On January 23, 2016, Donald Trump notoriously declared, 'I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters.' That statement was understood at the time as a metaphorical expression of the depth of Republican voters' commitment to him. Ten years and one day later, his administration's agents shot a disarmed man on the street in full view of the public. Perhaps we should have taken him not only seriously but also literally. The dynamic Trump observed is that he had created a bond with his supporters that no outside facts could break, even something as blatant as a cold-blooded killing on an American street. And that is the nub of the crisis into which we have plunged over the past decade. All politicians spin and distort to some extent, of course. Trump's innovation was to grasp that, because the conservative movement had trained its devotees to ignore mainstream media and rely completely on information supplied by its own loyalists, his ability to control his supporters' perceptions effectively had no limit. And because his supporters would believe anything, he could do anything....

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro was already irritated by what he describes as 'unnecessarily contentious' questions from the team vetting him to be Kamala Harris's running mate when a senior aide made one final inquiry: 'Have you ever been an agent of the Israeli government'' Shapiro, one of the most well-known Jewish elected officials in the country'and one of at least three Jewish politicians considering a run for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination'says he took umbrage at the question. 'Had I been a double agent for Israel' Was she kidding' I told her how offensive the question was,' Shapiro writes in his forthcoming book, Where We Keep the Light, a copy of which The Atlantic obtained ahead of its release on January 27. The exchange became even more tense, he writes, when Remus asked whether Shapiro had ever spoken with an undercover Israeli agent. The questions left the governor feeling uneasy about the prospect of being Harris's No. 2, a role that ultimately went to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. After Harris and Walz lost to Donald Trump, many Democrats were critical of her decision to bypass Shapiro, the popular governor of the nation's largest swing state. In his book, Shapiro says that the decision may not have been fully hers; he says he had 'a knot in my stomach' throughout a vetting process that was more combative than he had expected. Shapiro wrote that he decided to take his name out of the running after a one-on-one meeting with Harris that featured more clashes, including about Israel....

Traces of toxic plant compounds have been found on a handful of 60,000-year-old African arrowheads, providing the oldest chemical evidence that Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers used poison to bring down prey. The finding, published on 7 January in Science Advances1, adds to the growing picture of how intelligent and technologically advanced people were in this era. Making poisoned arrows is about as hard as following a 'complex cooking recipe', says study co-author Marlize Lombard, an archaeologist at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa. 'You have to add to it the danger of the poison, and planning to work with it without getting poisoned yourself, then you have to hunt and track the prey animal under difficult and dangerous conditions sometimes for a day or two.' 'It shows advanced planning, strategy and causal reasoning ' something that is very difficult to demonstrate for people living so long ago, but for which the evidence is increasing every year,' agrees archaeologist Justin Bradfield, also at the University of Johannesburg, who was not involved in the study....

On Tuesday afternoon, the risk of wildfire in northeastern Colorado had risen high enough that Xcel Energy, the state's largest utility company, announced that it would shut down power in much of the area the following day. Expected high winds, combined with the current dry conditions, meant that a downed electrical line could spark a catastrophe. Local institutions responded by announcing closures yesterday, among them the Boulder, Colorado'based National Center for Atmospheric Research, or NCAR. Shortly after the Xcel announcement, USA Today broke the news that the Trump administration planned to 'dismantle' the center. Climate scientists know NCAR as one of the largest weather-and-climate-research institutions in the world; Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, described it as 'one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country.' NCAR had already reduced its staff in anticipation of drastic budget cuts at the National Science Foundation, which provides about half of the center's funding. In March, a major NCAR project meant to track hurricanes and other severe storms was canceled after the administration pulled back money appropriated for it. Now efforts to dissolve the center would begin 'immediately,' USA Today reported, and would include a full closure of the center's Mesa Laboratory'whose distinctive rose-hued towers, designed by I. M. Pei, have overlooked the city since the 1960s. (The Office of Management and Budget did not immediately return a request for comment.)...