At 17, they were meant to be taking their A-levels this year. But Harvey Tweats and Tom Whitehurst have a big ambition: to replace the toads, frogs and lizards we have lost.

The insurrection at the Capitol was just the latest chapter in America's ongoing battle over race, writes NPR host Sam Sanders. "Once you see it as such," he says, "it all makes a lot more sense."

Banned from social media and abandoned by some staff after inciting a riot at the U.S. Capitol, President Donald Trump and a dwindling circle of advisers plan a defiant final week in office, according to people familiar with the matter.

The United States is lifting decades-old restrictions between American and Taiwanese officials, in a move that will fundamentally change Washington's relationship with the self-governed island -- and is expected to anger Beijing. Washington has for years "created complex internal restrictions to regulate" US officials' dealings with Taiwan "in an attempt to appease the Communist regime in Beijing," US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement on Saturday. "No more," Pompeo wrote. China considers Taiwan a part of its territory, and US dealings with the democratically ruled island have long been a source of tension. In a statement, Pompeo, a staunch critic of China, wrote that US diplomats should now consider all previous State Department contact guidelines regarding relations with Taiwan to be "null and void."

Winds of change did not blow through a luxury seaside resort here as top Republicans huddled Friday to chart their party's future. After disappointing elections that cost the GOP the White House and control of the U.S. Senate — and after a mob incited by President Trump to protest his election defeat left five dead and his lame-duck administration in shambles — there was little appetite for a course correction, or for taking on the president. Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman Trump installed four years ago as the titular head of the GOP, was reelected unanimously without a challenger. She lavishly praised Trump for attracting new voters in his losing campaign while thanking him for choosing her for the post. And Tommy Hicks Jr., a close ally of the president and his eldest son, overwhelmingly defeated three challengers to remain co-chair of the Republican Party with 70 percent of the vote.

“My concern, as a virologist, is that if you wanted to make a vaccine-resistant strain, what you would do is to build a cohort of partially immunized individuals in the teeth of a highly prevalent viral infection,” Bieniasz told STAT. Even rolling out the vaccine at all when there is so much transmission occurring is far from ideal, he said, suggesting it would have been safer to beat down the amount of virus in circulation before beginning the vaccine deployment.

Evans, who was arrested on federal charges Friday, was set to be a first-time officeholder.

President Donald Trump is considering having Rudy Giuliani and Alan Dershowitz defend him if he faces another impeachment trial, two sources familiar with the matter said.

Two Black officers told BuzzFeed News that their chief and other upper management left them totally unprepared and were nowhere to be found on the day.

Naively, I thought they were taking little things so seriously to demonstrate how gravely and ruthlessly they would dismantle a big thing. (After all, Fortress D.C. hasn’t had a problem being ruthless in the name of security in the fairly recent past.) But Wednesday’s insurrectionist siege revealed that there never was any higher purpose to us getting yelled at or detoured. It wasn’t an indication of any higher seriousness at all. It was instead the limits of the security’s reach.

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall plays a critical role in the group that helped organize the protest and rally that preceded the riots, attack and attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday. Marshall leads the Republican Attorneys General Association’s dark-money nonprofit Rule of Law Defense Fund, which is listed as a participating organization for the March to Save America on the march’s website, as are the groups Stop the Steal, Tea Party Patriots and Turning Point Action. The website is now down, but archived versions show RLDF as a participating group. “I am honored to lead RAGA’s policy branch, the Rule of Law Defense Fund, and bring conservative attorneys general together in promotion of federalism, freedom, and the rule of law,” Marshall said in a Nov. 10 statement to RAGA.

A web of pro-Trump dark money groups organized and funded a rally that led to the infamous riot on Capitol Hill.

Donald Trump does not become president of a country by accident, although there has inarguably been a strong slapstick element to it. A country would first have to be depraved enough to produce a Donald Trump in the first place, and then it would have to go on getting progressively sicker in ways that permitted him to rise, through one egregious public idiocy after another and from one act of casual defilement to the next, to the sort of prominence that would make that presidential campaign possible. It would have to be sick in ways that would make it such that long before he inexorably won his party’s nomination and then the nation’s highest office, nearly every American knew his name. The country would have to be distracted and defeated and deluded enough to believe that this qualified him, and even qualified him in unique ways. It would have conflated not just who Trump appeared to be on TV with who he really was, but its own governance with unusually slow-moving TV programming.

Pence and Trump reportedly met on Wednesday morning, before Trump left to whip his supporters up into a violent rage, and it did not go well.

Spanish dictator Francisco Franco's family has finally been evicted from the summer palace it has occupied since 1938. The handover shows how Spain is starting to confront its past — but also points to the vast real estate and business power that still lies in the hands of Franco's supporters.

Among the speakers addressing the raucous crowd was Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney and face of his failed legal effort to challenge the election results in court. The former New York mayor walked on stage to “Macho Man” before calling on Trump supporters to settle the dispute over the election via “trial by combat.” Giuliani then assured the thousands of protesters that he was “willing to stake my reputation,” on the existence of election-altering fraud at play, ignoring the fact that such unfounded claims have repeatedly been laughed out of court. “And if we are wrong we will be made fools of,” Giuliani continued, as if that ship had not already sailed.

NEW YORK (AP) — A woman who wrongly accused a Black teenager of stealing her phone and tackled him while being filmed at a New York City hotel apologized but defended her actions in a television interview.

“The legacy of the Trump administration is going to be that the president sparked an insurrection and people died.”

Some Democrats are more afraid of backlash than they are concerned with making government work for people. Even the prospect of the government cutting Americans no-strings-attached $2,000 checks seemed, as 2020 ended, to send certain moderates and liberals into a state of mild panic, as they imagined the funds falling into undeserving hands.

Twitter, the president’s preferred megaphone, cited “the risk of further incitement for violence.”