Rep. Jeff Van Drew, D-N.J., conducts a news conference introducing legislation that would help offset expenses incurred by new parents in the Capitol on Wednesday, December 4, 2019. | Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images. Rep. Jeff Van Drew plans to switch political parties, a move he’s likely using to boost his re-election prospects. Rep. Jeff Van Drew, a moderate Democrat who’s vocally opposed the impeachment of President Donald Trump, intends to switch parties next week, . Van Drew’s announcement is poised to take place as the , a development that’s seen as providing an opportune distraction for Trump. Van Drew’s decision also comes as he stares down a potentially competitive Democratic primary in 2020 — and a similarly tight g.

Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin speaking to President Donald Trump in 2018 during a roundtable on prison reform. | Mark Wilson/Getty Images. Before leaving office, Bevin pardoned a number of people incarcerated for violent crimes, a decision Democrats slammed and Mitch McConnell called “completely inappropriate.”Before handing over power to Gov. Andy Beshear (D) last week, former Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin ® used his final days in office to issue hundreds of pardons, including people convicted of sexual assault and murder. The decision has drawn criticism from both the left and the right, with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell calling the pardons “completely inappropriate” and Beshear calling the pardon of Dayton Jones, who was convicted of rap.

Former President Omar al-Bashir during his corruption trial in Khartoum, Sudan. | AFP/Getty Images. Al-Bashir was sentenced for corruption, but is also wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes. Omar al-Bashir, the deposed former president of Sudan, was sentenced to two years of incarceration at a state run-reform center by a Sudanese court Saturday. The verdict marked a the end of the first major test of the independence of the nation’s judiciary under its new government, and saw a key demand of protesters who helped bring al-Bashir down being met. Al-Bashir ruled Sudan for 30 years before being removed in April by mass protests triggered by austerity measures. Those protests quickly broadened into a pro-democracy movement t.

On January 19, 2019, protesters advocating for and against abortion access demonstrate at the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington D.C. | Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images. A federal appeals court ruled against the ban, which would have restricted abortion after 15 weeks. A federal appeals court blocked Mississippi’s 15 week abortion ban on Friday, simultaneously ensuring abortion access in the state after the 15th week of pregnancy, and paving the way for further legal challenges to current federal abortion regulations. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — the only abortion clinic left in Mississippi — sued the state in 2018 to block the law banning the procedure; a judge ruled in the clinic’s favor that year. Friday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appea.

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images. Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman on what this impeachment process means for American democracy. This week, the House Judiciary Committee announced and approved two articles of . Why two instead of 10? Why is this process moving so quickly? And why are Democrats prioritizing trade deals the same week as impeachment? Vox’s Jen Kirby answers the key questions on . Noah Feldman is a Harvard Law professor and one of the constitutional scholars who testified at the House Judiciary Committee’s hearing. He joins me to talk about what he saw, what he learned, and the Republican argument that truly scared him. Plus, on page five of the articles of impeachment lurks a clause many will miss, but I think it’s the

From left, Emma Thompson, Florence Pugh, Saorise Ronan, and Eliza Scanlen in Little Women. | Sony Pictures Entertainment. And the rest of the week’s best writing on books and related subjects. Welcome to Vox’s weekly book link roundup, a curated selection of the internet’s best writing on books and related subjects. Here’s the best the web has to offer for the week of December 8, 2019. At the New York Times, Leonard S. Marcus calls for the Caldecott Medal — America’s most prestigious award for picture books — to :. Portugal, Latvia and Brazil are among the countries currently experiencing a picture book moment. After a feverish decade of acquiring rights to the best books the West has to offer, China is poised to become its own picture book p.

Rep. Jerry Nadler, the Judiciary chair. | Shawn Thew (Pool)/Getty Images. Full House vote on impeachment coming soon; UK vote leaves Johnson in the clear and Corbyn out of a job. Vox Sentences is your daily digest for what’s happening in the world. Sign up for the , delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday, or view the for past editions. The committee has spoken. After two days of panel deliberation and infighting, the House Judiciary Committee voted to approve the drafted articles of impeachment against President Trump. []. Drafted by the committee earlier this week, the articles bring two charges against President Trump: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. []. The articles were approved by a margin of 23 to 17 along part.

Reed Hastings is one of many high-powered hosts of the Buttigieg fundraising event scheduled on Monday. | Ernesto S. Ruscio/Getty Images/Netflix. The families of Eric Schmidt, Reed Hastings, and Sergey Brin are hosting a fundraiser for Buttigieg on Monday. Representatives from Silicon Valley’s wealthiest families are raising money for in a show of Silicon Valley force not yet seen in the primary campaign so far, Recode has learned. A host list circulated to prospective donors for an event on Monday morning in Palo Alto, California, features individuals with family ties to some of the most prominent people in Big Tech. Netflix CEO and co-founder Reed Hastings is listed as a co-host of the event, as is Nicole Shanahan, the wife of Google co-fo.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) speaks at the Teamsters Vote 2020 Presidential Candidate Forum on December 7, 2019, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. | Win McNamee/Getty Images. Candidate Cenk Uygur has been criticized for offensive comments about women. Sen. Bernie Sanders drew criticism this week after endorsing Cenk Uygur, a California congressional candidate with a history of using racial slurs and making demeaning comments about women. Uygur is running for the seat left vacant by the resignation earlier this year of . On Thursday, Sanders called him “a voice that we desperately need in Congress,” . But others say Uygur has been using his platform for years to make offensive statements about women, Jews, Muslims, and other groups. In 2016, for example,

President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump arrive at the Supreme Court with Chief Justice John Roberts on July 22, 2019. | Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images. T he Supreme Court is about to tell us how willing it is to protect Donald Trump. The Supreme Court that it will hear Trump v. Mazars , a case involving whether House investigators may obtain Trump’s financial records — most likely including his tax forms — from Trump’s accounting firm. Mazars will be heard alongside two other cases, Trump v. Vance and Trump v. Deutche Bank , which also concern the scope of Trump’s immunity from investigation. Deutche Bank , like Mazars, concerns a congressional subpoena. Vance involves a Manhattan prosecutor’s effort to obtain Trump’s financial r.

