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on 25/05/2019 at 1:02 am

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — The bodies of a man and a woman were discovered Friday in a submerged vehicle near the Mississippi River in Missouri, bringing the death toll to nine from storms that have ravaged the central U.S. this week and threaten major flooding through the holiday weekend. […]

on 24/05/2019 at 8:27 pm

The president, in a memo released Thursday, directed U.S. intelligence agencies to cooperate with Barr’s review, which he has said would look into allegations by Trump and his allies that his campaign was spied upon and that various figures in the Justice Department and the FBI were trying to undermine him. “We have documents now that I have declassified for the purpose of the attorney general,” Trump told reporters on Friday. […]

on 24/05/2019 at 8:15 pm

The United States announced Friday it was deploying 1,500 additional troops to the Middle East in response to what the Pentagon called an "campaign" of recent attacks approved by Iran's top leadership. The escalation of the US military presence follows a decision in early May to send an aircraft carrier strike force and B-52 bombers in a show of force against what Washington's leaders believed was an imminent Iranian plan to attack US assets. "This is a prudent response to credible threats from Iran," said acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan. […]

on 24/05/2019 at 6:37 pm

Donald Trump gave attorney general William Barr the unilateral authority to declassify intelligence documents and ordered the US intelligence community to “quickly and fully cooperate” with his work in an official memorandum.The move is meant to accelerate Mr Barr’s inquiry into whether US officials improperly monitored or carried out surveillance on the president’s 2016 campaign.The directive signed on Thursday night alarmed former intelligence officials and Democratic legislators, who see it as a move to “investigate the investigators” probing the president’s alleged ties to Russia.David Kris, former head of the justice department’s national security division, told the AP that it’s “very unusual — unprecedented in my experience — for a non-intelligence officer to be given absolute declassification authority over the intelligence”.John McLaughlin, former deputy director of the CIA who served as acting director in 2004, tweeted disapproval as well.“Giving Barr declassification authority for this investigation is a really bad idea,” Mr McLaughlin wrote. “The agencies can cooperate but must retain their legal responsibility for protecting sources. Congressional intelligence committees need to stand in the door on this one.”The move gives Mr Barr the power to unilaterally unseal documents that the justice department has historically regarded as among its most highly secret, such as warrants obtained from the foreign intelligence surveillance court, which are never usually made public.Mr Trump also gave the declassification power explicitly to Mr Barr, noting that it would not extend to another attorney general. It is to be used only for Mr Barr’s review of the Russia investigation.Senator Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, pointed out that lawmakers still do not have the full Mueller report.“So of course the president gives sweeping declassification powers to an attorney general who has already shown that he has no problem selectively releasing information in order to mislead the American people,” Mr Warner tweeted on Friday morning. Representative Adam Schiff, chairman of the House intelligence committee, called Mr Trump’s decision “un-American”.“While Trump stonewalls the public from learning the truth about his obstruction of justice, Trump and Barr conspire to weaponise law enforcement and classified information against their political enemies,” Mr Schiff wrote on Twitter. “The cover-up has entered a new and dangerous phase.&rdquo […]

on 24/05/2019 at 5:50 pm

But one of Nicholas Winton's ideological heirs has hit back at Theresa May over her comparison to the man who saved hundreds from the Nazis. […]

on 24/05/2019 at 4:33 pm

Rep. Jerry Nadler, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, became ill during a public meeting on speed cameras with Mayor de Blasio on the Upper West Side. […]

on 24/05/2019 at 4:26 pm

Facebook has been accused of leaving 'broken children' as collateral damage in the wake of their commercial aims, the child sex abuse inquiry has heard. Barrister William Chapman, representing the victims of abuse at the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), said social media companies were not preventing paedophiles reaching children as it was “contrary to their business model” and that their apps needed to be “fundamentally redesigned”. Police also warned that tech firms were going ahead with plans to encrypt more features "in the certain knowledge" it would lead to more children being abused. The warnings came as the inquiry’s hearing into online child abuse drew to a close yesterday. Over the last fortnight IICSA has heard evidence from Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and Google about their efforts to combat child abuse online. Giving his closing statement, Mr Chapman singled out Facebook as the “unacceptable face of social media”, citing that over half of reported grooming offences in 2017 and 2018 related to the company or its Instagram and WhatsApp apps. William Chapman giving his closing address to the inquiry He said that social networks scanned for evidence of abuse after it happened and that they now needed to change their business model to stop abusers easily contacting children. Mr Chapman said: “What they will not do, because it is contrary to their business model, is to restrict the opportunities for abuse before it takes place.” He added: “They leave behind broken children like so much collateral damage. “Money, they say, is no object but none you heard from has a dedicated budget to tackling this problem.” Among the recommendations being made to the inquiry on behalf of victims are for tech companies pay compensation to those abused via their services and that a new criminal offence be made of posing online as a child online without a reasonable excuse. Mr Chapman also accused tech companies of not giving the inquiry a “straight answer” about the scale of abuse on their sites and selectively releasing figures without context. Earlier in the hearing Microsoft failed to provide figures for how many children had been groomed on its live chat services Xbox Live and Skype and Facebook was similarly unable to say how many registered sex offenders had been caught using its services. “It is not acceptable to hide the extent of the problem on your platform in a black box out of which you prick pinholes for others to see only hints of the full horror within," said Mr Chapman. Later in the hearing, Debra Powell QC, speaking for the National Police Chiefs Council, warned that tech giants' plans to make ever more services encrypted would lead to more children being abused. Last month Facebook announced plans to add end-to-end encryption to its 1.3 billion-user Messenger service, meaning not even it will be able to see the content of messages. Ms Powell said: “Currently many technology companies are building in and offering to their users ever greater privacy protections, including end-to-end encryption, in the certain knowledge that this will make the detection and prevention of child sexual abuse and exploitation more difficult. “The inevitable result must be that more children will be abused and exploited and that their ordeals will go on for longer before the perpetrators can be caught, if they are caught at all.&rdquo […]

