After two weeks of closed-door testimony, a portrait is emerging of a president pressuring his own government and a foreign power to interfere in domestic politics, enlisting administration officials and his personal attorney in ways that increasingly made members of his own team uncomfortable.

“Each new testimony offers at least one big bit of information that generally places the president and Rudy Giuliani squarely at the heart of this throbbing scandal,” White House reporter Ashley Parker says.

President Trump and some aides have tried to block progress on the impeachment inquiry by refusing to comply with congressional subpoenas. But a growing number of employees have chosen to come forward with testimony, and their narrative points to actions that could bolster the case for impeachment. 

For more than a decade, foster homes and emergency shelters in every corner of West Virginia have been short of beds. Caseworkers with sleeping bags and baby formula have shuttled children to overnight stays in motels or state offices. 

Billboards have gone up along the highways, calling on commuters to open their homes to some of the 6,900 children forced into state care by an opioid epidemic that has fractured families across the state and claimed 5,200 lives over two decades. 

“As the opioid crisis was growing, more and more children were left behind,” investigative reporter Debbie Cenziper says. She spent more than six months tracking the crisis in West Virginia. “They were either abused, neglected, abandoned or orphaned, not just by parents but by extended family members.”

British House of Commons Speaker John Bercow ruled Monday that the government could not ask lawmakers to vote again on Brexit, dealing only the latest blow to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who staked his career on attaining an agreement. 

Last week, Johnson hammered out a new divorce agreement with the European Union. But Bercow refused the vote Monday because parliamentary rules bar considering the same measure twice during the same session. The new motion, he said, was “in substance the same” as the previous rejected one. 

London bureau chief William Booth says the latest developments have considerably slowed progress: “Instead of being on a fast train to Brexit, we are now on a very slow local train, making perhaps every stop.”