President Donald Trump directed his longtime attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, according to two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation of the matter. Trump also supported a plan, set up by Cohen, to visit Russia during the presidential campaign, in order to personally meet President Vladimir Putin and jump-start the tower negotiations. “Make it happen,” the sources said Trump told Cohen.

At the FBI Laboratory in Quantico, Virginia, a team of about a half-dozen technicians analyzes pictures down to their pixels, trying to determine if the faces, hands, clothes or cars of suspects match images collected by investigators from cameras at crime scenes. The unit specializes in visual evidence and facial identification, and its examiners can aid investigations by making images sharper, revealing key details in a crime or ruling out potential suspects.

Moving to protect the U.S. from advanced missile threats from China and Russia, President Donald Trump on Thursday laid out plans for a new array of space-based sensors and other high-tech systems designed to more quickly detect and defeat attacks. Trump, in a speech at the Pentagon, declared that space is the new warfighting domain. And he vowed that the U.S. will develop an unrivaled missile defense system to protect against advanced hypersonic and cruise missile threats from competitors and adversaries.

While a noisy Supreme Court fight captivated America last fall, an obscure federal accounting body quietly approved a system of classified money-moving. By Matt Taibbi.

College students from rural areas are moving to big cities for higher wages to help pay off their student loans, according to new research from the Federal Reserve. Why it matters: A "rural brain drain" has been pulling college-educated people out of rural America and into urban areas, deepening an educational and political divide that is increasingly coming to define the country.

Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and other major Republicans are spreading misinformation in support of the president's fixation on a border wall. By Nick Gillespie.

Kraft Foods wants to make sure that government workers currently on furlough during the shutdown do not go hungry. On Tuesday, the food corporation announced it will open a pop-up store in Washington, D.C., from Jan. 16 through Sunday, Jan. 20, that will provide free food to government workers who can present the appropriate identification. The store is located at 1287 4th Street NE, two blocks from Union Market.

The Sikh community is known for its kind gesture and benevolence. In a recent incident that will restore our faith in humanity, the community has offered free meals to fellow American government employees after they were caught amid the shutdown that has left thousands without pay. The Gurdwara menu which includes lentils, vegetables, rice and tortillas helped the employees in San Antonio, Texas.

OK, so it was never great in the first place. But the rise of rank nationalists could finally—perversely—spark an era of progress and cooperation for all humanity.

Kraft Heinz Co. is offering a helping hand to federal workers who have been without pay amid the longest government shutdown in U.S. history by offering them unlimited free Kraft food products. The food giant announced Tuesday that it is opening a pop-up grocery store in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday to help workers who are struggling to make ends meet.

Americans experience more food recalls today than they did five years ago, particularly when it comes to meat and poultry, a government watchdog analysis found. Meat and poultry recalls increased by two-thirds from 2013 to 2018 while food recalls overall edged up 10 percent, according to the report published Thursday by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG).

A pack of wild canines found frolicking near the beaches of the Texas Gulf Coast carries a substantial amount of red wolf genes, researchers said, a surprising discovery because the animal was declared extinct in the wild nearly 40 years ago. The finding has led wildlife biologists and others to develop a new understanding that the red wolf DNA is remarkably resilient after decades of human hunting, loss of habitat and other factors had led the animal to near decimation.

In 2019, more renewable energy will be added to the grid than fossil fuel-based energy, according to estimates from the Energy Information Administration (EIA). That had been the trend between 2013 and 2017, but last year new natural gas-fired power plants outpaced renewable additions to the grid. As a result, US carbon emissions increased, notably from the power sector, despite the rapid retirement of coal plants and a growing consciousness about the necessity of low-carbon energy.

Canadian air traffic controllers have bought hundreds of pizzas for their American counterparts over the past few days in what has become an industry-wide show of support during the U.S. government’s partial shutdown. Peter Duffey, the head of the Canadian Air Traffic Control Association, said the initiative began Thursday when employees at Edmonton’s control centre took up a collection to buy pies for controllers in Anchorage, Alaska.

On Friday, R Kelly received another visit from police — this time at Trump Tower Chicago, where the R&B singer has been hiding out, according to TMZ. Following the airing of the Lifetime documentary Surviving R Kelly, prosecutors in Cook County, IL encouraged Kelly’s alleged victims to “please come forward” in order to initiate an investigation. According to the Chicago Tribune, one tip they received said two women were being held against their will at Kelly’s Trump Tower residence.

In a reversal of a deal local officials had touted as a win for Los Angeles tech, SpaceX will no longer build its Mars spaceship and rocket booster system at the Port of Los Angeles. Instead, work to develop and test the prototype will be done in south Texas. SpaceX said in a statement Wednesday that the decision was made to “streamline operations.”

States with strict gun laws have lower rates of gun deaths among children and teenagers, and laws to keep guns away from minors are linked with fewer gun suicides in this age group, a Stanford study found. Compared with U.S. states with the strictest gun control legislation, gun deaths among children and teenagers are twice as common in states with the most lax gun laws, a study from the Stanford University School of Medicine has found.

Amid reports of overflowing trash cans and bathrooms at the nation’s national parks during the partial government shutdown, and the destruction of Joshua trees in Southern California, the charity supporting the parks system is seeking donations for repair once the government reopens. Will Shafroth, president of the National Park Foundation, said the fundraising drive launched Thursday night is most analogous to its efforts helping parks recover after natural disasters.

House Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) won the race for New York’s 14th congressional district by leading with her democratic socialist politics and running on a progressive platform advocating for an increased marginal tax rate on the wealthy and universal healthcare. Much to the surprise of her new colleagues on Capitol Hill, Ocasio-Cortez has not backed down on pushing for these ideas. And she’s using some nerdy quotes to do it.

