Following an announcement last year by Russian President Vladimir Putin in his annual State of the Union address, Russia is now about to deploy at least 30 high-tech, underwater nuclear drones that, according to the Russian news agency Tass, would each be “capable of carrying a nuclear warhead with a yield of up to two megatons to destroy enemy naval bases.” A two-megaton nuclear device delivers more than 133 times the explosive force of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, by a United States aircraft on August 6, 1945.

The most powerful nuclear weapon currently in the United States arsenal, the B83 thermonuclear bomb, delivers 1.2 megatons of explosive force, according to The Brookings Institute. One megaton is the equivalent of 1 million tons of the explosive material TNT.

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On Tuesday, a federal judge struck down an attempt by the Trump administration to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census. According to the Huffington Post, critics of the question say that it could result in fewer minorities and immigrants responding to the survey, fearing repercussions for their answers.

The ruling was made by U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman from the Southern District of New York. The question has been viewed as highly controversial ever since it was first suggested by the administration. Many critics worried that the question could dramatically reduce the response rate, resulting in inaccurate numbers for the 2020 census.

The suit against the question was filed by a diverse group. 18 states, as well as the District of Columbia, immigrant rights groups, and several cities all pushed back against the move. They also asserted that adding the question to the census actually violated a federal statute which requires a period of input and evidence prior to making changes to policy.

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A spelling mistake made on Twitter can quickly go viral — especially when it’s made by Donald Trump. On Tuesday morning, the President posted a tweet in which he incorrectly wrote the word ‘hamburgers’ as ‘hamberders.’ The error quickly went viral, and certain fast food franchises were quick to jump on the joking bandwagon.

On Monday evening, Trump hosted the Clemson Tigers football team at the White House. Food and drink were served from a selection of fast food spots, including Wendy’s, McDonald’s, and Burger King. By Tuesday morning, Trump had taken to Twitter to talk about the event — but the results weren’t quite what he expected.

“Great being with the National Champion Clemson Tigers last night at the White House,” Trump wrote. “Because of the Shutdown I served them massive amounts of Fast Food (I paid), over 1000 hamberders etc. Within one hour, it was all gone. Great guys and big eaters!”

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Law enforcement officials are legally barred from forcing people to unlock their smartphones — or other smart devices — using their faces, fingerprints, or via retina scan, a Californian judge has recently ruled.

As reported by Engadget— via Forbes— a nine-page order has recently been discovered, one which details an investigation in which law enforcement was looking into an extortion crime through the use of Facebook.

It seems that, although the presiding judge did acknowledge that investigators had enough evidence to establish probable cause for a warrant, their requests to unlock smartphones through the use of biometric scans had gone too far. The request from law enforcement did not limit their search to any one particular smart device or person — instead, investigators would have been able to compel everyone in the building to unlock their devices.

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It has been a case that captivated the country. Jayme Closs was missing and her parents were dead. Nearly three months went by and there were no sightings of the missing teen. People began to fear the worst.

However, as previously reported by the Inquisitr, Jayme managed to escape her kidnapper and was rescued on January 10. She was located in Gordon, which is approximately 66 miles north of where she had last been sighted.

The 13-year-old had managed to escape her captivity and approached a woman walking her dog, asking for help, according to CNN. She was then rushed into a nearby home and 911 was called. Police arrived and a suspect, Jake Thomas Patterson, was arrested not long after that, thanks to Jayme identifying a car while traveling with the police, according to new details emerging from the criminal complaint.

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Donald Trump has long claimed to be one of the world’s most highly skilled dealmakers. He even parlayed the claim into a bestselling book, The Art of the Deal, which has remained so popular that it still earned him a six-figure royalty payment in 2017, thirty years after its initial publication, as the Inquisitr has reported.

But his business record and now his record in the Oval Office have revealed his claim of extreme dealmaking proficiency to be a hollow one, according to Bloomberg News opinion editor Timothy O’Brien — who also wrote a 2005 biography of Trump.

“Trump, in reality, was never a peerless or even a particularly skillful dealmaker, and many of the most significant business transactions he engineered imploded,” O’Brien wrote on January 7.

“Instead, he made his way in the world as an indefatigable self-promoter, a marketing confection and a human billboard who frequently licensed his name to buildings and products paid for by others.”

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The talk of social media Tuesday was a campaign, launched early in the morning by Gillette, in order to combat what it calls toxic masculinity. The long spot, which will air as part of the Super Bowl next month, plays the shaving brand’s longtime slogan “The Best a Man Can Get,” in order to encourage men to be better, and avoid sexual harassment, casual sexism, and even bullying of others.