Seyni Nafo (left), former chair of the African Group of Negotiators, said at the COP25 that having no agreement is better than having a bad agreement. | Umair Irfan/Vox. Negotiations over the Paris climate agreement are now in overtime. MADRID — A tense round of international negotiations over the future of global action on climate change was running into overtime on Friday night, and some negotiators say the current round of talks may not result in an agreement at all. And part of the holdup is coming from the United States. The United Nations meeting known as will likely run into the weekend as the future of the 2015 hangs in the balance. “We only have a few hours left to come to an agreement,” Andrés Landerretche, COP25 presidency coordin.

Olly Curtis/Future via Getty Images via Getty Images. A ban on "malicious insults" and a complicated FTC ruling mean drastic changes could be coming to YouTube. On Wednesday, to its community guidelines, announcing that it will now penalize videos that "maliciously insult" users based on identities like race, gender, or orientation. The new rules, effective immediately, prohibit "harassment that suggests violence" as well as "content that maliciously insults someone based on protected attributes."

//D. Jewitt (UCLA). The Hubble Space telescope recently captured the alien visitor, which is moving at around 100,000 mph. It came from beyond. This is a Hubble Space Telescope image of a comet that is passing through our solar system. It was born around a star that is not our own, then flung off into space by some unknown cataclysm. But it’s not here to stay. It’s moving at around , which is much too fast for even our mighty sun to capture it in its orbit. (For reference, Voyager 1, the spacecraft that’s has left our solar system, is traveling at 35,000 mph.) The comet, named 2I/Borisov, is only the second interstellar object recorded in our solar system. The first, a cigar-shaped rock (also probably a comet of sorts), named Oumuamua was di.

Megan Rapinoe celebrates after scoring a goal during the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup Final between the US and the Netherlands on July 07, 2019, in Lyon, France. | Maddie Meyer/FIFA via Getty Images. The US soccer star and important voice on political and social issues just made her presidential pick. , the star of the US women’s national soccer team and , has once again waded into American politics — this time to endorse a 2020 Democratic nominee for president. “I’m proud to endorse Elizabeth Warren today, for being bold, for being real, for listening to ALL of us, and for being prepared to navigate the unique challenges we face today as a country,” Rapinoe tweeted on Friday afternoon. It’s a message that could resonate with her 900,000+ Twi.

Vice Minister of Commerce and Deputy International Trade Representative Wang Shouwen speaks at a press conference in Beijing on December 13, 2019. | Noel Celis/AFP/Getty Images. The agreement means trade should be calmer — for now. After more than a year and a half of swapping punishing tariffs, the US and China have struck a preliminary trade deal that is set to deescalate the trade war between the world’s two largest economies. On Friday morning, both countries the signing of a “Phase One” agreement, in which the US has agreed to reduce existing tariffs on billions of dollars worth of Chinese goods and hold off on a new set of them that would have kicked in on Sunday. In exchange, China has committed to buying US goods, including agricultu.

Rudy Giuliani stands as President Donald J. Trump participates in a signing ceremony for H.R. 1327, an act to permanently authorize the September 11th victim compensation fund, in the Rose Garden at the White House on Monday, July 29, 2019 in Washington, DC.

A woman chooses a book at the Russian State Children’s Library, Moscow, 2019. | Valery Sharifulin/TASS/Getty Images. The most important books of the decade, according to Vox staff. The books that stay with you are weird. I (Vox book critic Constance Grady) have read countless books in my life, and some of them were great books and some of them were terrible, but do I remember, say, The Sun Also Rises in as much detail as I remember the third volume in the Baby-Sitters Club series, The Truth About Stacey , where the truth is that she has diabetes? I do not. The books that are most important to you personally are books that hit you at just the right moment, that manage to change your mind about something, that get you through a hard time, that.

House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler (D-NY) | Shawn Thew (Pool)/Getty Images. Both articles, on abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, will go to the full House for a vote next week. The House Judiciary Committee voted to approve two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump Friday — paving the way for votes in the full House of Representatives next week that could make Trump only the third president in history to be impeached. Both articles — the first charging Trump with abuse of power, and the second charging him with obstruction of Congress — were approved by the committee on party-line votes, with all 23 Democrats voting in favor and all 17 Republicans voting against ( because he was recovering from a heart pro.

Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the just-defeated Labour party, on December 11, 2019. | Dan Kitwood/Getty Images. Why Labour lost — and what it means for Britain. The British electorate voted Thursday in one of the most important elections in the country’s modern history. And the results, revealed on Friday, show that they voted overwhelmingly for Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson and for Brexit: and the worst showing for the opposition, the left-wing Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn, . This does not appear to be because Johnson was a particularly adept or well-liked political figure. His approval ratings were , according to pre-election data from YouGov. His central campaign promise, , divided the country in half. He has a reputation and

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn poses outside a polling station in London on December 12, 2019. | Peter Summers/Getty Images. He said he would not lead the party in a future election campaign. UK Labour Party leader has said he will step down early next year. His announcement came after the party’s by Boris Johnson and the Conservatives in the country’s elections. “I want to also make it clear that I will not lead the party in any future general election campaign,”. “I will discuss with our party to ensure there is a process now of reflection on this result and on the policies that the party will take going forward.”This election defeat, then, officially marks the close of Corbyn’s tenure as Labour leader. His rise in 2015 energized the activist.