Bobby Allyn

A quiet New England community west of Hartford, Conn., has found itself roped into the impeachment saga with the emergence of an improbable character in the ongoing Ukraine scandal: Robert Hyde.

Hyde is a 40-year-old congressional candidate and former landscaper in Simsbury, Conn., who is known for being brash, foul-mouthed and for hitching his candidacy on his fervent support for President Trump.

Prosecutors in the U.S. Virgin Islands have unveiled a new lawsuit against the estate of Jeffrey Epstein alleging that over two decades he ran a conspiracy in which he transported young women and girls to his private Caribbean islands by helicopter and boat and then subjected them to sexual abuse.

The International Court of Justice in the Netherlands announced Wednesday that it is poised to make a decision on whether it will order Myanmar to put an end to what human rights watchers say has been a campaign of genocide against the country's Rohingya Muslim minority.

The United Nation's top court says the order will be handed down on Jan 23.

Updated at 6:15 p.m. ET

A federal judge in Maryland has blocked the Trump administration's executive order allowing state and local governments to turn away refugees from resettling in their communities.

Updated at 5:35 p.m. ET

Attorney General William Barr announced Monday that 21 Saudi military cadets studying at U.S. military bases are being sent back to their home country after investigators found child pornography, "jihadi or anti-American content" on accounts or devices associated with the students.

The announcement comes a month after a Saudi national opened fire in a classroom at a naval base in Pensacola, Fla., killing three young sailors and wounding eight others.

Updated 8:38 p.m. Sunday ET

The Trump administration is planning to announce on Monday that more than 20 Saudi students receiving military training in the United States will be sent back to their home country, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

The expulsions come in the wake of a Pentagon review of the Saudi officer who opened fire last month at a naval base in Pensacola, Fla., leaving three young sailors dead and wounding eight others.

Updated at 5:51 p.m. ET

A federal appeals court has handed the Trump administration a victory by allowing the president to tap military construction funds to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

A divided 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued the decision late Wednesday, reversing a lower court order that stopped Trump from using $3.6 billion in U.S Defense Department money to construct the long-promised border wall.

As the homelessness crisis in California grows more acute, Gov. Gavin Newsom is planning to ask lawmakers for $1.4 billion to pay monthly rents, build more shelters and provide treatment to those struggling with finding long-term housing, the governor's office announced on Wednesday.

A court in India has issued a death warrant for four men convicted in the fatal 2012 gang rape of a college student on a New Delhi bus, a crime that sparked huge demonstrations and a nationwide reckoning over sexual violence in India.

The men are scheduled to be executed by hanging at 7 a.m. on Jan. 22, the court in New Delhi announced Tuesday. India's president can still stay their execution, but he is not expected to intervene.

Updated at 11:50 p.m. ET Sunday

As thousands of mourners flooded the streets of Iran on Sunday to mourn the death of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, a series of dizzying developments convulsed the Middle East, generating new uncertainty around everything from the future of U.S. forces in Iraq to the battle against ISIS and the effort to quell Tehran's nuclear ambitions.

Amid the fallout of the U.S. drone strike on Friday that killed Soleimani, Sunday saw the following whiplash-inducing developments unfold almost simultaneously:

A top Trump administration official has been criticized for saying on Monday that the man charged with stabbing five people at a Hanukkah celebration in New York was the son of an "illegal alien" and came from a family that lacked "American values."

Ken Cuccinelli, the acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, made the comments in a now-deleted tweet about suspect Grafton Thomas.

A top United Nations official is accusing U.S. authorities of imposing a penalty that amounts to torture against former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, who is currently jailed in a federal facility after refusing to testify to a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Earlier this year, a federal judge detained Manning and imposed on her daily fines after finding that she was in contempt of the court's order to testify.

Carlos Ghosn, the former chairman of Nissan who faced up to 15 years in prison on a set of charges over financial misconduct in Japan, has fled the country ahead of his trial — a move that stunned even his Japanese lawyer.

After Ghosn's arrest last year, authorities in Japan released him on two separate bails that totaled the equivalent of $14 million. He was forced to surrender his passports, and Japanese authorities were ordered to closely monitor the former automotive executive.