Crises are a time-tested means of subverting democracy. From Getúlio Vargas and other better-known dictators in the 1930s to Indira Gandhi and Ferdinand Marcos in the 1970s and on to Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan more recently, autocratic-minded leaders have long used national emergencies — some real, some fabricated — to claim extraordinary powers. One of our greatest concerns about Donald Trump’s presidency has always been that he would exploit (or invent) a crisis in order to justify an abuse of power. Recent events have given this concern new immediacy.

So much ink has been spilled for so long on the national debt, it might be nice if that $22 trillion plus on the red side of the US balance sheet just didn't really matter. That's exactly the thinking behind a new school of economic theory that the government should be spending more, not less.

More U.S. coal-fired power plants were shut in President Donald Trump’s first two years than were retired in the whole of Barack Obama’s first term, despite the Republican’s efforts to prop up the industry to keep a campaign promise to coal-mining states.

An on-duty bus driver in Milwaukee knew what she had to do when she saw a young boy when a baby wandering around alone near busy streets. Milwaukee County Transit System (MCTS) driver Irena Ivic spotted the boy, wearing only a red onesie and no shoes, running down the sidewalk at 8 a.m. on Dec. 22, 2018. Surveillance video from the bus shows Ivic's view of the boy as he ran over a freeway overpass. Another security camera captured her reaction in the driver's seat.

Donald Trump's administration has been accused of trying to downplay the danger of nuclear waste so it can "abandon its responsibility to clean up their mess". A federal government plan to reclassify this waste as less dangerous has been fiercely criticised by officials in Washington state, who said the move would allow it to walk away from its responsibility to clean up millions of gallons of toxic, radioactive material.

At a press conference held on Dec. 20, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced the prosecution of two hackers from communist China. According to the DOJ, they were members of the hacking unit APT10, which is affiliated with the Chinese regime’s Ministry of State Security (MSS). The MSS is China’s only official intelligence agency, and is relatively new given the long history of communist Chinese espionage.

Although shoppers kept credit card machines busy this holiday season, growing evidence indicates that Americans are starting to feel uneasy about the pile of debt to which we continue to add. A new survey from CreditCards.com finds that more than two in five Americans currently carrying debt don’t know when they’ll pay off those balances — and one in four say they expect their debts to outlive them. “It’s definitely a depressing statistic,” said Ted Rossman, industry analyst for the site. “When we did a similar study back in 2013, only 9 percent never expected to get out of debt, and now it’s 25 percent.”

In the 1960s, the sugar industry funded research that downplayed the risks of sugar and highlighted the hazards of fat, according to a newly published article in JAMA Internal Medicine. The article draws on internal documents to show that an industry group called the Sugar Research Foundation wanted to "refute" concerns about sugar's possible role in heart disease. The SRF then sponsored research by Harvard scientists that did just that.

North Carolina's controversial legislation is impacting Hollywood's decision to film in the state. Netflix has opted to film its upcoming North Carolina-set series OBX, a coming-of-age drama set in a fictional town in North Carolina's Outer Banks, in South Carolina instead due to remnants of North Carolina's anti-LGBTQ House Bill 2. Best known as "the bathroom bill," the law requires transgender people use the public restrooms that correspond to the sex on their birth certificate. The legislation first drew criticism when it was enacted in 2016, with some studios even pulling their projects out of the state.

A bus driver in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, has been honoured for saving a toddler wandering alone in freezing conditions. Irena Ivic, who works for the Milwaukee County Transit System, spotted the child running along an overpass in December.

When the GOP passed tax reform in 2017 the party justified it's corporate tax cuts claims that the reductions would boost US employment wages and the economy in general. The FCC justified it's repeal of net neutrality by arguing that the regulation of wireless and wireline service was hampering innovation imposing ruinous costs and harming the telcos ISPs and cellular service providers in the United States.

The "shutdown" or US government shutdown that paralyzes some of the federal administrations of the US government has become the longest in the history of the United States on the night of Friday to Saturday, entering its 22nd day. This partial halt to the functioning of the federal authorities, which began on December 22, now exceeds 21 days of "shutdown" under the presidency of Bill Clinton in 1996.

Last year, four of the largest U.S. cell carriers were caught selling and sending real-time location data of their customers to shady companies that sold it on to big spenders, who would use the data to track anyone “within seconds” for whatever reason they wanted. At first, a little-known company LocationSmart was obtaining (and leaking) real-time location data from AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint and selling access through another company, 3Cinteractive, to Securus, a prison technology company, which tracked phone owners without asking for their permission.

A major survey of American authors has uncovered a crash in author earnings described as “a crisis of epic proportions” – particularly for full-time literary writers, who are “on the verge of extinction”. Surveying its membership and that of 14 other writers’ organisations in what it said was the largest survey of US authors’ earnings ever conducted, the Authors Guild reported that the median income from writing-related work fell to a historic low in 2017 at $6,080 (£4,760), down 42% from 2009.

The family of a Florida man who died in a high-speed accident involving a Tesla has sued the automaker, alleging that his Tesla's battery was defective and that the company was negligent when it removed a speed governor on the car. According to the lawsuit, Edgar Monserratt v. Tesla—which was filed Tuesday in Broward County court—Monserratt's 18-year-old son was a front-seat passenger in a 2014 Tesla S being driven by another person, Barrett Riley.

Jayme Closs, a 13-year-old girl who vanished after her parents were found dead in their northwestern Wisconsin home, has been found alive, the Barron County Sheriff's Department said. The Douglas County Sheriff's Department in Wisconsin notified the Barron County Sheriff's Department on Thursday that they had located Jayme alive.