on 24/05/2019 at 2:52 pm

U.S. stock and bond markets are closed on Monday to observe Memorial Day. Foreign financial markets will be open. […]

on 24/05/2019 at 1:20 pm

A police K-9 in Gwinnett County, Georgia, died Thursday after chasing a suspect in 90-degree heat. […]

on 24/05/2019 at 11:30 am

There are millions of apps available for your phone, but you can't take all of them on your next trip. So which travel apps should you pack? […]

on 24/05/2019 at 10:11 am

LONDON (AP) — British Prime Minister Theresa May says she will step down as Conservative Party leader on June 7, sparking a contest to replace her as party chief and U.K. leader. […]

on 24/05/2019 at 8:44 am

Beijing on Friday accused the United States of spreading "lies" about Huawei after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the telecom giant was not being truthful about its ties to the Chinese government. Huawei has been thrust at the centre of escalating tensions between the world's two top economies, with President Donald Trump saying Thursday the fate of the company could be included in any deal to resolve their trade war. Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said he was not aware of the "specifics" of Trump's comments and repeated that dialogue must be based on "mutual respect". […]

on 24/05/2019 at 7:29 am

Theresa May is set to announce a timetable for her resignation as U.K. prime minister, plunging British politics into turmoil and putting the fate of Brexit in doubt. May plans to quit as Tory leader with an election to choose her replacement beginning on June 10, according to people familiar with the matter. The result will shape the direction of Brexit and all options -- from leaving with no deal to canceling the divorce -- are now back on the table. […]

on 24/05/2019 at 6:48 am

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — An outbreak of nasty storms spawned tornadoes that razed homes, flattened trees and tossed cars across a dealership lot, injuring about two dozen people in Missouri's capital city and killing at least three others elsewhere in the state. […]

on 24/05/2019 at 4:20 am

Official data from the Election Commission showed Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party had won 296 of the 542 seats up for grabs and was ahead in seven more, up from the 282 it won in 2014. The BJP would have the first back-to-back majority in the lower house of parliament for a single party since 1984. After a rancorous and a polarizing election campaign, the focus shifts back to an economy that is slowing, even as the U.S.-China trade war rages and global oil prices tick higher. […]

on 24/05/2019 at 3:15 am

Simulator training remains a "possible option" for Canadian Boeing 737 MAX pilots, but it's too early to say whether it would be mandatory, a Transport Canada official said on Thursday night, further distancing the regulator from previous remarks by the country's transport minister. "It would be premature not seeing what Boeing has fully proposed yet to determine if simulator training will in fact be included," said Nicholas Robinson, the regulator's director general, civil aviation, told reporters on a conference call following a meeting of global regulators in Texas. Canada's Transport Minister Marc Garneau called in April for pilots to received simulator training for Boeing's software fix. […]

on 24/05/2019 at 1:41 am

The Bharatiya Janata Party pledged cash handouts to farmers, $1.44 trillion to build roads, railways and other infrastructure, a boost to manufacturing, and a doubling in exports. Consumer spending has taken a knock as a crisis among shadow banks curbed lending. The government has already widened its budget deficit target for the year through March 2020 to 3.4% of gross domestic product. […]

on 24/05/2019 at 1:03 am

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — The Latest on severe weather moving across the central United States (all times local): […]

on 24/05/2019 at 12:08 am

It's sometimes hard to make sense of what's going on with Tesla. Is the company on the verge of going bankrupt, or poised to set new records for deliveries? Well, according to Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the answer to both questions could be "yes."A few days ago, an internal email from Musk to Tesla employees claimed that the company was in danger of running out of cash in just 10 months time. As a result, Musk said that the company was going to implement "hardcore" cost-cutting measures, an initiative Musk claims is the only way for the company "to become financially sustainable and succeed in our goal of helping make the world environmentally sustainable."In the following days, a pair of research reports from analysts laid out rather dire bear-case scenarios for Tesla, with Morgan Stanley noting that Tesla, in a worst case scenario, might only be worth $10 a share. As a point of reference, Tesla was trading at $376 less than six months ago.All that said, demand for Tesla vehicles appears to be growing and on the verge of setting new records. According to a new internal email from Musk (via CNBC), the Tesla CEO relayed that the company was on pace to set a new record for deliveries for the June quarter."As of yesterday," Musk said, "we had over 50,000 net new orders for this quarter. Based on current trends, we have a good chance of exceeding the record 90,700 deliveries of Q4 last year and making this the highest deliveries/sales quarter in Tesla history!"Of course, Musk's statement was tempered with the qualification that Model 3 production needs to remain steady at 1,000 units per day, at a minimum."We've averaged about 900/day this week," Musk added, "so we're only about 10% away from 7,000/week. If we rally hard, we can do it."The larger takeaway from all of this Tesla hoopla is that demand, contrary to some analyst opinions, does not appear to be a huge issue for the company. Still, the company is burning through cash at an alarming rate and, as Musk notes, needs to pick up production to meet swelling demand. […]

on 23/05/2019 at 9:23 pm

SANDY, Utah (AP) — A Utah climber with a long-held dream to climb the highest mountains on the planet's seven continents died on top of Mount Everest after reaching his final summit, one of his daughters said. […]