America

    The world’s most powerful government shut down on Saturday after President Donald Trump and the US Congress failed to reach a deal on funding for federal agencies, highlighting the country’s deep political divisions. For the first time since October 2013 when a similar standoff that lasted 16 days kept only essential agency operations intact federal workers were being told to stay at home or in some cases to work without pay until new funding is approved. The shutdown began a year to the day after Trump was sworn in as president. In shutdowns, government employees are vulnerable to furlough, or temporary unpaid leave. Other essential workers, including those dealing with public safety and national security, keep working, some with and others without pay. After pre...

    The couple accused of imprisoning their 13 children in a Southern California home forced the kids to march through the upstairs rooms of one of their former houses, the New York Post reported Tuesday. Mike, who lived across the street from David and Louise Turpin and their brood in Murrieta, Calif., told the Post that the family would march back and forth on the second story at night. The light would be on the whole the time and they would be marching the kids back and forth. Mike, who declined to give his last name, told the paper that the bizarre occurrence would happen between midnight and 3 a.m. I thought they were like a cult, he said, adding that his wife referred to the children as clones and noting that they spoke robotically, in a monotone and at the same ...

    The new US embassy in London has officially opened days after hitting back at Donald Trump for suggesting its move to a new location was a bad deal. The United States president cancelled a visit to the UK to open the new American embassy, criticising its move from Grosvenor Square in the prestigious Mayfair district of central London to an off location at Nine Elms, south of the Thames. But last week a US embassy spokesman insisted it was completed within its one billion dollar (£730 million) budget and said the plan to finance it was developed in 2007, when George W Bush was in the White House, suggesting Mr Trump was wrong to blame predecessor Barack Obama. Reports have suggested the president may have called off his trip because he felt he had not been shown eno...

    A former porn star was paid $130,000 by President Trump’s personal lawyer a month before the 2016 election — part of an agreement to keep her quiet about an extramarital affair she had with the President, according to a report Friday. Attorney Michael Cohen arranged the payment to X-rated actress Stephanie Clifford after her lawyer negotiated a nondisclosure agreement, the Wall Street Journal reported. Clifford, who made dozens of dirty movies under the name Stormy Daniels, told friends the encounter with Trump took place after they met at a July 2006 celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe, people familiar with the matter told the newspaper. Another porn star, Alana Evans, told the Daily Beast that Daniels had told her I ended up with Donald in his hotel room. Pic...

    A school has to pay almost a million dollars to settle a discrimination lawsuit filed by a transgender former pupil over allegations relating to his use of school toilets. Ash Whitaker claimed staff at Tremper High School in Kenosha, Wisconsin, monitored his use of the toilets and made him wear a special bracelet, singling him out from other students. The 18-year-old claimed the school, which has agreed to pay $800,000 (£590,000) in compensation, banned him from using the boys' toilets and insisted on using female pronouns to refer to him. Most of the cash settlement - $650,000 (£478,000) will go towards paying for Mr Whitaker's legal costs. The lawsuit alleged he would avoid using the toilet altogether to avoid being punished and suffered severe depression and an...

    As president, Donald Trump has become known for changing strongly held opinions in a heartbeat, often while meeting with an advisor or foreign official who persuades him of the merits of another point of view. Norway’s prime minister Erna Solberg appears to have excellent powers of persuasion. In a short press conference after meeting with Solberg on today (Jan. 10) for just over an hour, Trump said the US could consider reentering the Paris Climate Accord that he pulled out of last summer, and spoke wistfully about Norway’s hydroelectric capacity. So, we can conceivably go back in, Trump said about the Paris deal. The US can’t technically exit the deal until just after the next presidential election, but the president’s declaration last June left the US isolated it i...

    Mudslides, boulders and cascading debris killed at least 13 people on Tuesday in an area of Southern California's Pacific Coast ravaged by a series of intense wildfires that burned off protective vegetation last month. Heavy downpours struck before dawn on Tuesday after thousands of residents in Santa Barbara County along the Pacific coast north of Los Angeles were ordered to evacuate or urged to do so voluntarily, some of them for a second time since December. But only 10 to 15 percent complied with mandatory orders, said Amber Anderson, a spokeswoman for the Santa Barbara County Fire Department. Emergency workers, using search dogs and helicopters, have rescued dozens of people stranded in mud-coated rubble in the pristine area, sandwiched between the ocean and t...

    The White House is struggling to contain the national discussion about President Trump's mental acuity and fitness for the job, which has overshadowed the administration's agenda for the past week. Trump publicly waded into the debate spawned by a new book, Fire and Fury Michael Wolff's inside account of the presidency over the weekend by claiming on Twitter that he is "like, really smart" and a very stable genius. In doing so, the president both underscored his administration's response strategy by being forceful and combative while also undermining it by gleefully entering a debate his aides have tried to avoid. Trump privately resents the now-regular chatter on cable television news shows about his mental health and views the issue as an invented fact and a joke...

    President Donald Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon on Sunday backed away from derogatory comments ascribed to him about Trump’s son in a new book that sparked White House outrage and could threaten Bannon’s influence as a would-be conservative power broker. Bannon, ousted from the White House in August, was quoted in ‘Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,’ by journalist Michael Wolff, as saying a June 2016 meeting with a group of Russians attended by Donald Trump Jr. and his father’s top campaign officials was ‘treasonous’ and ‘unpatriotic.’ The president responded by saying Bannon had lost his mind, and the White House suggested the hard-right news site Breitbart News part ways with Bannon as its executive chairman. Bannon said in a statement released ...

    A new book is alleging that the President’s daughter Ivanka revealed that it was the result of painful cosmetic surgery to hide his bald spot. According to a new book by Michael Wolff, Trump’s bald spot was cut out of his scalp and the remaining skin was pulled in and sewn shut. She often described the mechanics behind it to friends: an absolutely clean pate a contained island after scalp-reduction ­surgery surrounded by a furry circle of hair around the sides and front, from which all ends are drawn up to meet in the centre and then swept back and secured by a stiffening spray. The explosive book entitled Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House also claims the President uses Just For Men hairdye to camouflage his grey strands. The extract reads: ‘The color, s...