Trump's IS Protester Claim 'Utterly Farcical'

US intelligence experts have rejected claims by Donald Trump that a protester who tried to storm the stage at his rally may have links to Islamic State.

The presidential hopeful's Secret Service detail swarmed around him as the protester was detained and escorted from the rally at Dayton International Airport, Ohio, on Saturday.

Mr Trump appeared shaken and then told the audience: "I was ready for him, but it's much better if the cops do it, don't we agree?"

Authorities have identified the man as Thomas Dimassimo, from Fairborn, Ohio. He has been charged with inducing panic and disorderly conduct.

Chancellor To Unveil £4bn More In Spending Cuts

George Osborne is to announce a further £4bn of spending cuts by 2020 in this Wednesday's Budget.

The Chancellor will say the cuts are necessary to keep his fiscal plan on course, and enable him to continue to hit a Budget surplus in the final year of this Parliament.

He had anticipated a surplus of £10bn for 2019/20 just four months ago.

But revisions by the Office for Budget Responsibility to the forecast for earnings, the stock market and for low inflation have eaten into that forecast surplus.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies has calculated a £7bn shortfall in tax revenues.

The cuts could come partly from reducing cash totals to departments that anticipated higher inflation, and there could also be some new efficiencies to unprotected government departments.

Mr Osborne said the cuts he was planning were "not a huge amount in the scheme of things".

He told the BBC's Andrew Marr Show: "We need to act now so we don't have to pay later.

"That's why I need to find additional savings equivalent to 50p in every £100 the Government spends by the end of the decade.

"Because we have got to live within our means to stay secure and that's the way we make Britain fit for the future."

The Department for Work and Pensions has already confirmed some further cash-saving reforms to disability benefits.

Asked about claims the Government is facing an £18bn black hole in its finances, he replied: "£18bn is the sum of money that has been revised off our nominal GDP. In other words, that's a number out there last year because inflation was lower.

"It's a real number in the sense that all around the world every Western country, and indeed in big emerging countries like China, Brazil, Russia, people are looking at economic prospects and thinking they are not as rosy as they were just a few months ago."

Former chancellor Ken Clarke suggested Mr Osborne should carry out "tough and difficult" measures now as it was early in the five-year parliamentary cycle.

Mr Clarke told Sky News' Murnaghan programme: "The global economy is certainly slowing down.

"Markets are very jittery and if you look at the biggest problem in the short-term in Britain, it is that we are still running a deficit and we are still piling up debt and that slows down the prospects of growth.

"You've got all the other structural changes we've got to make, all the things we are doing on skills, training, infrastructure spending, trying to rebalance the economy.

"George has got to get on with that and this is the first Budget in a five-year parliament so if I were him, I'd want to do some of the tough and difficult things now."

:: Chancellor To Target Tax Loophole In Budget

The shadow Chancellor John McDonnell confirmed on Friday that Labour does not plan to reach an overall surplus under its new Fiscal Credibility Rule, as it will exempt investment spending from its target.

Mr McDonnell has criticised the Chancellor for his lack of investment spending.

Meanwhile, Mr Osborne appeared to indicate the Government may hold back from fuel duty rises in this week's Budget, after pressure from Tory backbenchers.

He also defended the £130m tax deal Google reached with HMRC, which was criticised by MPs for being "disproportionately small".

Mr Osborne said: "I was faced with a situation when I became Chancellor where we were not raising any money from this company.

"We are raising money from Google and indeed, from Facebook and the like.  I think that is a success."

Hospital call made for Germanwings pilot

Germanwings co-pilot was urged by doctor to attend psychiatric hospital weeks before he crashed plane, report says

Donald Trump blames Bernie Sanders fans for violence

Donald Trump supporters and protesters clash on Friday March 11 in Chicago [Charles Rex Arbogast/AP] 

Donald Trump supporters and protesters have clashed again following a rally that the Republican presidential frontrunner held in Cleveland, Ohio as he blamed Democrat Senator Bernie Sanders for escalating chaos. 

US police also fired pepper spray against an unruly crowd of demonstrators outside Trump's rally in Kansas City on Saturday. 

"Bernie's People," Trump repeatedly said in Cleveland, referring to several demonstrators before having them escorted out of the venue. 

The crowds later faced off outside, arguing about immigration and racism, before they were broken up by law enforcement.

"I'm terrified by Donald Trump, by the way I see his supporters behaving, by the things he says about women, people of colour, anyone that's different to him," said Ben Bowman, a Trump protester. 

