First Thing: Impeachment lawyers put their cards on the table

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Prosecutors from the House of Representatives yesterday submitted an 80-page memorandum outlining their impeachment case against Donald Trump before it begins in the Senate next week. The document detailed how Trump incited his supporters to attack the Capitol, and shared previously unknown details of the violence inside, revealing the attack had left “bullet marks in the walls, looted art, smeared faeces in hallways”.

The legal team said the then-president had created a “powder keg” and gone on to “strike the match”, and indicated they would share new footage and witness accounts, including testimony from police officers, during the case.

Meanwhile, lawyers for Trump issued just 14 pages outlining their case, arguing that Trump’s speech did not incite the violence and that the trial was unconstitutional because he has already left office. Trump’s team said that the phrase “if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country any more” had nothing to do with the Capitol, and was “clearly about the need to fight for election security in general”.

• Eric Trump criticised Scottish politicians over their debate about the funding of his father’s golf resorts in Scotland. The former president’s son said politicians were “advancing their personal agendas”, while the Trump Organization described the politician who called the debate a “national embarrassment”.

• Dolly Parton twice turned down the presidential medal of freedom from Trump, first because her husband was ill, and the second time because she didn’t want to travel due to coronavirus. Last year, Parton donated $1m towards the development of the Moderna coronavirus vaccine.

Biden unveiled a taskforce to reunite families separated at the border

President Joe Biden revealed plans to create a taskforce to reunite families who were separated at the US border by the Trump administration, condemning the policy as a “stain on the reputation” of the US. He also signed two other executive actions which called for a review of the changes Trump made to US immigration, and introduced programs to address the reasons why people were being driven north.

White House officials said they did not know how many families had been divided, because the policy had never had a method for tracking them. In December, a reunification committee said there were 628 children whose parents had not been located.

• Ice is facing new allegations of assault on asylum seekers, with a coalition of immigrants rights groups publishing testimonies from those they said were forced to the floor and had their fingers inked and pressed on to documents to approve their own deportations. Ice is continuing to deport migrants despite Biden’s orders, suggesting he still doesn’t have control of the agency.

• Two FBI agents were killed while serving a search warrant in a case involving violent crimes against children. Three other agents were injured during the incident yesterday morning in south Florida, and the suspect also died during a standoff with authorities.

A California prison transfer caused a huge coronavirus outbreak

A poorly executed transfer of nearly 200 people in California prisons triggered a public health disaster that led to dozens of deaths and endangered thousands of prisoners and staff, a report from the office of the state’s inspector general has found.

An outbreak of coronavirus in the California Institute for Men led officials to move those at high risk from the virus to prisons which were free of the virus. The two prisons they were taken to had just one Covid case between them before the transfer, but within a month of the inmates arriving, they had more than 1,300.

• Russia’s Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine has 91.6% efficacy against symptomatic coronavirus, trial data from more than 20,000 participants suggests. However, there are questions about diversity, since most trial participants were white men. The vaccine has been controversial, being rolled out by Russia before trials had ended.

• The lawmaker who faced an anti-vax attack said the movement is getting increasingly violent, with anti-vaccine activists disrupting one of the US’s largest vaccination sites on Saturday. In this interview, Dr Richard Pan, a senator who was the target of death threats and assault over his pro-vaccine stance, warns the movement is growing, and what law enforcement should do about it.

In other news …

• Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, will step back as the firm’s CEO, the company announced yesterday. The world’s richest man will remain the executive chair, but will hand the reigns to Andy Jassy.

• Alexei Navalny has been sentenced to two years and eight months in a prison colony, as Putin attempts to crack down on Russia’s leading opposition figure. The decision triggered protests in Moscow in which more than 1,000 people were arrested. Rafael Behr argues that despite his imprisonment, Nalvany will continue to spook the Russian state.

• The international criminal court may charge a child soldier with war crimes and crimes against humanity for the first time. But lawyers for Dominic Ongwen, now 41, from Uganda, say he was abducted by the cult when he was just 10, so shouldn’t be punished for the acts committed under duress.

• Hospital staff across Myanmar are on strike today in protest against the military coup in which Aung San Suu Kyi was forcibly removed from power and detained earlier this week.

View from the right: Democrats’ impeachment case should focus on Trump’s failure to stop the Capitol siege, rather than his incitement of it

The House of Representatives’ claims that Trump is responsible for inciting the attack on the Capitol are legally problematic and don’t account for the fact that violence had begun before his speech, argues Andrew C. McCarthy in the National Review. A better case would have been based on Trump’s decision not to intervene to stop the siege, where he “failed as commander in chief to take any actions to repel the attack on the seat of the United States government”, he argues.

Don’t miss this: what staying with an Arctic hunter showed me about the climate crisis

Writer Nancy Campbell recalls her time spent in Greenland, where the family she stayed with’s way of life is threatened by the climate crisis. The family are frugal with their scant resources, source food sustainably on the sea ice and have lost friends to drowning in the icy water as the icebergs melt. This piece provides both fascinating escapism and a harsh dose of reality.

Last thing: the language of (the end of) love

A partner’s language can subtly change months before a breakup, according to a new report. Three US psychologists at the University of Texas analyzed more than a million posts from 6,800 Reddit users and found that people who are about to break up use more personal and informal language, including using “I” and “we” more frequently. They also use words like “would”, “should”, “because” and “result” more often because they are trying to work out things they don’t understand.

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