Headlines Edition

Friday Headlines: Your friendly neighborhood fact-checker.

Bowing to Trump's threats of a government shutdown if his wall isn't funded, the House passes a stopgap measure that includes $5 billion for the wall. Today the House bill heads to the Senate, where it's expected to fail, triggering a government shutdown.

Trump has asked Senate Republicans to go for the "nuclear" option and eliminate the legislative filibuster in order to fund the wall, a move GOP senators have long refused to consider.

Here are the government agencies that will halt operations in case of a shutdown. Mueller's team, however, is exempt, and will keep working.

In an effort to raise $1 billion for Trump's wall, the founder of a right-wing fake news platform started a GoFundMe that has taken in millions of dollars over the past few days.

"I had no idea how beautiful the border is." Beto O'Rourke asks supporters to share photos of the habitats that could be damaged by Trump's wall.

Defense Secretary James Mattis resigns over Trump's withdrawal of US troops from Syria, a decision Trump appeared to make on a phone call with Turkey's Erdogan, rejecting advice from his own aides.

In his resignation letter, Mattis drew parallels between Trump and other authoritarian leaders.

Margaret Atwood on the decline of press freedom in America: "The signals sent to the rest of the world by the United States have not been lost on authoritarians elsewhere."

A chart shows the astounding decline in daily White House press secretary briefings from 2011 to 2018.

With all complaints against Kavanaugh dismissed, Congress owns his future. Perhaps only the chief justice is outside their reach.

Pyongyang says a condition for its disarmament is the withdrawal of US nuclear weapons from the Korean Peninsula.

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“The moment I found out Trump could tweet himself was comparable to the moment in Jurassic Park when Dr. Grant realized that velociraptors could open doors,” recalled the Trump Organization’s director of social media. An oral history of the moment Trump learned to tweet.

Statistically, a recession is overdue, and Trump's trade war—among his other economic antics—could make one a lot worse.

Illinois's attorney general claims the state's Catholic dioceses withheld the names of 500 priests accused of sexual abuse.

American Sniper definitely has not played in Fergus Falls since its first and only run in 2015. To be sure, we even reached out to Isaac Wunderlich, the manager of Westridge Theatre. Residents fact-check an article about their small American town written by Der Spiegel reporter Claas Relotius, who has now admitted to falsifying numerous stories.

The 2018 timeline of Facebook scandals is... longer than we expected.

To argue against exorbitant medical bills, patients could turn to contract law, where matters of fair pricing may arise.

The Great Barrier Reef die-off grabs attention, but if its seagrasses go, the result will be a massive release of stored carbon.

Though China doesn't officially recognize Christmas, Santa received a record 16,500 letters from the mainland last year.

Controversies and boycotts haven't slowed Chick-fil-A's growth; it's on pace to become the third-largest fast-food chain in America.

An analysis of hunter-gatherer diets finds no single "true" diet for humans; we "can be very healthy on a wide range of diets."

Pieces from Giant Robot's annual Post-It Show, where artists sell miniaturized versions of their works.