At the rally, Trump also referred to "Bernie our communist friend" and called him a "lousy" senator while blaming him for the disruptions at his rallies.

Rosa Rossi, a Trump supporter, said she thinks the former reality TV show star can revive the US' past standing in world affairs. 

"I believe he can get the illegal immigrants in control, he can build a wall, and he can also make better deals for America, where America will rise and be the most powerful country in the world again," Rossi said.  

In a Twitter post late Saturday, Kansas City police said they used pepper spray twice outside a rally adding two people were arrested. It wasn't clear if those sprayed were demonstrators or Trump supporters.

Videos posted on Twitter showed a large number of people being sprayed during the incident.

Trump has both inspired impassioned supporters and ignited a backlash of angry dissent with his promise to build a wall along the US-Mexican border to keep out illegal immigrants, and his call to temporarily ban the entry of non-US Muslims into the country.

Trump's events have been intense. For months, he incorporated interruptions by protesters into his speeches, growling "Get 'em out!" - sparking explosive cheers from the audiences as he did so.

But the confrontations began to escalate this month, most notably at a Trump event in New Orleans. A steady stream of demonstrators interrupted Trump's speech, including a huddle of Black Lives Matter activists, who locked arms and challenged security officials to remove them.

There were skirmishes throughout the speech, mostly pushing and shoving, although one man was captured on video biting someone.

Chicago violence 

Hours before Trump was scheduled to appear Friday night at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the atmosphere inside a campus arena was crackling as protesters and supporters shouted back and forth, arms raised and yelling in each other's faces.

Some of the protesters, many of whom said they supported Democratic candidate Sanders, said they planned to rush the stage when Trump came out to speak. They didn't get the chance as Trump called off the rally before even getting to the venue.

On Saturday morning, Trump was mid-speech when a man, later identified by authorities as Thomas Dimassimo of Fairborn, Ohio, jumped a barricade and rushed at Trump. He was able to touch the stage before he was tackled by security officials.

Trump initially laughed it off but later in the day he said Dimassimo had ties to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS).

Experts who watched a video that Trump tweeted as evidence called the allegation "utterly farcical".

"Trump's accusations about it being linked to ISIS serve only to underline the totality of his ignorance on this issue," said Charles Lister, a fellow at the Middle East Institute.

Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton called Trump's rhetoric "political arson". She said Trump's "ugly, divisive rhetoric" and alleged encouragement of violence "is wrong, and it's dangerous".

What drives Facebook’s relentless attempts to be cool

It would be easy to look at Facebook’s recent acquisition of the start-up Masquerade and scratch your head. Why, you might wonder, would a company worth roughly $300 billion dollars want to buy a company dedicated solely to putting goofy animations over people’s selfies?

But the answer is there if you look at how Facebook has evolved over the years. The social media network is dominant, but it’s also in a constant battle to be cool — or at least just cool enough to stay relevant without being confusing for the older people on the network. Snapchat can make a whole business basically designed to confuse most people over the age of 25, but Facebook’s audience doesn’t allow for that. Facebook may have started as a social network for college students, but those people are now in their 30s. And they’ve brought their parents to the party.

That’s worked out for Facebook, which has turned its broad base of users into a gold mine. But that doesn’t mean, however, that Facebook has resigned itself completely to being a social network for (relatively)old people. It’s proven through a series of acquisitions and experiments of its own that it’s looking closely at the competition to stay as relevant as it can.

Sometimes those experiments don’t succeed, which happened when Facebook tried to make its own version of Snapchat — Slingshot, remember? No? — and looked like it was a little desperate. What has worked, however, is acquiring companies that complement Facebook’s audience and its own functions. Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp are the prime examples of this. Both have been a good way for Facebook to infuse its brand with something new, without having to invest too much in a copycat product. The fact that Facebook has more or less let both companies continue to run on their own post-acquisition also helps those products retain their audiences. Panic that Facebook’s acquisition would dramatically change the culture of Instagram, for example, has largely subsided.

In that context, the Masquerade buy makes more sense, particularly because it lets Facebook take another step to go after a prime competitor for users: Snapchat.

In addition to being the one that got away for Facebook, Snapchat is an undeniable force with which Facebook must reckon. Snapchat sits at the center of several social media trends that are pretty important right now — photo-based messaging, popularity among teens, personalization and a more mobile mindset.

