President Donald Trump’s lawyers on Sunday previewed their impeachment defense with the questionable assertion that the charges against him are invalid, adopting a position rejected by Democrats as “nonsense” as both sides sharpened their arguments for trial. “Criminal-like conduct is required,” said Alan Dershowitz, a constitutional lawyer on Trump's defense team. Dershowitz said he will be making the same argument to the Senate and if it prevails, there will be “no need" to pursue the witness testimony or documents that Democrats are demanding.

(Bloomberg) -- Sign up here to receive the Davos Diary, a special daily newsletter that will run from Jan. 20-24.Iran will transfer the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder of a crashed Boeing aircraft to Ukraine for further investigation, according to Iranian media.“The black boxes of Flight 752 will not be decoded in Iran and will be transferred to Ukraine instead as per the country’s request,” semi-official Tasnim news agency reported, citing Hassan Rezaeifar, head of the Iranian Civil Aviation Organization’s accident-investigation office.Iran is under intense international pressure to provide full accountability over the circumstances that caused the crash of the Ukrainian International Airlines plane on Jan. 8. The country’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps later said it had mistaken the aircraft for a cruise missile.The three-year-old Boeing Co. 737-800 abruptly stopped transmitting its position and plunged to the ground about two minutes after takeoff from Tehran, killing all 176 aboard. The crash occurred hours after the Islamic Republic started launching rockets against Iraqi bases where U.S. forces are stationed, in retaliation for the killing of Iran’s top general, Qassem Soleimani.Iranian officials at first fiercely denied that Iran was to blame for the crash, provoking outrage and protests in Iran once they accepted culpability.To contact the reporter on this story: Arsalan Shahla in Tehran at ashahla@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Shaji Mathew at shajimathew@bloomberg.netFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

Two more bodies have been discovered at a Tijuana, Mexico, property where investigators earlier found the remains of a missing California couple buried under the dirt floor of a house on Friday. Jesús Rubén López Guillén, 70, a U.S. resident, and his wife Maria Teresa Guillén, 65, a naturalized U.S. citizen, were reported missing by their daughter Norma López after they traveled from Garden Grove to Tijuana on Jan. 10 to collect more than $6,400 in overdue rent from their 37-year-old son-in-law. Police in Garden Grove launched a missing persons investigation after López said she could no longer track her parents’ movements through the Find My Phone app. She said the last signal she received before their phone went dead was at the property they owned where her husband was living in southern Tijuana, about 4 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border. Their bodies were found buried under the dirt floor of one of the property’s three homes late Friday.While conducting an investigation into the circumstances of the Guilléns’ murder, Mexican investigators say they discovered the bodies of another couple buried in the property. It is not known if they were found in the same house as the Guilléns’ remains. The new victims have not yet been identified, but police in Mexico say they also may have been involved in a monetary dispute with the son-in-law.The son-in-law, a Mexican national who was deported from the U.S. in 2012 and identified only as “Santiago” in court documents, was first charged with the California couple’s disappearance and taken into custody while the property was searched. Baja California state prosecutor Hirán Sánchez confirmed that when his in-law’s bodies were found, he was charged with their murder.Sanchez told reporters that when the son-in-law was first questioned about what happened to his in-laws, he offered up a “series of contradictions” including a tale that they had walked across the border and that he had picked them up. López says her parents had instead driven their own pickup truck to retrieve the money. The son-in-law also told police that he first took them to their property and then they went together to a bank to exchange currency he paid them, after which he said he drove them back to the border. Instead investigators say that the son-in-law tried to extract money with the couple’s bank cards.“The Guilléns drove themselves to their houses, not Santiago,” Sanchez said at a news conference. “They never left.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

Vanessa Smallwood of Maple Shade, N.J., was 46 at the time of her disappearance. She was identified in a statement from New Jersey State Police.

