On Monday, porn actress, Stormy Daniels, reportedly offered to return $130 thousand she received in 2016 from president Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, as to publicly disclose her alleged affair with Mr. Trump.

Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, claims to have had an affair with Trump which started in July 2006 after the two had met at a celebrity golf tournament at Lake Tahoe. Once the real-estate mogul turned political candidate was about to enter the 2016 elections, Trump reportedly tasked his personal attorney to pay the porn star $130 thousand to buy her silence.

Now, Stormy Daniels seeks to end her deal to keep quiet about her alleged affair with Trump. According to the letter which was sent to Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, from Ms. Clifford’s lawyer, Michael Avenatti, the porn actress is willing to wire the money into an account of Mr. Trump’s choosing by Friday.

Mr. Avenatti set another deadline for Tuesday to give Mr. Cohen time to answer to Daniels’ offer.

According to the letter, if Cohen were to accept the payment, Daniels’ contract would be “deemed null and void”. More so, she would be allowed to speak openly and freely about her relationship with Trump including the “attempts to silence her. The termination of the contract would also allow her to use and publish “any text messages, photos and/or videos relating to the president that she may have in her possession, all without fear of retribution and/or legal liability for damages”.

In addition, the letter seeks an agreement that neither Trump nor Cohen’s shell company, Essentials Consulting LLC, used to pay Daniels, would attempt to block the broadcast of an interview with the porn star that Daniels taped with “60 Minutes” last week.

The letter was also sent to a lawyer working on the case with Cohen, Lawrence S. Rosen.

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The Trump administration has quietly lifted a ban which prevented Americans from importing sport-hunted elephant body parts back into the U.S. This decision comes in direct contradiction with President Trump’s previous stance on the issue, where he supported the Obama-era trophy ban.

The latest change was announced quietly in a March 1 memorandum from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which bypassed previous rulings on trophy hunting. Thus, the agency said that it would allow sport hunters to receive permits for trophy items on a  “case-by-case basis”.

The memo, while not publicized by the agency, did not clarify the specific guidelines by which the permits would be judged nor did it specify the president’s role in the decision. Trump had publicly expressed his opposition several times to lift the ban on trophy imports.

In November 2017, after the Fish and Wildlife Service announced it would roll back the ban on the importation of sport-hunted elephant trophies from Zimbabwe and Zambia, Trump announced it would halt the repeal amid public uproar. The president claimed that it would take a lot of pressure for him to allow lifting the ban, even calling the notion of hunting elephants for sport a “horror show”.

Big-game trophy decision will be announced next week but will be very hard pressed to change my mind that this horror show in any way helps conservation of Elephants or any other animal.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 19, 2017

African elephants have been listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act since 1979.

People within the Interior Department who are proponents of big-game hunting believe that the money received from elephant-hunting permits would increase the federal system’s budget. The memo cited the lawsuit brought by Safari Club International and the National Rifle Association, which claimed that the administration did not account for all the facts surrounding the potential regulation. More so, the agency said that the ban repeal is a result of several Endangered Species Act findings withdrawals dating back to 1995.

According to the memo, the findings “are no longer effective for making individual permit determinations for imports of those sport-hunted ESA-listed species”.

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Stormy Daniels, the porn actress who said that she was paid to keep silent about her affair with Donald Trump, filed a lawsuit against the president Tuesday alleging that he never signed the nondisclosure agreement that his lawyer arranged with her.

According to Daniels’ lawsuit, president Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, filed for arbitration in Los Angeles last week to enforce the “hush agreement” that required the porn star to keep quiet about her alleged affair with Trump. The civil suit went on to say that her agreement is not valid because, while Daniels and Cohen signed it, Trump never did.

Stephanie Clifford, known in the adult industry as Stormy Daniels, also sued Essential Consultants LLC, a company which Cohen had set up days before the November 2016 election to pay Daniels $130 thousand for her silence.

Daniels had signed that agreement as well as a side letter agreement using her professional name on October 28, 2016. Cohen signed the document on the same day.

