“With all this excess inventory, landlords are trying to do whatever they can to keep malls occupied. The more empty spaces, the more difficult it is to attract new tenants.”

“We’re going to start to see some real pain now,” Senate President John Cullerton told reporters in Springfield on Wednesday after both S&P and Moody’s downgraded Illinois to just above junk, the lowest ever rating for a US state. “We’re going to start to see downgrades. We don’t have any funding for schools. We don’t have any funding for higher end and a bunch of social programs.”

On Tuesday afternoon the US began the first ever missile test involving a simulated attack by an intercontinental ballistic missile, firing off an interceptor from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. And according to an update from the Defense Agency, the test was a success.

Three leakers of classified information at the White House have been identified and are expected to be fired, according to CBS which adds that leaks of Trump’s conversation with Lavrov are by officials who are holdovers from President Obama’s administration.

The United States is sending a third aircraft carrier strike force to the western Pacific region in an apparent warning to North Korea to deter its ballistic missile and nuclear programs.

Pushing hard to persuade Trump to back the landmark Paris climate accord deal, after hours of talks that were described by Angela Merkel as “controversial”, the G-7 leaders failed to get Trump’s endorsement.

The Trump administration will propose the deepest cuts to government programs in a generation, proposing to cut $3.6 trillion in spending over 10 years across all discretionary spending and non-discretionary spending.

In a new study entitled “Lifetime Incomes in the United States over Six Decades,” economists from University of Minnesota, the University of Chicago and Princeton University took a look at the median lifetime earnings (from ages 25 – 55) of Americans over a multi-decade period starting in 1960. The new paper includes some “astonishing numbers,…The stagnation of living standards began so much earlier than people think…”

In 2014, 54% of the counties in the U.S. had no murders whatsoever while the worst 1% of counties had 37% of the murders and the worst 5% of counties accounted for 68% of murders.

For years Somali pirates were able to easily board ships and hold their crew for ransom, at times even going so far as to torture or kill hostages until their demands were met. But, as the following video shows, it looks like the pirate business has gotten significantly more dangerous for maritime criminals who are often under-equipped and travelling in speed boats.

Even as Donald Trump is desperate to show to the US population, and especially his voter base, some actual achievement before his first 100 days run out next weekend, the Trump administration is quietly preparing for the possibility of a government shutdown, even though the president and his staff believe one is unlikely to occur.

Amid attempts to “clarify areas of sharp difference,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov blasted the Trump administration’s “ambiguous and contradictory” foreign policy at the start of talks with Tillerson in Moscow Wednesday calling the demand for the Kremlin to abandon Assad “absurd.” Furthermore, he warned Tillerson that Russia “believes it’s fundamentally important not to let these actions happen again.”

A bombshell report on forfeiture just came out: The DEA has taken $3.2 billion without filing any criminal charges or even any type of judicial oversight.

According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the United States currently has an “infrastructure gap”. If the discrepancy is not closed between what needs to be invested in infrastructure and what is actually invested, it could ultimately create a $4 trillion drag on GDP by 2025. As a result, between 2016 and 2025, each American household will lose $3,400 in disposable income due to infrastructure inefficiencies.

The U.S. economy is so big that all of the individual states are comparable to entire countries…

“Why are people leaving? Economic reasons, the high cost of living, are certainly a part of it,” said Hans Johnson, senior fellow at the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California. “For those people (near the poverty line), California is not viable.”

Twenty attorneys general and governors are asking new Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt to rein in what they perceive as federal overreach by the agency under the Obama administration.

WikiLeaks has published what it claims is the largest ever release of confidential documents on the CIA. It includes more than 8,000 documents as part of ‘Vault 7’, a series of leaks on the agency, which have allegedly emerged from the CIA’s Center For Cyber Intelligence in Langley. In short the CIA can spy on you any way they want to, obliterating the Fourth Amendment and any semblance of Americans being secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects.