U.S. prosecutors on Monday asked a U.S. judge to drop the criminal cases accusing President-elect Donald Trump of seeking to overturn his 2020 election defeat and unlawfully withholding classified documents, citing his impending return to the presidency following his successful 2024 campaign. For analysis, we spoke with Professor Harold Krent from the Kent College of Law.

The COP29 climate summit presidency released a draft finance deal on Friday that would have developed nations take the lead in providing $250 billion per year by 2035 to help poorer nations - a proposal that drew criticism from all sides. We talked with Professor Gregory Keoleian with the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan.

The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants on Thursday for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his former defense minister and Hamas officials, accusing them of war crimes and crimes against humanity over their 13-month war in Gaza and the October 2023 attack on Israel, respectively. We talk with Leila Sadat, Washington University professor of international criminal law and special adviser on crimes against humanity to the ICC Prosecutor.

British long-range missiles and U.S. land mines are now being used by Ukraine against Russia’s full-scale invasion. The Biden administration will allow Ukraine to use American-supplied antipersonnel land mines to help it slow Russia’s battlefield progress in the war. And Ukraine has fired long-range British Storm Shadow missiles into Russian territory for the first time. The U.S. and other foreign embassies closed in Kyiv Wednesday over security threat. We speak with Jim Townsend, adjunct senior fellow in the Center for a New American Security Transatlantic Security Program.

President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday formally lowered the threshold for Russia’s use of its nuclear weapons, a move that follows U.S. President Joe Biden’s decision to let Ukraine strike targets inside Russian territory with American-supplied longer-range missiles. Moscow says Ukraine fired six American-supplied longer-range missiles at Russia’s Bryansk region. It marks Kyiv’s first use of the weapons inside Russia in 1,000 days of war. We talk about it with Doug Klain, nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.

The Kremlin warned Monday that President Joe Biden’s decision to let Ukraine strike targets inside Russia with U.S.-supplied longer-range missiles adds “fuel to the fire” of the war and would escalate international tensions even higher. Biden’s shift in policy added an uncertain, new factor to the conflict on the eve of the 1,000-day milestone since Russia began its full-scale invasion in 2022. A conversation with Jennifer Kavanagh, a Senior Fellow & Director of Military Analysis at Defense Priorities.

Climate activists have written a letter to UN climate leaders demanding that big oil lobbyists be banned from the annual COP climate meetings. This year's U.N. climate summit is struggling to focus minds on the health of the planet, with turbulent geopolitics, a confrontational host and the reelection of U.S. climate skeptic Donald Trump stealing the limelight. We talk with correspondent in Chermaine Lee, who is at the conference in Azerbaijan.

The word unprecedented has been used a lot in analyzing the victory of President–elect Donald Trump’s second term. But U.S. history is replete with examples of what some think is unusual. We talk about it with presidential historian Lindsey Chervinsky, Executive Director of the George Washington Presidential Library and the historic relevance of her latest book, Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents That Forged the Republic.

President Joe Biden welcomed President–elect Donald Trump to the White House Wednesday. Despite the unprecedented nature of the election, the Biden administration continued a long-standing tradition of the United States’ democratic process of a peaceful transfer of power. A conversation about that tradition with VOA Chief National Correspondent and former White House Bureau Chief Steve Herman.

International aid groups say Israel hasn’t met the U.S. demand deadline for allowing more humanitarian access into the Gaza Strip. The groups say conditions are worse now than any point in the 13-month-old war. This week, the outgoing Biden administration is expected to judge whether Israel has done enough to meet a demand issued last month to get more aid flowing into Gaza. We speak to Larry Garber, former USAID Mission Director to the West Bank and Gaza.