Vox Sentences: 3 days of hearings and one notepad

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The biggest impeachment week yet

• The last scheduled public impeachment hearing wrapped up Thursday. Now Democrats and Republicans are fighting about whether the evidence presented is enough to impeach President Trump. Both sides complain that partisan opposition is holding up important evidence. [NBC News / Jonathan Allen]
• Here are the basics on how we got here — and what could happen next — from Vox’s big impeachment explainer. [Vox / Matthew Yglesias and Andrew Prokop]
• Tuesday, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman testified about his concern with Trump’s conduct on the call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. [New Yorker / John Cassidy]
• On Wednesday, the biggest day of testimony, US Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland said that, yes, there was a quid pro quo. [CBS News / Caroline Cournoyer, Grace Segers, and Stefan Becket]
• And on Thursday, when former National Security Council Russia expert Fiona Hill and State Department official David Holmes came to answer questions, Holmes backed up Sondland’s assertion of a quid pro quo and Hill rebutted conspiracy theories about Ukraine election meddling. [Washington Post / Aaron Blake]
• “I WANT NOTHING”: Trump prepared to dismiss testimony with some very strange notes. [Vox / Hannah Brown]
• There are also plenty of people who haven’t testified: former National Security Adviser John Bolton, the anonymous whistleblower, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and the president himself. [New York Times / Peter Baker]

Thousands dead in the DRC

• Children are bearing the brunt of the world’s worst current measles outbreak, which has struck the Democratic Republic of Congo. [The Guardian / Rebecca Ratcliffe]
• Nearly 5,000 people have died, with about 90 percent of the deceased under the age of 5. More than 230,000 report contracting measles in the DRC, according to the World Health Organization. [IFLScience]
• Health professionals are attempting to fight the disease with vaccination campaigns with limited success. That same WHO report notes that while 44 percent of the country is in the epidemic phase of the disease, many affected areas are inaccessible to medical professionals due to ongoing conflict. [Outbreak News Today]
• The DRC is also suffering from an Ebola outbreak, with half the number of those perishing from measles dying from Ebola over the last 15 months. [BBC]

Miscellaneous

• Trump won’t commit to the bipartisan bill to stand with Hong Kong protesters, claiming it might hurt his chances to make a trade deal with China. [CNN / Kevin Liptak and Betsy Klein]
• While Russian troops have moved into Syrian domain that the US used to hold, they are facing problems they didn’t anticipate. [Al Monitor / Kirill Semenov]
• Isolation rooms are a common practice in Illinois public schools. Here’s why Gov. Pritzker finds the practice “appalling,” and wants to end them. [Chicago Tribune / Jennifer Smith Richards, Jodi S. Cohen and Lakeidra Chavis]
• A young man’s insurance resisted covering drug rehab near his home. Months later, he overdosed after bad treatment — thousands of miles away. Now his mother is suing the insurer. [Vox / German Lopez]

“Nowadays, you see a dead body with two shots to the chest and one in the groin. That’s how military members shoot. So you have to ask yourself, who’s teaching them to shoot or who is doing the shooting.” [US Marine Corps veteran Daniel Torres speaks on the grim fate for some deported veterans: joining drug cartels]

Watch this: How a murder changed the fate of the Amazon

How the battle for Amazon’s most valuable trees cost Chico Mendes his life. [YouTube / Ana Terra Athayde, Sam Ellis, and Christina Thornell]

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