Wednesday’s top story: McConnell says Republicans still don’t have votes to block impeachment witnesses. Plus, fighting back against Brazil’s far-right

Good morning, I’m Tim Walker with today’s essential stories.

Bolton testimony could devastate Trump’s fragile defence

The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, has reportedly told his Republican caucus that they do not yet have enough votes to block testimony from witnesses, including John Bolton, at Donald Trump’s impeachment trial. The president’s legal team wrapped up their opening arguments on Tuesday, but his defence could unwind should the former national security adviser repeat at trial the claim reportedly made in his book: that Trump told him he was withholding aid to Ukraine for domestic political purposes.

Pompeo rant. Trump on Tuesday praised his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, for his tirade against the NPR reporter who had challenged him on Ukraine during an interview. “You did a good job on her,” the president said.

Trump unveils Middle East plan with no Palestinian support

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Trump launches his peace plan with Israeli prime minster Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House on Tuesday. Photograph: REX/Shutterstock

Trump has at last revealed his administration’s vision for peace in the Middle East, a 181-page document that delivers many of Israel’s historic demands without any support from the Palestinians, to whom it offers a limited state with borders significantly diminished from those offered in the 1993 Oslo peace agreement. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was in Washington to see the plan unveiled, and described Trump as “the greatest friend that Israel has ever had in the White House”.

Palestinian response. The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, called the deal a “conspiracy” that “will not pass”. But the cause of Palestine no longer stirs deep passions across the Arab world, as Martin Chulov reports.

Netanyahu indicted. As he celebrated with Trump in DC on Tuesday, Netanyahu was being formally indicted on corruption charges by a court in Israel. He denies any wrongdoing.

US airlifts hundreds out of Wuhan in coronavirus evacuation

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A plane, chartered by the US state department to evacuate Americans from Wuhan, arrives in Anchorage, Alaska. Photograph: Kerry Tasker/Reuters

The US and Japan have airlifted hundreds of their citizens from Wuhan, the Chinese city at the centre of the coronavirus outbreak, as officials said the death toll had risen to 132 and the number of confirmed cases in China reached 5,974: more than during the 2003 Sars epidemic. The British are expected to begin their own airlift as early as Thursday, while Australia and New Zealand have announced a joint plan to evacuate their citizens and keep some quarantined for up to 14 days on the remote Christmas Island.

Human transmission. Germany has confirmed the first known human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus in Europe, where a man was infected by a colleague who had travelled to China but showed no symptoms at the time of the transmission.

A year inside Trump’s monumental Facebook campaign

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Trump campaign’s sophisticated social media machine bombards conservative voters. Illustration: Griffin Barnett/The Guardian

As the Democrats remain mired in a long and potentially damaging primary battle, the Trump campaign has been building a vast and sophisticated social media machine to communicate with potential voters, spending close to $20m on more than 218,000 Facebook ads in 2019, according to a Guardian analysis. Julia Carrie Wong investigates how this messaging – some of it xenophobic, fear-mongering and/or outright false – is being used to influence conservative users and harvest their data.

Data collection. “The campaign is all about data collection,” Trump’s 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale told the Guardian. “If we touch you digitally, we want to know who you are and how you think and get you into our databases so that we can model off it and relearn and understand what’s happening.”

Cheat sheet

The US dropped 7,423 bombs on Afghanistan in 2019: more than in any year since the military began keeping a tally in 2006, and an almost eightfold increase since 2015.

Dylann Roof , the white supremacist who murdered nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, is appealing his death sentence on mental health grounds, claiming that he was suffering from schizophrenia during his capital trial.

The Pentagon says 50 US service members have now been diagnosed with traumatic brain injury as a result of a recent Iranian missile strike on their base in Iraq. Trump originally claimed the 8 January attack had not injured any US troops.

A Facebook group of amateur northern lights enthusiasts has helped in the discovery of a new form of the aurora borealis, which resembles rippling green sand dunes.

Must-reads

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Vanessa Nakate, left, poses with fellow climate activists at the Davos summit last week. Photograph: Markus Schreiber/AP

Battling for diversity in environmental activism

Vanessa Nakate joined her fellow young climate activists, including Greta Thunberg, for a press conference at the Davos summit. But when a news agency cropped her from its photo of the event, the 23-year-old Ugandan took up a new kind of activism: ensuring climate activists of colour are not erased from the debate.

Reddit founder on the importance of paternity leave

Of the world’s richest countries, the US is the least generous when it comes to paternity leave. When Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and his wife, Serena Williams, had their first child, his paid parental leave was vital. “It’s something that a lucky few get access to in America, that really everyone should,” he tells Miranda Bryant.

If not almond, what milk should we drink?

A glass of dairy milk produces almost three times more greenhouse gas than any plant-based milk. But a recent Guardian investigation found that demand for almond milk was decimating bee populations. So what’s the best alternative? Annette McGivney investigates.

What happens after you get your dream job away from it all?

The latest “dream job” to go viral is caretaker of a remote island off Ireland’s west coast, which attracted more than 23,000 applications. Katherine Purvis asks the lucky candidates who secured similar gigs whether the experience lived up to expectations.

Opinion

David Miranda is now Brazil’s sole openly LGBTQ+ congressman. His husband, the journalist Glenn Greenwald, faces criminal charges after helping to expose government corruption. They say the far-right Bolsonaro regime wants them dead – and it is time to fight back.

The last nine months of our lives … have been filled with attacks of every kind. We have received detailed death threats containing personal, non-public data available only to the state.

Sport

Colin Kaepernick led the 49ers to the Super Bowl in 2013. But when the NFL and Fox recall San Francisco’s former greats at this weekend’s game, writes Melissa Jacobs, he may not even get a mention.

Nike’s controversial, hi-tech running shoe, the Vaporfly, will escape a blanket ban by World Athletics, the Guardian understands. But on Friday the sport’s governing body is also expected to announce a temporary suspension of any new shoe technology until after this summer’s Tokyo Olympics.

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