiration to “keep your weight under control” and “buy a hairband so that you don’t look dishevelled after having the baby”.

Sign up

Sign up for the US morning briefing

First Thing is delivered to thousands of inboxes every weekday. If you’re not already signed up, subscribe now.