AP PHOTO/JACQUELYN MARTIN

Trump's second impeachment trial to open with sense of urgency, speed; Trial confronts painful memories of Capitol siege

No American president has been impeached twice. Nor has any in 245 years faced two impeachment trials, the second one while no longer in office.

Donald Trump’s historic second impeachment trial is opening on Tuesday with a sense of urgency, Lisa Mascaro and Hope Yen report.

Democrats want to hold the former president accountable for the violent U.S. Capitol insurrection. And Republicans want it over as fast as possible.

It comes just over a month since the deadly Jan. 6 riot. Senate leaders are still working out the details, but it appears there will be few witnesses, and Trump has declined a request to testify.

Holed up at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, the former president has had his social media bullhorn stripped from him by Twitter, without public comments since leaving the White House.

House managers prosecuting the case are expected to rely on the trove of videos from the siege, along with Trump's incendiary rhetoric refusing to concede the election, to make their case. His new defense team has said it plans to counter with its own cache of videos of Democratic politicians making fiery speeches.

The House impeached Trump Jan. 13 on the charge of inciting insurrection.

EXPLAINER: How Trump's second impeachment trial will work.

5 key questions for Trump's Senate impeachment trial.

VIDEO: Trump impeachment trial confronts Capitol siege.

Analysis: The outcome of Trump's second impeachment trial may seem preordained, but the trial itself matters. It is ultimately a test of whether a president, who holds an office that many of the nation’s founders feared could become too powerful in the wrong hands, is above the law. Senators will be forced to sit still, listen to evidence and wrestle with elemental questions about American democracy. The American people will also be sitting in their own form of judgment as they watch. The verdict and the process itself will be scrutinized for generations, Political Editor Steven Sloan writes.

Capitol Breach-What We Know: On Jan. 6, the U.S. Capitol was besieged by supporters of Trump who were angered by the then-president’s election loss. While lawmakers inside the building were voting to affirm Joe Biden’s win, Trump loyalists were marching to Capitol Hill and breaking in. Five people died in the violent melee, including a police officer. The toll of the siege is still being tallied, from the growing number of people charged with crimes to the continued presence of National Guard troops in the nation's capital, Kevin Freking, Nomaan Merchant and Lolita C. Baldor report.

Insurrection Remembrances: The trial is more than an effort to convict the former president over inciting an insurrection. It's a chance for a public accounting and remembrance of the worst attack on the U.S. Capitol in 200 years. In the month since the siege, Trump defenders say it’s time to move on. But many lawmakers have started recounting their personal experiences from that day. For many who were witnesses, onlookers and survivors, it’s far from over. Lisa Mascaro has that story.

Trump Prosecutor: Stacey Plaskett couldn’t cast a vote last month when the House impeached Trump, but she can help prosecute him. The non-voting delegate from the Virgin Islands is among the impeachment managers selected by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to argue the case. It’s an extraordinary moment that places Plaskett in the center of just the fourth U.S. impeachment trial in history. But there will also be a familiar dynamic when Plaskett walks into the Senate chamber that she’s experienced before. She'll be one of the only Black women in the room, Padmananda Rama and Mary Clare Jalonick report.

AP PHOTO/ERANGA JAYAWARDENA

Unwilling to wait anymore, poorer countries seek their own shots; More people choose to die at home in US; Around the globe, virus cancels spring travel for millions

Giving one's citizens “the peace of mind” offered by the COVID-19 vaccine, as a Honduran business leader succinctly put it, has become a focal effort for some poorer countries who have gotten tired of waiting to get doses through a United Nations program.

Countries including Honduras, Serbia and Mexico are actively striking out on their own, cutting their own private deals, report Maria Cheng and Aniruddha Ghosal.

Experts are increasingly concerned that these go-it-alone efforts could undermine a U.N.-backed program to get shots to the neediest people worldwide.

In past disease outbreaks, less wealthy countries generally waited for vaccines to be delivered by the U.N. and others. Many are now taking matters into their own hands. Those deals, however, could leave fewer vaccines for the program known as COVAX.

U.K.-EU Vaccinations: The European Union has chosen a careful route in its vaccine campaign to defeat the pandemic. And as a result, it has seen a slow rollout of shots compared with Britain. Across the channel, the United Kingdom has shown speed and agility in its vaccine strategy. It has announced vaccine deals earlier, authorized shots from different companies more quickly, and experimented with stretching out the time between doses to get more people some protection quicker. The result is that the EU is in the U.K.’s rearview mirror in the vaccination drive. Britain has given at least one vaccine shot to about 15% of its population, compared with some 3% in the EU's 27 nations, Raf Casert and Masha Macpherson report.

Timeline of virus vaccine deals reveals EU's lag behind UK.

