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Quote of the Day

Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings - always darker, emptier and simpler - Friedrich Nietzsche

Word of the Day

Halycon - denoting a period of time in the past that was idyllically happy and peaceful.

In the news...

Two mid-level Facebook staffers brief angry US lawmakers.The company’s associate general counsel and deputy chief privacy officer will tell Congress why it allowed Cambridge Analytica—a marketing firm used by the Trump presidential campaign—to harvest the information of tens of millions of users.

Pratt & Whitney starts delivering spare engines for India’s stranded jets.IndiGo was forced to ground 11 Airbus SE A320neo aircraft last week due to safety concerns. The airline has lost more than $600 million in market value this month amid its engine problems./p>

Troubles mounted for Cambridge Analytica…The board suspended CEO Andrew Nix, who was captured on hidden camera by Channel 4 News bragging about using bribes and sex workers to entrap foreign officials. Separately, UK regulators are requesting a warrant to seize servers at the firm.

…and Mark Zuckerberg was AWOL at an all-hands Facebook crisis meeting. The CEO has been notably silent since damning reports emerged about the company’s interactions with Cambridge Analytica, and was not present at a meeting open to all employees to discuss the scandal. Meanwhile US and UK lawmakers are pressing for him to answer their questions directly.

Donald Trump can’t dodge a defamation suit.A Manhattan judge ruled that the US president must face a lawsuit from a former Apprentice contestant, Summer Zervos, who accused Trump in 2016 of sexual assault. Her suit claims that he defamed her by saying her statements were “fiction” and made “for personal gain.

Israel admitted to bombing a Syrian nuclear site in 2007. It isn’t yet clear why the nation, long suspected of the airstrikes, went public now. Authorities said Israel would not tolerate projects posing an “existential threat,” and noted that ISIL militants later captured the area where the site, believed at the time to house a nuclear reactor soon to go live, had been.