Donald Trump had a phone conversation with his campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos in December 2016 that appeared to be about a highly lucrative business deal involving Russians — a deal that would “result in large financial gains for himself and Mr. Trump,” according to a letter received by House Intelligence Committee incoming Chair Adam Schiff. The letter was posted by journalist Scott Stedman on his Twitter account, with information about the sender redacted.

But federal authorities are now investigating the claims made in the letter, which they take “very seriously,” according to a major investigative report by Natasha Bertrand and Stedman published online Wednesday by Atlantic Monthly. In the report, Bertrand and Stedman said only that the letter was written by a “confidant” of Papadopoulos.

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The superintendent of Darien, Connecticut, schools recently issued a statement in an email that angered the entire community. The Darien school system announced that parents were no longer allowed to come and visit their children during their lunchtime. According to NBC, the new rule was made because too many parents were making cafeteria visits and causing a distraction to other students.

Darien is a wealthy community that is well known for its topnotch schools. Many parents say they chose to live in this particular area because they wanted the opportunity to be involved in their children’s education. For some parents, an occasional lunch time visit was a great bonding activity for them and their child. Other parents liked to surprise their children on their birthday with a special treat for their lunch. Now they are being told these visits are banned altogether.

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In a report that might make you cry “fake news,” researchers found that dogs just aren’t that smart. No, the researchers were not cats.

According to a shocking new CNN report, dogs do not possess any more intelligence than other carnivores like cats, chimpanzees, dolphins, wolves, pigs, or pigeons. The new study was conducted by researchers in Exeter and Canterbury University and published in the December issue of the journal Learning & Behavior. Psychologists, Professor Stephen Lea and Dr. Britta Osthaus, asked the question, “Are dogs really that special?” It turns out the correct answer, in general, is no in spite of how individual owners feel about their beloved best friends.

The study deduced, “we conclude that dog cognition is influenced by the membership of all three of these groups, and taking all three groups into account, dog cognition does not look exceptional.”

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New photos have emerged of Chris Watts posing affectionately with a dark haired woman. The images show the pair smiling while enjoying time out in nature. The only problem is that the dark-haired woman isn’t Watts’ wife, Shanann. According to People, the woman is Nichol Kessinger, Watts’ former co-worker and mistress.

Watts had only just begun an intimate relationship with Kessinger in July, when he decided to murder his pregnant wife and their daughters, 4-year-old Bella and 3-year-old Celeste on August 13. The deranged father reportedly strangled Shanann and smothered the children, later hiding their bodies in an oil field where he used to work.

Kessinger claimed that Watts’ had told him he was separated from his wife and getting a divorce. As far as she knew, they split up mutually. “I believed him,” she claimed. However, when investigators looked into Kessinger’s search history from before the murder, they found an entirely different story.

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Just one day after he received information that WikiLeaks would soon release “very damaging” information on Democrat Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election campaign, longtime political dirty tricks specialist Roger Stone spoke on the phone to his longtime friend and political protege Donald Trump, according to an analysis of documents by Slate.com staff writer Elliot Hannon.

While the subjects discussed by Stone and Trump in that telephone conversation have not been revealed, Russia investigation Special Counsel Robert Mueller is reportedly investigating that call and all contacts between Trump and Stone during the 2016 campaign, according to a report by Washington Post.

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A digital murder map of medieval London has been created which shows the most dangerous and violent streets of the city during the 14th century. University of Cambridge criminologist Professor Manuel Eisner has carefully surveyed all of the documented cases of murder that occurred between 1300 and 1340 and placed all of these upon a map that shows the “hot spots” of unbridled violence in London during this time.

As Phys.org reports, after analyzing records from the city’s coroner that recorded murders between 1300 and 1340, it was discovered that Cheapside and Cornhill were the two most violent spots in London and also the ones most likely to result in death if you happened to be there at the wrong time. And the wrong time, according to the murder map of London, was on Sunday, when the chance of death was greatest for medieval city folk.

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The same self-proclaimed time traveler who claims to know who will replace Donald Trump as president, per a previous Inquisitr report, has warned that in another 12 years a certain country will try to implement brain chips into as many people as possible, and the USA will be ravaged by apocalyptic floods.

The Express reports that the man simply known as Noah claims that the Philippines will try to give everyone brain chips in 2030.

It’s a shocking claim but then again so is claiming to be from the future. With his face blurred and his voice distorted, Noah discusses his prediction on YouTube channel ApexTV.

According to Noah, 2030 is the point when the Philippines begin to introduce brain chip implements. Apparently, people are not obliged to get the chip.

Noah said, “You can obviously say ‘no’ to this and they won’t give it to you at all. But they’re trying to give it to as many people as humanly possible.”

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The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has issued their provisional statement on the State of the Climate in 2018, in which they warn that we are running out of time to combat climate change, reported the Guardian.

As global temperatures continue to rise, data shows that 2018 will be the fourth hottest year in a row, with temperatures almost 1 degree C above pre-industrial levels. Additionally, the 20 warmest years on record have all occurred in the past 22 years. The WMO warned that, based on current trends, global warming could reach 3 degrees C to 5 degrees C by the end of the 21st century.

WMO deputy secretary general Elena Manaenkova commented on the organization’s warning.

“These are more than just numbers. Every fraction of a degree of warming makes a difference to human health and access to food and fresh water, to the extinction of animals and plants, to the survival of coral reefs and marine life.”

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Special counsel Robert Mueller is said to believe that Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, lied about a number of things, including his personal business dealings, lobbying income, and meeting with a former Russian-Ukrainian associate.

According to Business Insider, Mueller’s team filed a court report on Monday which claimed Manafort had provided untruthful statements to the FBI and the special counsel’s side several times “on a variety of subject matters.” They claim his statements offered several inaccuracies, including his relationship and communications with Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian-Ukrainian political operative and one of his oldest associates, who he reportedly met in Ukraine.

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After nearly 70 hours of interviews with Russia investigation special counsel Robert Mueller and his team of investigators, Micahel Cohen — the former Donald Trump lawyer and “fixer” best known for arranging a $130,000 hush money payoff to porn star Stormy Daniels, as Inquisitr reported — has struck a plea deal with prosecutors, according to a breaking ABC News report on Thursday morning.

Cohen already pleaded guilty in August to financial crimes including federal campaign finance violations involving the payoff to Daniels. But this time, his guilty plea goes straight to the heart of Mueller’s Russia probe, according to the ABC report, which said that Cohen will plead guilty to lying in closed-door congressional testimony about the 2016 Trump presidential campaign’s contacts with Russians.

Also on Thursday, investigators in Frankfurt, Germany, raided the corporate offices of the multinational financial institution Deutsche Bank, according to a Bloomberg News Twitter post. The raid came in connection with a money laundering probe.

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The mother of a 5-year-old Texas child whose first name is Abcde – pronounced “Ab-city”- is speaking out after she says the child was mocked by a Southwest Airlines employee who they say posted the daughter’s boarding pass to social media while making fun of her name.

According to KABC in Los Angeles, when the mother and daughter were getting on a plane at John Wayne Airport in Southern California to return to El Paso, a Southwest gate agent audibly mocked the child’s name to those around her. Then, the agent took a picture of the boarding pass, which was later posted to Facebook.

“The gate agent started laughing, pointing at me and my daughter, talking to other employees,” Traci Redford told the TV station. “So I turned around and said, ‘Hey if I can hear you, my daughter can hear you, so I’d appreciate if you’d just stop.”

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A Thanksgiving Day argument about the practice of kneeling in protest during the national anthem at NFL games took a turn for the worse when a North Carolina father broke up a fight between his two sons over the topic and reportedly shot and wounded one of them by accident.

According to reports from ABC News and the News and Observer, police authorities from Cary, North Carolina reported that the above incident started when 21-year-old Esteban Marley Valencia and his brother, 27-year-old Felipe Miguel Valencia, began arguing at Thanksgiving dinner about the kneeling protests that have been taking place in the NFL since the 2016 season. Speaking to police, the young men’s father, 51-year-old Jorge Luis Valencia-Lamadrid, said that Esteban had been “drinking a large amount of alcohol” throughout Thanksgiving and had gotten into “verbal and physical altercations” with other people at home prior to the incident.

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Elizabeth Midlarsky, a 77-year-old professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College, opened her office door on Wednesday to discover frightening and awful pieces of graffiti spray-painted on her walls.

“I opened the outer door and almost passed out,” Midlarsky said, according to reporting from CNN.

What Midlarsky found in her office was two large swastikas and a derogatory word adorning the once-blank spaces on her office walls. Midlarsky is Jewish herself, and has written extensively on the subject of the Holocaust during World War II.

The professor immediately reported the incident to her university, and the New York Police Department is investigating the matter as a possible hate crime. Taken aback by the bigoted imagery in her office, Midlarsky, who is reportedly in declining health, was driven home by van so that she could be removed from the situation.

“I was so shaky, I wasn’t sure I was going to make it,” she recalled.

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As he prepared to depart for the G20 summit in Argentina on Thursday morning, Donald Trump told reporters that his former lawyer and “fixer” Michael Cohen is “a weak person” who is “lying” to get himself a lighter prison sentence, according to the Associated Press. Cohen entered a guilty plea in a New York federal court on Thursday — the second time he has done so in just four months.

