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Residents of southeast Michigan were left a bit shaken Tuesday night after a big bright flash lit up the sky and the ground beneath them shook. A flying saucer? No. A shooting star? Not quite. The National Weather Service eventually solved the mystery, tweeting "USGS confirms meteor occurred around 810 pm, causing a magnitude 2.0 earthquake."

WASHINGTON—The Pentagon is planning to develop two new sea-based nuclear weapons to respond to Russia and China’s growing military capabilities, according to a sweeping Defense Department review of nuclear strategy. The planned move has ignited a broad debate over future U.S. nuclear strategy at a time when the nation also faces the threat of proliferation, in particular from North Korea’s efforts to expand its arsenal of nuclear weapons and develop long-range missiles capable of delivering them. Supporters of the Pentagon’s plan say it is time for the U.S. to update its nuclear forces to deal with changing threats some three...

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese public broadcaster NHK issued a false alarm about a North Korean missile launch on Tuesday, just days after a similar gaffe caused panic in Hawaii, but it managed to correct the error within minutes. It was not immediately clear what triggered the mistake. Related Searches Missile Alert False Alarm HawaiiHawaii Missile False AlarmFalse Missile Alert HawaiiMissile Launch HawaiiBallistic Missile Alert Hawaii "We are still checking," an NHK spokesman said. NHK's 6.55 p.m. alert said: "North Korea appears to have launched a missile ... The government urges people to take shelter inside buildings or underground." The same...

Electronics giants like Samsung, LG, Panasonic and more suddenly lost power to their booths a little after 11 a.m. PT. LG’s exhibit in the center portion of the hall is enclosed, and when the power dropped out it drew audible gasps from attendees, and for a minute it seemed like some sort of surprise announcement. But everyone quickly realized that there was a problem and brought out their phones to provide a modicum of light as attendees exited the hall. Other parts of the hall remain up and running, but CES attendees outside were locked out of the convention center...

The movies were right: Gremlins are real. Or at least they will be if DARPA -- the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency -- has anything to say about it. As we learned this week from our friends at the Navy Times , DARPA is moving ahead on its effort to create a fleet of flying aircraft carriers, which it calls the "Gremlins" program, with demonstration flights scheduled to begin sometime next year. What are Gremlins? We've been watching this particular hush-hush DARPA project for more than two years now . In a nutshell, it calls for the creation of...

Washington (AFP) - President Donald Trump chimed in on the weather Thursday, citing the cold wave sweeping across much of the central and northeastern United States as justification for his controversial move to leave the global climate change pact. "In the East, it could be the COLDEST New Year's Eve on record," Trump tweeted from his Mar a Lago resort in Florida, where he is on holiday vacation. "Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming that our Country, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect against. Bundle up!"...

GOP tax plan could lead companies to curb shifting of profits abroad—and could satisfy Trump’s protectionist instincts. Besides tax reform, one of President Donald Trump’s most cherished goals is reducing the gaping U.S. trade deficit. In a little-appreciated way, the tax bill expected to pass Congress this week may do just that. This wouldn’t come by making businesses and workers more productive or changing other countries’ trade practices, but by curbing the incentive for multinational companies to artificially shift profits abroad... CLICK RELATED VIDEO LINK AT WSJ TRUNCATED ARTICLE FOR FURTHER DETAILS

Included in the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act, which President Donald Trump intends to sign soon, is a provision that will allow the military to save an estimated $200,000 per year by selling surplus M1911 pistols to those in the public interested in purchasing them. Used widely during World War I, World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War, these historic firearms have been officially out of service since 1985, when the military replaced them with Beretta 92 pistols. Since then, the military has been forced to store leftover M1911 pistols at a price of $2 per year....

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION is considering a set of proposals developed by Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a retired CIA officer — with assistance from Oliver North, a key figure in the Iran-Contra scandal — to provide CIA Director Mike Pompeo and the White House with a global, private spy network that would circumvent official U.S. intelligence agencies, according to several current and former U.S. intelligence officials and others familiar with the proposals. The sources say the plans have been pitched to the White House as a means of countering “deep state” enemies in the intelligence community seeking to undermine Donald...

The former director of the Office of Government Ethics filed a complaint with a federal watchdog over White House counselor Kellyanne Conway's comments on the Alabama Senate race, saying Conway could have violated a law that forbids federal employees from using their positions for political purposes. "I have filed a complaint with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, which investigates Hatch Act violations," Walter Shaub tweeted Wednesday...

