Here’s what United States Senators saw and heard on Wednesday, as Democratic impeachment managers started to build their case against former President Donald Trump, charged with inciting an insurrection that led a mob to attack the Capitol on Jan. 6.

They heard Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s terrified staff whisper into a phone for help as the members of the mob pounded on doors nearby.

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It was impossible not to feel your pulse quicken as House Democrats pushed the play button on a 13-minute supercut of what transpired on Jan. 6. Barricades fell. Flagpoles became javelins. Windows shattered. Teargas wafted. Police screamed in fear and in agony. People died.

From the end of 2020 into early 2021, the U.S. was locked on a pathway of continually breaking and re-breaking COVID-19 records. In December, more than 200,000 new infections in a single day were reported for the first time. Only about a month later, the country hit a somber new record: 300,000 diagnoses in a single day.

After months near those dizzyingly high marks, daily case numbers have fallen dramatically. On Feb.

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If you didn’t quite follow former President Donald Trump’s defense team’s argument on the opening day of the Senate impeachment trial, Republican Senators were right there with you.

The Senate affirmed the constitutionality of holding an impeachment trial for a former president on Tuesday, paving the way for the final showdown over Donald Trump’s extraordinary presidency.

By a vote of 56 to 44, the Senate voted that it has the jurisdiction to try a president once he has left office.

Just because the United States has re-joined the Paris Agreement doesn’t mean that the world is on a path to a better climate future. The 2015 agreement, in which signatories pledged to collectively cap global warming at “well below” 2°C above pre-industrial levels, is only the first step.

Realism in foreign policy reflects a messy, dangerous world where too little can be distilled into clear-cut moral absolutes, and thus national interest takes precedence over universal values. Nevertheless, a world ravaged by war, migration, refugee flows, and a demand for dignity across ethnic, religious, and racial lines requires a morally sustainable foreign policy rooted in idealism. Yet realism and idealism can work together.

Under pressure from the economic impact of COVID-19 and U.S. sanctions, Cuba scrapped a ban on most private businesses on Saturday, the latest in a flurry of long-awaited reforms to its Communist system triggered by the government in recent weeks, and a sign that the state’s grip on the economy is loosening.

All of the things you need to know now from the editors of TIME