Happy Tuesday, January 14. In the last two days, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) took some shots at her longtime Senate ally Bernie Sanders (I-VT), accusing the Vermont senator of directing his volunteers to “trash” her and confirming he once told her a woman could not win the Democratic nomination. The Sanders campaign has vehemently denied the allegations. Is this a sign of a broader rift between the two comrades or just the ebb and flow of a Democratic primary? Here’s more on that and other stories we’re following:

I remain skeptical. But CBS is reporting that the White House believes there’s a good chance they won’t be able to stem Senate GOP defections on allowing witnesses in the President’s impeachment trial.

I kept hearing how Elizabeth Warren was refusing to go negative in kind with Bernie Sanders. But I think she just dropped a neutron bomb directly on Bernie’s head.

And to be clear, “going negative” isn’t a bad thing if you are discussing relevant facts.

There is a robust scientific consensus that all human populations outside of Africa descend from migrations of homo sapiens out of Africa that took place between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago. Before that, in Europe for instance, neanderthals were the dominant human or hominid population outside of Africa. But last year scientists performed a series of skeletal morphology and dating tests which appear to change the story dramatically.

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Happy Monday, January 13. NBC News reported Monday morning that President Trump had been plotting the assassination of Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani for at least six months prior to the attack, a development that puts renewed scrutiny on the administration’s “imminent” threat rationale for the strike. Here’s more on that and other stories we’re following.

I saw an article headline today arguing we should abolish the presidential pardon. Too much power in the hands of one person. For what it’s worth, I think the pardon power serves an important purpose (though it is an archaic one) and that we should see more pardons, really a lot more. But the point of the article, which is based on President Trump’s wanton and partial abuse of this power, focused my attention on a different point.

With Iran’s admission that it accidentally shot down a civilian airliner the night of its retaliatory strikes against the US military bases in Iraq it is worth remembering that Russia has still not made a similar admission about the fate of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 shot down over Ukraine in 2014. The facts are not identical. In that case Russia provided Buk surface-to-air missiles to “separatists” operating in eastern Ukraine who seem to have thought they were shooting down a Ukrainian military jet.

Here we get into the inherent and intentional murkiness about which of these “separatists” aided by Russia were people who could legitimately be called “separatists” versus Russian military or Russian veterans operating with plausible deniability in Russia’s shadow invasion of eastern Ukraine. Whatever the precise details, the upshot is the same: As part of an intentional policy of using vaguely deniable proxies, Russia gave highly lethal weaponry (you need serious military hardware to shoot an airliner at cruising altitude out of the sky) to people operating with little command and control or oversight. The result was unthinkable tragedy. Not only has Russia never admitted responsibility it has continued to support and propagate various conspiracy theories and “false narratives” about what happened.