According to the lawsuit, Trump was aware of the agreement and that the money was put in place to influence the election outcome. The Federal Election Commission filed two complaints about this matter, claiming that the payment violated election law because it was not reported as an in-kind campaign donation.

“Mr. Trump, with the assistance of his attorney, Mr. Cohen, aggressively sought to silence Ms. Clifford as part of an effort to avoid her telling the truth, thus helping to ensure the presidential election.” The lawsuit reads.

Under the “hush agreement” Daniels was forced to give Trump every copy of every text and email that she ever exchanged with him as well as photos of Trump that she had. The deal also prevented the porn actress from ever communicating with the president or his family “for any reason whatsoever”. In addition, Daniels had to give Cohen the names of everyone with whom she’d ever shared images or correspondence about their affair.

Daniels alleged that she had sex with Trump after they met at a golf tournament at Lake Tahoe in 2006, shortly after his wife, Melania, gave birth to their son Barron.

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On Tuesday, the director of the National Security Administration and U.S. Cyber Command, chief Admiral, Mike Rogers, told the Senate Armed Service Committee that the United States did very little to dissuade or prevent Russia from meddling in future elections. Rogers said that president Donald Trump did not order him to retaliate against Putin for his interference in the 2016 presidential election nor to prevent more cyber attacks from Russia in the future.

Admiral Rogers reportedly told the Committee that the US is “probably not doing” enough to tackle the Russian threat. More so, he claims that the sanctions currently imposed on Russia were not enough to “change their behavior” or alter their plans for the future.

President Trump has been criticized for his poor response to the Russian meddling in the 2016 election, even shifting the blame on other parties. Trump also refused to implement sanctions that had been unanimously voted on by both houses of Congress, claiming that the idea of sanctions was enough to discourage Russian cyber attacks.

The NSA director’s statement on Tuesday is the most straightforward admission to date by a United States government employee that the president has opted to turn a blind eye to the Russian threat.

While Admiral Rogers admitted that Trump did little to allocate proper resources to the Russia meddling, he pushed back on suggestions that he should look for a presidential sign-off.

“I am not going to tell the president what he should or should not do,” the NSA director told Connecticut Democrat, Richard Blumenthal, when pressed to answer if Trump should give him authority. “I’m an operational commander, not a policymaker,”

Rogers, however, agreed with Blumenthal’s estimation that Russian cyber operatives continue to attack the US without much resistance and that Washington has failed to take the threat seriously.

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Several areas of the Hudson River have been labeled hot spots for high concentrations of pharmaceuticals, according to new research by the Lamont- Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University. A large portion of the drugs found in the famous New York City river treat blood pressure, cholesterol and common pains and aches.

In 2016, researchers at Columbia University identified 16 different pharmaceutical compounds from samples taken at 72 spots along the Hudson River. The area covered stretched 155 miles, from the northern waters of Troy down to the Battery in New York Harbor.

Researchers found a combination of different pharmaceuticals from drugs that treat ulcers and epilepsy to antibiotics. Some of the highest concentrations of these substances were found near sewage discharge pipes for the city of Kingston.  Other potential hot spots were found near sewage outfalls near Orangetown and Yonkers, where researchers found 90 percent of the 16 compounds they tested for.

The study claims that there is currently no evidence that the compounds lurking in the river water have negative consequences for humans. However, the concentrations could potentially pose a threat to marine life in the Hudson.

“Some levels are high enough that you could be concerned about fish and other aquatic organisms,” said Andrew Juhl, an aquatic biologist at the observatory and co-author of the study.

In addition to the pharmaceutical compounds, researchers also found traces of caffeine and the artificial sweetener, sucralose. This discovery led researchers to believe that sewage is the likely source of most of the pharmaceuticals in the Hudson River.

Other compounds were traced back to blood pressure drugs and anti-ulcer medication, especially one called Zantac, as well as an anti-cholesterol drug called Lopil. Acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, was also found in the river.

The study was published in the journal, Water Research.