The campaign, as was perhaps intended, drew strong reactions. Some have praised its earnest, modest advocacy for better male behavior, while others have criticized it for male-bashing. Others still have agreed with the ad’s sentiments, while arguing that there’s something unseemly about a corporation piggybacking off of a social justice cause in order to sell razors. See Vox for an overview of the different sides of the Gillette Wars of 2019.

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The East Coast of the USA should start bracing itself for a cold spell after meteorologists confirmed that the polar vortex has split into three parts. The change is likely to result in plummeting temperatures for much of the eastern United States.

So far, much of the eastern U.S. has enjoyed a relatively mild winter. But that is all set to change with arctic temperatures likely to reach as far south as Nashville, according to the Washington Post.

The polar vortex is an atmospheric circulation pattern that usually sits above the poles, in a layer of the atmosphere known as the stratosphere. It can weaken when temperatures at the poles become warmer and on occasion, this causes it to break up into smaller “sister vortices” that can travel great distances from the poles. These “sister vortices” typically bring with them stormy weather and extremely low temperatures.

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On Wednesday, top officials from the Kremlin dismissed the idea that Donald Trump could be working as a Russian agent, and criticized American journalists for discussing the issue at all. These allegations come in light of two new reports that raise serious questions about the level of involvement Trump has with the Russian government, in particular with President Vladimir Putin.

According to Bloomberg News, the New York Times claims that as far back as 2017, there were questions about who Trump was working for. In a new report, the New YorkTimes asserts that the FBI actually opened an investigation into Trump to determine whether he was being used — knowingly or unknowingly — by the Russian government. But Kremlin officials were quick to shut down discussions on the topic, calling it “nonsense.”

“That’s stupid,” Yuri Ushakov, foreign policy aide to President Vladimir Putin, said to reporters on Wednesday. “How can the president of the United States be an agent of another country? Just think about that.”

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Donald Trump has now met face-to-face with Russian President Vladimir Putin on five separate occasions, as the New York Times has reported, with no public record existing of what was discussed in any of those meetings. But after one such private meeting in Hamburg, Germany, on July 7, 2017, Trump took the extraordinary step of personally telephoning a Times reporter to defend Putin against charges that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election.

Trump frequently refers to the paper as “the Failing New York Times” — 22 times on Twitter alone since his inauguration.

The July 7, 2017, meeting was an impromptu, unscheduled one between Trump and Putin during a formal dinner at the G20 Summit in Hamburg. In the video below on this page, Trump can be seen gesturing toward Putin during the dinner, pointing at Putin, then at himself, them pumping his fist, as Newsweek reported.

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As the longest partial shutdown of the U.S. government in history continues, low-income families – including the elderly and disabled – face eviction scares as affordable housing funding for assistance programs such as Section 8 begins to run out.

According to the Huffington Post, renters in select states are already facing threats of eviction from landlords as the shutdown has cut off funding to the federal rental assistance program that chipped in a portion of their rent.

“Until the government opens again, you are responsible for ALL of your rental amount,” a property manager penned in a letter to tenants in the state of Arkansas.

The director of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, Diane Yentel, said she found it “appalling” that landlords were already threatening tenants with eviction because of the shutdown.

She, however, also recognizes the blame possibly falls on Trump’s administration who currently refuses to sign any government funding bill that doesn’t include the funding for the border wall.

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Many people have expressed concern about some of the actions taken by Donald Trump during his presidential tenure, and now former CIA director John Brennan has offered his thoughts, agreeing with the assessment that the president is a “clear and present danger” to the country’s national security, Newsweek reported.

Brennan’s thoughts echoed those of David Laufman, former counterintelligence chief of the Department of Justice, who gave his analysis of the commander in chief while appearing on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show on Monday night.

Laufman told show host Rachel Maddow that there was a “culmination of things” that backed his assertion that the president “is a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States,” including the “unbelievable acquiescence to Vladimir Putin in Helsinki,” Newsweek previously reported.

Brennan made an appearance on the same news network on Tuesday, January 15, when he was asked by Chris Hayes if he agreed with the former DOJ official’s evaluation.

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Wildlife photographer Michael George captured an adorable video of a baby manatee that’s going viral on Instagram. The National Geographic shutterbug was at SeaWorld working on his book, Life at the Zoo: The Secret World of Your Favorite Animals, when he was given the opportunity to see the unique bond between rescued baby manatees and the woman who bottle-feeds them.

Per WSVN7, George’s book is for children, and it’s filled with imagery that helps showcase the importance of zoos for animal rescue, breeding, and conservation programs. The manatee in question was being fed inside SeaWorld Orlando’s Manatee Rehabilitation Area. The woman providing the hungry manatee calf with sustenance is clearly a big fan of these creatures, as evidenced by the manatee tattoo on her arm.