Africa’s richest woman has been accused of corruption and exploiting her own country’s natural resources, after thousands of documents detailing her business interests were leaked to the media. Isabel dos Santos, who resides in the UK and whose father was the president of Angola, faces allegations of exploiting family connections to secure deals on land, oil and diamonds. According to the documents, seen by BBC Panorama and the Guardian, she and her husband were allowed to buy up valuable state assets and siphon hundreds of millions of dollars out of Angola. Ms dos Santos, whose fortune is estimated at £2bn, says these claims are entirely false and that she is the victim of a witch-hunt led by the Angolan government. She also wrote on Twitter that the leaked documents were “fake” and based on “false information.”     Ms dos Santos is already under investigation for corruption by the Angolan government, which has frozen her assets in the country. The documents were obtained by the Platform to Protect Whistle-blowers in Africa and then passed to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Anti-corruption campaigners responded by claiming that Ms dos Santos has been exploiting her own country for personal gain, with normal Angolan citizens the victims of her lavish lifestyle. "Every time she appears on the cover of some glossy magazine somewhere in the world, every time that she hosts one of her glamorous parties in the south of France, she is doing so by trampling on the aspirations of the citizens of Angola,” Andrew Feinstein, the head of Corruption Watch, told the BBC. In an interview with the BBC following the leak, Ms dos Santos said: “I regret that Angola has chosen this path, I think that we all stand a lot to lose. “Now, when you look at my track record and you see the work I have done and look at all the companies I have built, most certainly my companies are commercial companies.   “If you tell me, is there anything wrong for an Angolan person to have a business venture with a state company, I think there is nothing wrong.” She added that she was facing “prejudice” due to being the daughter of José Eduardo dos Santos, who served as President of Angola from 1979 to 2017. Ms dos Santos was educated in the UK and is married to Sindika Dokolo, a Congolese art collector and businessman.

Philippine authorities ordered a crackdown Monday on evacuees' daily visits to their homes in the danger zone around Taal volcano as scientists warned it could be "recharging" for a more powerful explosion. More than 110,000 people have taken refuge in evacuation centres since Taal burst to life a week ago, but many hard-hit towns have let residents back for hours each day to fetch items, feed livestock and clean up their houses. "We are directing DRRMCs (civil defence officers)... not to allow anyone to enter the danger zone," said Epimaco Densing, undersecretary for the Department of Interior.

Workers for cruise lines like Carnival and Norwegian might be away from home for over six months, so they need to be thoughtful about what they pack.

A prominent Hong Kong pro-democracy activist was arrested by police, his organisation said on Monday, after a protest he helped organise in the financial district a day earlier turned violent with officers firing tear gas to disperse the crowds. Ventus Lau was arrested on Sunday evening on charges of "obstruction of police administration" and violating terms set when permission was granted for the protest, the Hong Kong Civil Assembly Team said in a statement. "It was primarily rioters' violent acts which led to the suspension of the gathering," Senior Superintendent Ng Lok-chun told reporters.

South Korea on Monday confirmed its first case of the SARS-like virus that is spreading in China, as concerns mount about a wider outbreak. A 35-year-old Chinese woman who flew in from Wuhan, the apparent epicentre of the outbreak, was confirmed to have the new coronavirus strain, the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) said. "She was visiting Seoul on a tour for the Lunar New Year holidays," said KCDC director Jung Eun-kyeong, adding Korean authorities were investigating her movement on the plane and those who might have come in contact with her, including flight attendants.

“This should never be the case,” she wrote. “The cruelty of our immigration system becomes clearer every day. We must stop detaining immigrants and start giving them pathways to citizenship.”

Workers from Switzerland-based Medair use clipboards, cell phones, and GIS software to locate informal settlements of Syrian refugees across Lebanon.

From Dustbuster to Dyson, we tried a bunch of hand vacs, and were surprised by just how powerful they've become.

IoT is a security hellscape. One cryptography has a plan to make it a little bit less so.

Super Cruise? Traffic Jam Assist? Autopilot? Translation for all of the above: Keep your eyes on the road\!

Check this box for an existential crisis.

A special panoramic camera allows artist Jay Mark Johnson to distort reality.

Home delivery is where the action is for real estate developers and EV startups. 

Last week, news of the Democratic debate was all over social media.

With the frozen top of the world melting to liquid, an expedition set out to untangle the physics and help forecast its future.

Fujifilm's latest X-Pro leans into its eccentricities, bringing film-era aesthetics to the digital present.