Does Masquerade make Facebook a Snapchat killer? No, obviously not. But it does help the company take a small piece of the goofy, loose and completely shareable part of Snapchat’s culture and incorporate it into its own massive social network. It gives it just a little bit of something new, and keeps it just in step with the most current culture — which is just what Facebook wants. In addition to buying Masquerade, for example, this week Facebook also patented an algorithm that is aimed at detecting slang words its users type to put into a social glossary — perhaps, reports said, for the hippest auto-correct feature ever.

Facebook’s pursuit of cool, however, must walk a fine line. If Facebook did use its glossary to suggest slang terms, it runs the risk of alienating parts of its audience by being too ahead of the curve, said Kirsty Waller, senior vice president at SDL, an online translation service. “If Facebook gets the prediction wrong, users will feel like the platform doesn’t understand them, which can be off-putting.”

With the Masquerade features, however, Facebook may face the opposite problem: Once you pull something into the mainstream, it can lose its appeal. Now that everyone — your fifth-grade teacher and your grandparents — will also be using filters to turn themselves into zombies or to face-swap with their cats, it may lose any semblance of cool.

Obama Argues Against ‘Absolutist’ Views Amid Apple-FBI Fight

President Barack Obama advised against adopting “absolutist” views about privacy and security when it comes to technology, addressing a crowd at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSW) on Friday amid the ongoing Apple-FBI encryption battle.

“My conclusion so far is that you cannot take an absolutist view on this,” he said. “I suspect that the answer is going to come down to how do we create a system where the encryption is as strong as possible, the key is as secure as possible, it is accessible by the smallest number of people possible for a subset of issues that we agree are important?”

 His comments to the tech community at the festival come as Apple challenges a court order obtained by FBI investigators who say they need the company’s help in unlocking the encrypted iPhone of one of the San Bernardino shooters. Apple has said unlocking the phone would set a dangerous precedent, and many in the tech community have sided with the company.

While declining to comment on the specific Apple case due to ongoing legal action, Obama said the country must seek to balance the rights and risks associated with privacy, security and technology. He said Americans make other concessions of privacy or convenience in the interest of security, including TSA screenings before flights and stops to screen for drunken drivers on the road.

“This notion that somehow our data is different and can be walled off from those other tradeoffs we make I believe is incorrect,” he said.

Obama said strong encryption is important for preventing terrorist attacks and stopping people from hacking and disrupting financial or air traffic control systems, which are increasingly digital. But he said even if devices are impenetrable because of encryption, there still needs to be a way to catch child pornographers or terrorists.

“If, in fact, you can’t crack that at all, government can’t get in, then everybody is walking around with a Swiss bank account in their pocket, right? So there has to be some concession to the need to be able to get into that information somehow,” he said.

However, the President cautioned that oversight over government surveillance was also important.

“We don’t want government to be looking through everybody’s phones, willy-nilly, without any kind of oversight or probable cause or a clear sense that it’s targeted at somebody who might be a wrong-doer,” Obama added.

SNP To Launch Fresh Scottish Independence Bid

Nicola Sturgeon has vowed to launch a fresh bid for Scottish independence this summer, whatever the outcome of the EU referendum in June.

The Scottish First Minister is also promising a rethink on some of the arguments the Yes campaign made last time, in a bid to turn the 45% who voted Yes into a majority for independence.

Her pledge came as she addressed the SNP's spring conference in Glasgow with a new poll suggesting the party is on course to win an overall majority in the Scottish Parliament again.

After election pledges in her speech on health, education, tax and even a promise of broadband for all Scots, her independence vow electrified her audience of 3,500 SNP delegates.

She said one of her heroes was Eleanor Roosevelt, who once said: "The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams."

Ms Sturgeon told the delegates independence was "a beautiful dream" and this summer the SNP would "embark on a new initiative to build support for independence".

And signalling a change of tactics and strategy, the First Minister admitted that, in 2014, many Scots didn't find the pro-independence arguments compelling enough.

"We will listen to what you have to say," she told the conference. "We will hear your concerns and address your questions - and in the process, we will be prepared to challenge some of our own answers.

"And, patiently and respectfully, we will seek to convince you that independence really does offer the best future for Scotland.

future shaped not by perpetual Tory governments that we don't vote for, but by our own choices and our own endeavours.

"That is how we will turn the 45% of September 2014 into a strong and positive majority for independence."

The First Minister's announcement was immediately condemned by Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson, who said: "It's clear the SNP - from top to bottom - just isn't prepared to let this go.

"People voted decisively to remain part of the UK and it's time Nicola Sturgeon respected it."