But he appears to have outfoxed them.

Updated at 3:16 p.m. ET

Federal prosecutors in New York have filed hate crime charges against the man accused of carrying out a stabbing rampage north of New York City over the weekend that wounded five people as they celebrated Hanukkah.

President Trump has been criticized after retweeting a post to his 68 million followers on Twitter that included a name linked to the alleged whistleblower whose complaint about the president's dealings with Ukraine prompted the impeachment inquiry.

At the time of the complaint, the individual was an intelligence community official who sounded the alarm about Trump's pressure campaign with Ukraine that House Democrats cited in impeaching the president for alleged abuse of power.

The Trump campaign on Christmas Eve launched a website full of talking points intended to help supporters of the president win arguments with "that liberal snowflake relative."

Featuring videos on topics from the economy to immigration and attacks on the media, snowflakevictory.com seeks to provide pro-Trump tidbits that can be brought to the holiday dinner table.

More than 50 people were hospitalized after 69 cars were involved in a chain-reaction crash on a Virginia interstate on Sunday morning, state authorities say.

Images from Interstate 64 in York County near Williamsburg showed cars and trucks in a tangled heap following the pileup.

Virginia State Police said the crashes began on an icy and fog-shrouded overpass bridge around 7:51 a.m.

"Fog and ice were causative factors, but the cause of the actual accident, we do not know at this time," said Virginia State Police spokeswoman Sgt. Michelle Anaya.

Boeing's Starliner spacecraft returned to Earth on Sunday, landing safely in the New Mexico desert.

The journey is being hailed as a major achievement despite failing to complete a core objective: docking at the international space station.

Engineers and scientists are now analyzing data from the trip ahead of a plan to send U.S. astronauts to space in 2020. It would mark the first American-launched space travel since NASA retired its space shuttle fleet in 2011.

Sen. Susan Collins, the Maine Republican who is one of the few members of her party willing to buck President Trump, announced Wednesday she would seek reelection. Her announcement comes the same day the U.S. House of Representatives began debate on impeaching the president.

Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., is among the 19 federal officials in American history who have been impeached by the House of Representatives.

Now, he wants to cast a vote to impeach No. 20: President Trump.

Updated on Dec. 16 at 9:22 a.m.

A conservative-leaning Democrat from New Jersey who defied his party in opposing the impeachment of President Trump is expected to switch parties and become a Republican.

Rep. Jeff Van Drew, a first-term Blue Dog Democrat who represents a swing district in southern New Jersey, intends to change parties after some of Van Drew's internal polling showed that he was becoming increasingly unpopular in his purple district, according to a senior Democratic aide.

Anna Karina, the French New Wave actress who in the 1960s established herself as a fixture in films directed by Jean-Luc Godard, died on Saturday in Paris. She was 79.

France's culture minister confirmed the news, saying on Sunday that "her look was the look of New Wave. It will remain so forever."

Is Trump profiting off the presidency?

It's a question that has dogged President Trump since he first took office, and it is gathering momentum again, even as the impeachment saga and Trump's dealings with Ukraine dominate the headlines.

A trio of lawsuits claiming that Trump's business dealings are violating the Constitution have been ping-ponging in federal courts for months, but all three cases are now advancing to critical stages.

A panel of federal appeals judges on Monday appeared skeptical that an anti-corruption lawsuit brought by Democratic lawmakers against President Trump over his business dealings abroad would survive judicial review.

Presidential candidate Joe Biden squared off with a voter in Iowa on Thursday, calling the man a "damn liar" after he accused Biden of helping to get his son on the board of a Ukrainian gas company in an attempt to win access with Ukraine's president.

In the testy exchange at a town hall packed with Biden supporters, the former vice president took umbrage with another accusation from the voter: that Biden is too old to run for president.

Updated at 1:43 p.m. ET

Federal law enforcement officials have announced criminal charges against two Russian nationals who operate a hacking organization known as Evil Corp., a group officials say is responsible for one of the most sweeping banking fraud schemes in the past decade.

The story of the House Democrats' impeachment report has quickly become all about the phone records.

The majority Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday released a 300-page report detailing the evidence it has accumulated in its impeachment inquiry into President Trump.