South Africa Vaccine: The country has suspended plans to inoculate its front-line health care workers with the AstraZeneca vaccine after a small clinical trial suggested that it isn't effective in preventing mild to moderate illness from the variant dominant in the country. South Africa received its first 1 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine last week and was expected to begin giving jabs to health care workers in mid-February. The disappointing early results indicate that an inoculation drive using the AstraZeneca vaccine may not be useful, Andrew Meldrum and Sylvia Hui report.

Burkina Faso Hospitals: The West African country, which at first managed to avoid a catastrophic surge of the coronavirus, is now trying to cope with a much deadlier resurgence. Although Burkina Faso’s virus figures are still relatively small, officials worry that a general lack of understanding and adherence to basic safeguards will end up overwhelming the country’s already strained health system. Complicating matters, Burkina Faso is suffering from a conflict involving Islamic militants, the army and local defense groups that has pushed hundreds of thousands to the brink of starvation and forced the closure of more than 130 health centers in the tiny country, Sam Mednick reports.

Dying at Home: More Americans are making the decision to have their terminally ill loved ones die at home rather than in nursing home and hospice settings. For many families, home is a better setting than the terrifying scenario of saying farewell to loved ones behind glass or during video calls amid the pandemic, Heather Hollingsworth reports. National hospice organizations are reporting that facilities are seeing double-digit percentage increases in the number of patients being cared for at home.

Spring Travel: Around the globe, tough new restrictions on travel because of variants of the virus are hitting just when millions of people are normally on the move. That's more bad news for airlines, restaurants and hotels, which have been struggling mightily for the past year. In late winter and early spring, Chinese factory workers are normally heading home for Lunar New Year, American college students are hitting the beach over spring break, and Germans and Britons are fleeing drab skies for some Mediterranean sun over Easter. But all of that is now canceled or in doubt, Dave McHugh, Casey Smith and Joe McDonald report.

NATURAL DISASTER RESPONSE FORCE VIA AP

Rescuers in India digging for 37 trapped in flood; 165 are missing, and at least 18 killed, after glacier breaks in India’s Himalayas

Rescuers in northern India are working to rescue more than three dozen power plant workers trapped in a tunnel after part of a Himalayan glacier broke off and sent a wall of water and debris rushing down the mountain.

More than 2,000 members of the military, paramilitary groups and police have been taking part in search-and-rescue operations in the northern state of Uttarakhand after the disaster, which has killed at least 18 people, left some 165 others missing and damaged dams and homes downstream, Biswajeet Banerjee and Rishabh R. Jain report.

Officials said the focus is on saving 37 workers who are stuck inside a tunnel at one of the affected hydropower plants. Excavators have been brought in to help with the efforts.

The flood was caused when a portion of Nanda Devi glacier snapped off, releasing water trapped behind it, a disaster experts said could be linked to global warming.

The floodwater rushed down the mountain and into other bodies of water, forcing the evacuation of many villages along the banks of the Alaknanda and Dhauliganga rivers.

Video showed the muddy, concrete-gray floodwaters tumbling through a valley and surging into a dam, breaking it into pieces before roaring on downstream. The flood turned the countryside into what looked like an ash-colored moonscape.

VIDEO: Scores still missing after glacier breaks in India.

EXPLAINER: How glaciers can burst and send floods downstream.

America's Race War

Analysis: A race war was evident in the US long before the Capitol siege

A war rages on in America, and it didn’t begin with Donald Trump or the assault on the Capitol.

It started with slavery and never ended, through lynchings and voter suppression, the snarling attack dogs of staunch segregationist Bull Connor in Alabama and the insidious accounting of redlining.

Today’s battles in the race war are waged by legions of white people in the thrall of stereotypes, lies and conspiracy theories that don’t just exist for recluses on some dark corner of the internet, writes Aaron Morrison.

People like the murderer who fatally shot nine Black parishioners at a church in South Carolina, telling detectives that Black people were taking over the country and raping white women. And the shooter who killed 23 and wounded 23 others at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas — targeting Mexicans, authorities say, because he believed they were invading the country to vote for Democrats.

For a very long time, civil rights leaders, historians and experts on extremism say, many white Americans and elected leaders have failed to acknowledge that this war of white aggression was real, even as the bodies of innocent people piled up.

After taking the oath of office on the very platform that some in the mob scaled to breach the Capitol, President Biden acknowledged the danger of doing nothing about systemic racism and violence born of hate.

“A cry for racial justice some 400 years in the making moves us,” he said. “A cry that can’t be any more desperate or any more clear. And now a rise of political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism that we must confront and we will defeat.”

VIDEO Analysis: A race war raged before Capitol riot. By Noreen Nasir.