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Jimmy Kimmel was one of the several late-night hosts who took a jab at Donald Trump after the president tweeted the word “hamberders” instead of “hamburgers” before quickly deleting his post, joking that he appeared to have “had a stroke or something.”

Trump ordered huge amounts of fast food when he welcomed the Clemson Tigers football team, who won the college national championship last week, to the White House on Monday night — including servings from Burger King, McDonalds, and Wendy’s. And on Tuesday morning, the president took to Twitter to describe the event and gush about the football team, but he accidentally misspelled the word “hamburgers.”

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As the government shutdown continues, with funding for the president’s proposed border wall the main point of contention, many news outlets have been going to the border to interview those close to where the wall would be built.

One such report Wednesday, by the Washington Examiner, alleged something shocking: that ranchers and farmers along the border have been finding Islamic prayer rugs in the area. This indicates that Muslims — and, by implication, Muslim terrorists — have been crossing the border illegally. This echoes rhetoric from the president, per the New York Times, that terrorists are entering the country by crossing the border, and therefore a wall is needed to stop them.

The story features a female rancher from New Mexico, interviewed in a 97-second video, talking about how many of the people crossing the border in recent months have been from countries other than Mexico.

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It’s unclear if Vice President Mike Pence was just late to the news that ISIS has taken responsibility for a suicide bombing this morning in Syria, or if he’s just toeing the Trump administration line that says the terrorist group has been defeated.

The Daily Beast says that Pence boasted on a conference call this morning with Global Chiefs of Mission that “ISIS has been defeated” hours after the attacks by a suicide bomber in the Syrian town of Manbij, killing 15 people, four of whom are said to be United States soldiers.

“The caliphate has crumbled and ISIS has been defeated.”

Pence also doubled down on his support for Donald Trump and his leadership in announcing the military exit from Syria despite the controversy.

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When Jayme Closs, 13, escaped the clutches of her kidnapper after 88 days in captivity, she flagged down a woman walking her dog and asked for assistance. That woman, along with others, helped to keep Jayme safe until the police arrived. Now, the husband of the woman who initially called 911 to report Jayme’s safety suggests that Jayme should receive the reward money being offered in her case.

According to Fox News, Peter Kasinskas, the husband of the woman who called 911 after Jayme appeared, Jayme should be the person to receive the reward money. This news comes after it was suggested that they receive the $50,000 on offer regarding information pertaining to the Closs case.

According to 13 WIBW, the reward money — and who should receive it — is currently being reviewed. Barron County Sheriff Chris Fitzgerald says that the beneficiary of the reward money is currently being discussed between themselves and the FBI.

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In a new book to be published at the end of this month, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie — who in February of 2016, as CNN reported, became the first of Donald Trump’s Republican rivals to drop out of the presidential race and endorse Trump — describes Trump as his “friend,” but has far less kind things to say about the staff members Trump has hired to surround him during his post-election transition and in the White House.

In fact, according to an excerpt published by the news site Axios from Christie’s upcoming memoir Let Me Finish, Christie describes Trump’s staff as “a revolving door of deeply flawed individuals — amateurs, grifters, weaklings, convicted and unconvicted felons — who were hustled into jobs they were never suited for, sometimes seemingly without so much as a background check via Google or Wikipedia.”

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Chad “Cheddar” Mock was cruising along a busy Minnesota street when he rounded a corner and couldn’t believe what happened right in front of his vehicle.

Thankfully, his dashcam captured the entire ordeal. Mock was driving in Mankato when a black four-door car harrowingly pulled out in front of him. Undeterred, Mock kept cruising along at a safe pace of 18 miles an hour, according to his dash cam.

As he maneuvered the bend in the road, something pink and black goes flying out of the tan sedan in front of him. It was a car seat!

Even more shocking was that a little girl wearing a pink coat was strapped into that car seat. The vehicle continued on and Mock slammed on the brakes. He leaped out of his truck and ran up to the car seat. He flagged down oncoming traffic so the motorist wouldn’t hit the child as she laid there on the center line.

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When former Tennessee Titans football player Tony Beckham stepped out of his Wellington, Florida, home at 6:40 a.m. to head off to work, he noticed movement at the side of his house. What he saw sickened and infuriated him instantly.

Beckham spied a man crouched in some bushes alongside the home. He was peering in the window and had his hands in his pants, reported CBS12. The man, Geoffrey Cassidy, 48, was intensely staring into Beckham’s 15-year-old daughter’s bedroom window.

“I waited for a second and I looked again,” Beckham told WPBF. “And I see a white male and he’s standing by my window and he’s trying to get a better position. I couldn’t believe it. I was like, ‘Is this for real?’ I thought I was getting ‘Punk’d.'”

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