The president’s border wall plan could damage or destroy ‘the oldest-known books in North America’

On an overcast summer morning, Carolyn Boyd, an archeologist at Texas State University, stood at the foot of a cave in west Texas, looking up toward a series of towering murals painted on a rock wall. Three massive human-like figures soared toward an overhang that had sheltered the painting from the elements since they were drawn here perhaps 4,000 years ago.

An artist herself, Boyd knows how hard it would have been to paint these long, crisp lines. Before starting, the bands of Indigenous hunter-gatherers who lived in this west Texas valley, where the Pecos River empties into the Rio Grande, would have spent weeks pulverizing gypsum, hematite, limonite and manganese to make paint. They would have gathered massive quantities of sotol stalks to fold its fibers into scaffolding. The painting itself would have required teamwork and precision, with people at the bottom guiding artists on the wall as they painted figures stretching up to 30ft tall.

Appeals court slashes judgment to $1.5m in a significant legal victory for the rightwing Infowars founder

A Texas appeals court has slashed the $50m judgment to $1.5m against Alex Jones, founder of the rightwing platform Infowars, over falsely calling the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, a hoax.

The ruling does not affect a $1.4bn judgment against Jones in Connecticut, but is a significant legal victory for Jones after he and his company, Free Speech Systems, were found liable for damages for claiming the mass shooting didn’t happen.