America

    The Facebook boss will send one of his senior deputies instead, the company said. Damian Collins who leads the digital, culture, media and sport select committee had written to Mr Zuckerberg directly requesting that he appear. Mr Collins letter made the request in the strongest possible terms, and suggested that Mr Zuckerberg himself should appear. He gave until Monday evening to reply to the request. Facebook has now replied, on a letter dated 26 March, in which it says that it will send either Mike Schroepfer, Facebook's chief technology officer, and Chris Cox, its chief product officer. Both have worked under Mark Zuckerberg for more than 10 years, and are among the longest serving executives at the company. It didn't say why the Facebook boss himself could not...

    Stormy Daniels, the adult film actress who alleges that she had an affair with Donald Trump in 2006, says that she was threatened for attempting to tell her story publicly and accepted money through a Trump attorney to remain silent because she was scared for her family. In a much-anticipated 60 Minutes interview, Daniels said she believed she was doing the right thing when she accepted $130,000 from a company linked to Trump attorney Michael Cohen to stay quiet. Daniels said she was taking her infant daughter out of the car to go to a fitness class when someone approached her. A guy walked up on me and said to me, Leave Trump alone. Forget the story, Daniels told journalist Anderson Cooper. And then he leaned around and looked at my daughter and said, That’s a bea...

    Facebook is changing the way it shares data with third-party applications, Mark Zuckerberg announced Wednesday in his first public statement since the Observer reported that the personal data of about 50 million Americans had been harvested and improperly shared with a political consultancy. The Facebook CEO broke his five-day silence on the scandal that has enveloped his company this week in a Facebook post acknowledging that the policies that allowed the misuse of data were a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it. We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you, Zuckerberg wrote. He noted that the company has already changed some of the rules that e...

    President Trump fired back at Joe Biden in an early morning tweet, saying the former vice president is trying to act like a tough guy. Crazy Joe Biden is trying to act like a tough guy. Actually, he is weak, both mentally and physically, and yet he threatens me, for the second time, with physical assault, the president said. He doesn't know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way, he added. Don't threaten people Joe! Biden reportedly said at an anti-sexual assault rally in Florida that he would have beat the hell out of Trump in high school over comments the president has made about women. A guy who ended up becoming our national leader said, I can grab a woman anywhere and she likes it, Biden said, according to ABC News. They asked me if I'd ...

    The Texas serial bombing suspect has been killed after being tracked down by police, according to US media reports. Two people were killed in five explosions to hit the US state this month. Local media reported the suspect was tracked down by the FBI and police in Round Rock, near Austin. He killed himself using an explosive device, a law enforcement official told the Austin Statesman newspaper. Anthony Stephan House and Draylen Mason died in the explosions There were also reports of gunfire with police. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives confirmed it was at the scene of the individual suspected in the package bomb murders on the I-35 highway. The suspect was identified in the last 24 hours after shipping an explosive device from a FedEx stor...

    A Facebook post that a man wrote in which he apologised to his wife for mistaking her emotions for weakness has gone viral. Sean and Ashley Price are a married couple with two young children currently living in Baltimore, Maryland. A couple of days ago, Sean decided to write a lengthy Facebook post about an epiphany that he had about his wife’s strength of character. While in the past Sean had often pointedly mistaken Ashley’s high emotional intensity for weakness, he now realised, belatedly, that she is far stronger than he had previously thought. Sean chose to publicly apologise on social media for his error of judgement. So many times I called her weak for her intense emotional reactions towards different things, he wrote. Told her to grow up, be a woman, sto...

    In a December phone call with Saudi Arabia’s King Salman, President Trump had an idea he thought could hasten a U.S. exit from Syria: Ask the king for $4 billion. By the end of the call, according to U.S. officials, the president believed he had a deal. The White House wants money from the kingdom and other nations to help rebuild and stabilize the parts of Syria that the U.S. military and its local allies have liberated from the Islamic State. The postwar goal is to prevent Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his Russian and Iranian partners from claiming the areas, or the Islamic State from regrouping, while U.S. forces finish mopping up the militants. The Saudis, whose crown prince arrives in Washington on Monday for extensive meetings with the administration, ...

    The former US president Bill Clinton has urged Northern Ireland’s political leaders to use the anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement as a stimulus to save power sharing. The US statesman described the signing of the accord in 1998 was one of the happiest days of his presidency as he hailed the courage of everyone who made it possible. In a video message broadcast to a commemoration event in Washington DC, Mr Clinton acknowledged that, 20 years on, there was work to be done to salvage the institutions which the agreement created. We know the progress that has been made has been imperilled by the consequences of recent events and the uncertainties of the Brexit vote, he said. We also know in our heart of hearts that none of these problems is an excuse n...

    The CBS News program “60 Minutes” was moving forward with plans to show an interview it conducted last week with the pornographic film actress who says she had an affair with Donald J. Trump as her lawyer and a lawyer for the president traded public jabs through the weekend over her right to speak. The porn star, Stephanie Clifford, spoke with the “60 Minutes” contributor Anderson Cooper late last week. She did so despite an arbitrator’s ruling reaffirming an agreement she reached with Mr. Trump in October 2016 to remain silent about their alleged relationship which she said started in 2006 and lasted several months in exchange for $130,000. The “60 Minutes” interview raised the prospect that Mr. Trump’s personal attorney and fixer, Michael D. Cohen, would seek an i...