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If alien life, in its most basic, microbial form, would crash-land on Earth, how would humans react? Would they fear the discovery or be cheerful about it? It appears that most of us would welcome the notion of alien life with open arms, according to a report presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancements of Science.

Michael Varnum, a social psychologist at Arizona State University in Tempe, said that humans would “take the news rather well” if microbial life was discovered in our solar system.

To come to this conclusion, Varnum and his team conducted a survey which involved 500 US volunteers to describe how they would react if they learned that scientists discovered microbial alien life.

Varnum and his colleagues then analyzed each participant’s response using software that determined the number of words indicating a positive emotion, such as “nice”, or negative emotion like “worried”. The researcher’s algorithm also looked for reward- and risk-focused words including “benefit” and “danger”.

According to the report, most people used positive and reward-focused words to describe their potential reactions. The same results prevailed when the participants were asked how everyone else would react to the news.

Varnum and his team conducted another study where they asked another 500 US volunteers to read several newspaper articles. One of them was from 1996 and described the discovery of evidence for fossilized Martian microbes in a meteorite. Another article was from 2010 and was about the creation of a synthetic bacterial cell in a laboratory.

Both groups responded favorably to the articles, however, the most positive reactions were registered among those who read the Martian microbes article. According to Varnum, this would suggest that people are more inclined to discover the presence of alien life rather than the discovery of previously unknown-life forms on Earth.

Varnum, however, notes the small scale of the study as well as the specific population they surveyed. He and his colleagues now hope to perform a similar study on participants from different cultures, to find out if people across the world would react to the news of alien microbes.

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President Trump’s longtime attorney, Michael Cohen, claims he personally paid $130 thousand to former porn star, Stormy Daniels, who allegedly had a sexual relationship with Trump in 2006.

Cohen confirmed previous news reports describing the potential cover-up, saying that he paid Stormy Daniels (real name Stephanie Clifford) a month before the 2016 presidential election.

“Neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign was a party to the transaction with Ms. Clifford, and neither reimbursed me for the payment,” Cohen said.

The lawyer claims that he notified the Federal Election Commission of the arrangements after Common Cause, a non-profit government accountability group, filed a complaint alleging that the payment was of illegal nature.

According to Cohen, the transaction was “lawful” and was not seen as a Trump campaign contribution nor as a campaign expenditure.

Trump’s attorney did not explain why he made the $130 thousand payment to Daniels without seeking reimbursement or for what the money was for in the first place. He stressed that Trump and Daniels did not have any sexual encounters in 2006. However, Cohen declined to answer Tuesday when asked if the payment was intended to silence the former porn actress before the 2016 election.

Daniels was quoted in a 2011 interview where she claimed that Trump had a sexual encounter with her after meeting at a gold tournament in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. This would have taken place a year after his marriage to Melania Trump, the current First Lady of the US.

However, at the end of January of this year, Daniels said via a written statement that the alleged affair never took place. This affirmation was later retracted during her appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live!. Daniels said that she didn’t know where the statement came from and the signature didn’t look like hers.

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A New York judge has awarded 21 artists who belonged to the iconic graffiti group, 5 Pointz, a whopping $6.7 million after a developer decided to whitewash their murals in Long Island City, Queens.

On Monday, Judge Frederic Block said there was no remorse from the owner of the warehouse building who decided to tear down the artist’s revered work to make room for luxury apartments.

“The sloppy, half-hearted nature of the whitewashing left the works easily visible under thin layers of cheap, white paint,” Judge Block said.

Twenty-one artists sued the owner of a Long Island City, Queens, location known as 5Pointz. Their works had been painted over in 2013, with the buildings being demolished a year later. The ruling was soon followed by a three-week trial in November.

The destruction of 5 Pointz was met with backlash from both New Yorkers and culture enthusiasts. This move was part of the city’s ongoing effort to strip away the cultural identity of New York neighborhoods and gentrify them with luxury condos.