<p>And it was the attempt to rebuff criticism of capitalism that mostly riled up the crowd.</p> <p>Chibber argued that the problem with capitalism is the power it has over workers. With the weakening of U.S. labor unions, “we have a complete despotism of the employers,” he said, leading to stagnant wages. When Mangu-Ward countered that Americans aren’t coerced on the job, the crowd erupted in laughter. “Every morning you wake up and you have a decision about whether or not you’re going to go to work,” she insisted, and the audience laughed again...</p>

An eagle-eyed driver has been credited with helping crack the case last week after he spotted a suspicious suitcase being loaded onto his bus as he prepared to drive from Paris to the airport, a hub for low-cost airlines. Acting on his tip-off about a large brown bag that appeared to be moving on its own, police at Beauvais pounced on a Romanian man who picked up the suitcase and a smaller black rucksack as he arrived. After arresting him, detectives found an accomplice hidden inside the case who, once alone in the baggage hold during the trip, would pull...

MIAMI Authorities sent an aircraft carrier and other Navy ships to help with search-and-rescue operations in Florida on Monday as a flyover of the hurricane-battered Keys yielded what the governor said were scenes of devastation. "I just hope everyone survived," Gov. Rick Scott said. He said boats were cast ashore, water, sewers and electricity were knocked out, and "I don't think I saw one trailer park where almost everything wasn't overturned." Authorities also struggled to clear the single highway connecting the string of islands to the mainland. ... He said the Navy dispatched the USS Iwo Jima, USS New York...

The map above (click to enlarge) was created (with assistance from AEI’s graphic design director Olivier Ballou) by matching the economic output (GDP) in each US state (and the District of Columbia) in 2016 to a foreign country with comparable nominal GDP last year, using data from the BEA for GDP by US state and data for GDP by country from the International Monetary Fund. For each US state (and the District of Columbia), we identified the country closest in economic size in 2016 (measured by nominal GDP), and for each state there was a country that was a...

KROMDRAAI, South Africa (Reuters) - Scientists unveiled the first evidence on Tuesday that early humans co-existed in Africa 300,000 years ago with a small-brained human-like species thought to already be extinct on the continent at that time. The findings, published in three papers in the journal "eLife", raise fresh questions about human evolution, including the prospect that behaviours previously attributed to humans may have been developed by hominin precursors of Homo sapiens. Hominins are an extinct group of the same genus as humans, the only surviving members of that category today. Man's nearest living relatives, chimpanzees and gorillas, are further...

FULL HEADLINE: "It's not just CNN: Now ABC, CBS and NBC all refuse to run Trump re-election campaign ad that blasts them as 'FAKE NEWS'" President Trump's 2020 reelection campaign is blasting 'biased' CNN, ABC, CBS and NBC for refusing to run Trump's first re-election ad The ad includes five TV news anchors and personalities as it blasts 'fake news' CNN pushed back at the 'false graphic' as says 'the mainstream media is not 'fake news' The campaign planned to put $1.5 million behind the 30-second ad Instead the publicity will drive millions of eyeballs to see it, free of...

A huge well of molten carbon that would spell disaster for the planet if released has been found under the US. Scientists using the world's largest array of seismic sensors have mapped a deep-Earth area, covering 700,000 sq miles (1.8 million sq km). This is around the size of Mexico, and researchers say it has the potential to cause untold environmental damage. The discovery could change our understanding of how much carbon the Earth contains, suggesting it is much more than we previously believed. It would be impossible to drill far enough down to physically 'see' the Earth's mantle,...

The Trump administration has been looking for ways to cover the cost of its "massive" proposed tax cut. On Wednesday, it appeared to offer at least a partial solution: Make blue states pay... ~snip~ So just how dramatic is it? According to 2014 figures compiled by the Tax Foundation, taxpayers in just four deep blue states -- California, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois -- reaped nearly 44% of total benefit from the deduction. That means those four states pick up the lion's share of the tab if the deduction were eliminated. In all, the 18 states that went blue...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump's top national security aides have completed a broad review of U.S. options aimed at countering North Korea's nuclear and missile programs, a senior U.S. official said on Sunday. The review, which was accelerated to have it done before Trump's summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping this week, includes a range of economic and military measures but leans towards new sanctions and increased pressure on Beijing to rein in its neighbor, the official said. The list of recommendations was put together by Trump's National Security Council on his orders and was ready for his consideration,...

Federal employees worried that President Donald Trump will gut their agencies are creating new email addresses, signing up for encrypted messaging apps and looking for other, protected ways to push back against the new administration’s agenda. Whether inside the Environmental Protection Agency, within the Foreign Service, on the edges of the Labor Department or beyond, employees are using new technology as well as more old-fashioned approaches — such as private face-to-face meetings — to organize letters, talk strategy, or contact media outlets and other groups to express their dissent. The goal is to get their message across while not violating...