Trump news: Leading ally of president lashes out over impeachment as accuser claims to have documents corroborating sexual assault

A new environmental study has shown that air quality in the United States suffered between 2016 and 2018, after seven straight years of improvement beginning during the first months of the Barack Obama administration.

The rise in pollution, which just so happens to coincide with the election of one Donald J Trump, has led to thousands of premature deaths across the country, according to the economists from Carnegie Mellon University, who studied Environmental Protection Agency data to produce their report.

The administration has been hard at work since that fateful night in November 2016 rolling back environmental regulations left, right and centre to promote fossil fuel extraction under a president who considers climate change "a hoax".

It's official America: voting Trump is bad for your health.

Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, the two business associates of Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani linked to his hustling operation in Ukraine who were recently arrested on campaign finance violation charges, pleaded not guilty in court yesterday.

Giuliani himself is apparently shopping around for a decent defence lawyer, according to CNN.

The three House committees carrying out the impeachment inquiry are taking the rest of the week off to attend memorial events honouring the late House Oversight Committee chairman and civil rights hero Elijah Cummings.

When matters resume next week, they have closed-door interviews tentatively scheduled with Charles Kupperman, a deputy to national security adviser John Bolton who has since left the White House, on Monday and another with Tim Morrison, the National Security Council's current Russia and Europe director, on Thursday.

If Morrison appears for his interview, he will be the first White House aide to testify while still in the job, defying Trump's insistence his administration would not cooperate with the Adam Schiff-led probe.

Acting Ukraine ambassador Bill Taylor told Schiff's team on Tuesday about phone calls he had had with Morrison over the Ukraine affair.

In a detailed opening statement, Taylor said Morrison told him in an August phone call that the "president doesn't want to provide any assistance at all," speaking about the military aid that had already been authorised by Congress.

"That was extremely troubling to me," Taylor said.

Taylor described another call with Morrison in September in which Morrison told him of a conversation another diplomat, Gordon Sondland, had held with a Ukrainian official. Morrison told Taylor that Sondland had told the Ukrainians that the aid money wouldn't come until their president, Volodymyr Zelensky, pursued an investigation into a company linked to former vice president Joe Biden's family.

Those conditions would contradict Trump's own claims that there was no "quid pro quo" for the investigations.

Asked yesterday about how he felt the impeachment inquiry was going, Republican senator John Thune, second only to Mitch McConnell, had this damning assessment to offer:

Following the passing of Cummings, California Democrat Jackie Speir said on Wednesday she would run to replace him as chair of the Oversight Committee, setting her in competition with acting chair Carolyn Maloney of New York.

Cummings will lie in state at the US Capitol on Thursday before his funeral takes place in his native Baltimore on Friday, where Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi will be among the speakers.

Bored of listening to Trump dismiss any press coverage he finds unfavourable as "Fake News" and hammering out contrary Fox clips on Twitter instead of governing?

Me too - but Emily Bloch, president of the Society of Professional Journalists, is even more so.

She's just written an op-ed for Teen Vogue explaining her move to trademark the phrase in order to block the president from using it. Good show.

The House Ethics Committee is investigating California congresswoman Katie Hill over allegations she had an affair with a staffer, which were first circulated by right-wing website RedState.

Here's Chris Riotta with some background if you're late to the drama.

For Indy Voices, Chris Stevenson says the sort of political polarisation we've seen on both sides of the Atlantic in the shape of Trump and Brexit is now a global phenomenon.

Negar Mortazavi says Trump's Turkey ceasefire announcement yesterday saw him claiming a victory in his pledge to curtail American involvement in "endless wars" in the Middle East but the experts say any such triumphalism is premature.

Devin Nunes' Cow remains one of the most committed Trump administration trolling accounts on Twitter and is pretty bang on here.

Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe told Anderson Cooper last night that House Democrats are in possession of a "smoking Howitzer", not just a smoking gun, in their pursuit of Trump's impeachment.