The judge claims that he would not have assessed so much in damages if the owner had waited for his permits and tore down the murals 10 months later than he did. 5 Pointz was stripped of 45 art pieces which prompted the artists to sue under the Visual Artists Rights Act, a 1990 law that protects artwork of “recognized stature”.

The 5Points site had been an internationally-recognized graffiti mecca of sorts ever since the 1990s. Previous arrangements had allowed graffiti artists to legally paint on the building, even allowed artists to live and work inside it.

One of the more renowned voices who opposed 5Pointz’s destruction was Banksy, the elusive British street artist. He pleaded with New York City lawmakers to save the site in 2013 after displaying art all over the city which was part of a campaign called “Better Out Than In”.

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A study conducted by the non-governmental organization, Human Rights Watch, has noted a worrying surge of antipsychotic drugs used by nursing homes to sedate residents who do not have schizophrenia or other serious mental illnesses. The report examined about 179 thousand residents of long-term nursing homes across the US.

According to the study, US nursing homes are administering antipsychotic drugs to tens of thousands of elderly residents each week regardless of their diagnosis.

The report states that the drugs are used to sedating side effects, which make patients with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease easier to manage.

“People with dementia are often sedated to make life easier for overworked nursing home staff, and the government does little to protect vulnerable residents from such abuse,” said Hannah Flamm, a New York University law school fellow at Human Rights Watch.

The FDA warned against using antipsychotic drugs to treat psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia due to their lethal nature. These warnings are often not relayed to dementia patients nor to their loved ones, according to the study.

One nursing-home social worker said that the reason for sedating someone with these drugs included cries for help. Another social worker included the desire for calmer behavior as another reason for medicating residents.

“The nursing homes don’t want behaviours. The want docile.” The social worker said.

For the study, the researchers focused on six states, including California and Texas, which are known to have the most efficient nursing homes. The report was based on publicly available data, coupled with hundreds of interviews with residents, families and state officials who deal with nursing home complaints.

Another investigation into the overuse of psychotic drugs found that only 2 percent of cases were deemed serious enough for the nursing facilities to be fined.

The Human Rights Watch criticised the government for failing to enforce laws that already exist to protect nursing home residents.

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On Martin Luther King Day, the Trump administration saw fit to deport 39-year-old, Jorge Garcia, who was brought into the US when he was ten years old by an undocumented relative. Garcia, who is the father of a 12-year-old son and a 15-year-old daughter, departed from the Detroit Metropolitan Airport. The landscaper from Lincoln Park, Michigan, would go back to Mexico after thirty years of residency in the US.

According to media sources, immigration courts issued a removal order on Garcia in 2009, however, his deportation was halted during the Obama administration. While his family tried to find ways of getting him a legal status, President Trump was cracking down on undocumented immigrants. Garcia is the latest victim of Trump’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants, a move criticized by many people as being too excessive.

Garcia and his wife, Cindy Garcia, an American citizen and retired autoworker, got married 15 years ago after they first met in Detroit.  According to Garcia’s wife, an attempt was made in 2005 to get him legal status however that eventually led them to deportation proceedings. Even after the birth of their children, Garcia had to check in with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials (ICE), states his wife. The 39-year-old’s deportation was stayed multiple times during the Obama administration, however, he was too old to qualify for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) which President Obama created. This policy was designed to protect children of undocumented immigrants from being deported. As of June 15, 2012, any immigrant who is 31 or younger can qualify for DACA status, while anyone older than 31 is exempt.

Another Obama era-policy that may have helped Garcia, Deferred Action for Parents of Americans, was created to protect undocumented adult immigrants with children who were American citizens or lawful residents. That policy, however, was blocked in court later on.

Garcia’s family asked ICE if they could postpone his deportation to see if the government can eventually pass DACA legislation. ICE said that Garcia could remain in the US until the holidays were over, with a scheduled deportation planned for January 15.

“His case needs to be looked at individually because he deserves to be here in a country that he’s known, not in Mexico,” said Cindy Garcia.

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