This time, Cohen pleaded guilty to telling lies under oath about Trump’s business deals in Moscow leading up to and during the 2016 presidential campaign, as Inquisitr reported earlier on Thursday.

According to a plea document signed by Cohen and posted online by Vox.com, Cohen told congress during closed-door hearings in August of 2017 that the planned Trump Tower Moscow project was dead by January of 2016. In fact, Cohen now admits, discussions on the proposed real estate project continued until June of 2016.

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Former President Bill Clinton and his wife, former Secretary of State and presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, made the second stop of their 13-city paid North American speaking tour–“An Evening With The Clintons”–yesterday, appearing on stage in Montreal on Wednesday night. During the event, the Daily Mail reported, the former first couple had some words of admiration for Canada, and also received a special gift from the city’s hockey team.

Upon arriving to the Bell Centre, which is home to the Montreal Canadiens NHL hockey team, the Clintons were gifted personalized Canadiens jerseys complete with their last names printed on the back, which they appeared delighted to received.

They later spent an hour addressing the crowd at the arena, which was moderated by fashion designer Tanya Taylor, and indicated the the United States needed to follow in the footsteps of their northern neighbor, and should see the country as a role model for diversity.

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By now, most fans know that Kevin Spacey is at the center of a sexual assault scandal that could likely derail his life and destroy his career. But, according to Radar Online, the former House of Cards actor is going to great lengths to ensure that doesn’t happen. It has been reported that Kevin Spacey has gone into hiding in order to avoid the allegations. Reports suggest that Spacey has avoided the public eye at all costs, as he was last seen in November of 2017.

During the time which he was last seen, he was reportedly dressed in disguise and jogging around a rehabilitation facility in Arizona which costs $25,000 a month. Spacey was supposed to be at the facility for approximately 45 days, but the publication reports that he checked himself out of the facility just 21 days after checking in.

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Two California teenagers were killed execution-style Sunday morning, November 25, in a triple homicide in Tijuana, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune. The two male teenagers set out on a trip Friday, November 23, to Ensenada. There, they met up with another male teen from Tijuana. The three teenagers were found deceased at an apartment complex the following Sunday.

Christopher Alexis Gomez, 17, and Juan Suarez-Ojeda, 18, of San Diego — along with the unidentified teenager from Tijuana — had gone to a barbecue on Friday afternoon, which witnesses confirmed. The San Diego teens were supposed to come back to the U.S. that same night, but never made it. According to Gomez’s cousin, as reported by the San Diego Union-Tribune, the Tijuana teen called his mother Saturday morning to confirm they were all safe, but they had lost their cellphones.

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A meeting of art experts and multiple organizations was held back in 1989 with the purpose of returning over half a million pieces of art stolen by Nazis from Jews during World War II. This effort was spearheaded by an American diplomat named Stuart Eizenstat who created a document through this meeting called the “Washington Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art.”

The Daily Beast is reporting that if everyone had complied with the recommended principles, over 600,000 pieces of art (currently held by governments, museums, and private collectors) would have been returned to its rightful owner or their heirs.

But in a new meeting in Berlin, hosted by the German Lost Art Foundation to measure the success of the project, it seems things are a mixed bag. Eizenstat is attending the conference to report that the countries with the most stolen art are doing the least to return the art to its rightful owners.

Eizenstat is calling on Spain, Italy, Russia, Hungary, and Poland to do the right thing.

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A man from Buckeye in Maricopa County, Arizona, had to be rushed to hospital this week after he accidentally shot himself in the groin while inside a Walmart store.

As reported by Newsweek, the police responded on Tuesday to the Watson and Yuma Walmart, and later tweeted that the scene appeared to be a case of a “self-inflicted accidental shooting” inside the retailer.

Buckeye PD later confirmed the theory with a statement: “Adult male accidentally shot himself in the groin area inside the Walmart Watson & Yuma. Being transported to hospital. No other injuries.”

The incident occurred at approximately 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday. The man who shot himself had been carrying his semi-automatic handgun in the waistband of his pants when it had suddenly started to slip. Not wanting it to fall and potentially go off if it hit the ground, he attempted to reposition it in his waistband, and instead accidentally discharged the weapon, according to the man’s explanation to police.

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Sometimes people break the rules of Twitter and get banned from the popular social media platform. However, right-wing conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer decided not to take her banning sitting down. Instead of going away, she went to the Twitter headquarters on West 17th Street in Chelsea, New York, and chained herself the front door in protest of them denying her access to the platform.

Loomer is so mad that she said she’s willing to go to jail to protest her treatment on the site. As part of her protest, the journalist also wore a yellow Star of David on her sweater, and she compared what is going on with what the Nazis did to Jews leading up to World War II.

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