Good morning, I’m Tim Walker with today’s essential stories.
Witnesses returning to detail Trump’s Ukraine quid pro quo
Adam Schiff, the House intelligence committee chairman who is seen as spearheading the impeachment inquiry, has announced that public hearings will begin next week, starting with testimony from three US diplomats who have already given evidence to Congress behind closed doors. The trio are expected to give their accounts of Rudy Giuliani’s shadow foreign policy on behalf of Donald Trump, whom they say sought dirt from Ukraine on his political rival Joe Biden in return for $400m in military aid.
Bill Taylor. One of the three diplomats, the acting ambassador to Ukraine, William Taylor, said in his closed-door deposition last month that he observed US officials negotiating the quid pro quo firsthand. His full testimony was released on Wednesday.
Greenland delay. When state department officials were trying to get Trump to release the aid, they were unable to organise a meeting with the president because his staff too busy pursuing his interest in buying Greenland, Taylor testified.
Steve Bannon to be surprise witness at Roger Stone trial
With the spotlight on impeachment proceedings, elsewhere in Washington Trump’s sometime adviser Roger Stone went on trial this week for lying to Congress about the Trump campaign’s efforts to obtain DNC emails hacked by Russia and published by WikiLeaks during the 2016 election. The prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky said in his opening statement on Wednesday that the jury would hear from witnesses including the former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, suggesting further headaches for the president.
Opening statement. “The evidence in this case will show that Roger Stone lied to the House intelligence committee because the truth looked bad,” Zelinsky said. “The truth looked bad for the Trump campaign, and the truth looked bad for Donald Trump.”
Child survivors of Mexico murders hid as boy walked for help
Six wounded children hid in the mountains of northern Mexico while their eldest surviving sibling, 13-year-old Devin Langford, walked 14 miles (23km) to seek help after nine of their close relatives had been gunned down in a cartel ambush on a remote road in Chihuahua state on Monday. The details of the attack of members of the LeBaron family of Mexican-American Mormons heap fresh pressure on Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to tackle the spiralling violence of organised crime across the country.
Women and children. Three women and their 14 children from the Langford, Miller and Johnson families were driving in three SUVs from a village in Sonora to meet relatives in neighbouring Chihuahua state when the attack occurred on Monday morning.
Downing Street ‘ignoring’ evidence of Russian election meddling
Boris Johnson’s 10 Downing Street has refused to allow publication of a report by a UK parliamentary intelligence committee on Russian interference in British politics before the December general election, a position described as one expert as “completely untenable”. The committee spent 18 months investigating Kremlin efforts to sow discord in British public life, including via social media – and particularly during the Brexit referendum.
Twitter spies. Two former Twitter employees have been charged in California with spying for Saudi Arabia after they reportedly accessed personal data from the Twitter accounts of critics of the Saudi regime.
Cheat sheet
Hundreds of miles of mangroves and coral reefs are threatened by a vast oil spill that has polluted the north-east coast of Brazil in recent weeks. The source of the spilled oil, thought to be from nearby Venezuelan oilfields, is still unidentified.
Elizabeth Warren has invited Bill Gates to meet and discuss her wealth tax plan, after the multibillionaire Microsoft founder expressed skepticism about the Democrat’s proposal of a 6% tax on wealth over 10 figures.
An undersea volcanic eruption in the South Pacific has sunk one island in the Tongan archipelago, only to replace it with another that is three times larger, according to a report by the Tonga Geological Service.
After 12 months of Greta Thunberg, Extinction Rebellion and other high-profile environmental protests, Collins Dictionary has named “climate strike” its 2019 word of the year.
Must-reads
Stacey Abrams and the fight for fair elections in America
The Guardian is launching the fight to vote, a year-long series on voter suppression and the efforts to end it. And at the forefront of those efforts is the former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, who tells Oliver Laughland: “I am not convinced at all that we will have free and fair elections unless we work to make it so.”
Who is the real ‘Dice Man’ behind the disturbing cult novel?
The Dice Man, the 1971 book by Luke Rhinehart, was a novel posing as a memoir by a man who had turned over his life choices to the random roll of a dice, and it seemed to offer readers a subversive set of rules for living. Emmanuel Carrère, a French former adherent, set out to find the man behind it, almost half a century later.
A former astrologer explains how it works
Felicity Carter’s customers used to marvel at her psychic abilities as she told their fortunes in an attic in Sydney, Australia, for A$50 an hour. But did she really have a mystical gift or had she simply learned to read people and exploit their superstition?
Five new ways to be single beyond ‘self-partnering’
The actor Emma Watson recently described her happy single existence as “self-partnering”, but that’s not the only way to be alone, writes Max Benwell. Why not try being unconsciously unpartnered or apposexual instead?
Opinion
Anti-vaxxers are back in the spotlight, and Lucky Tran says they’re spreading misinformation using a familiar propaganda tactic known as “firehosing”: keep telling the same obvious lies without shame, as frequently as possible.
Firehosing inundates us with so many wild opinions that it becomes exhausting to continually disprove them. In this scenario, reality is reduced to positioning and who can sell their position best.
Sport
Tottenham Hotspur took a big stride towards the knockout stages of the Champions League with a 4-0 win away at Red Star Belgrade, while Manchester City clung on with 10 men to draw 1-1 with Atalanta. Here’s a roundup of the rest of Wednesday night’s action.
Margaret Court, the Australian who holds the all-time record of 24 grand slam tennis singles titles, has called on Tennis Australia to celebrate the 50th anniversary of her 1970 grand slam by inviting her to the next Australian Open, after she was shunned by the organisation in 2017 for voicing opposition to same-sex marriage.
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