The top Democrat on the U.S. House Intelligence Committee, Congressman Adam Schiff, faulted the White House for waiting until Friday to share with him information it provided to his Republican counterpart last week. Schiff visited the White House Friday and viewed documents that were “precisely the same” as those seen last week by the committee’s chairman, Congressman Devin Nunes. “While I cannot discuss the content of the documents, if the White House had any concern over these materials, they should have been shared with the full committees in the first place, as a part of our ordinary oversight responsibilities,” Schiff said. Nunes controversy Nunes sparked a controversy last week when he said he received information from an undisclosed source at the White House that conversations by President Donald Trump and his staff had been swept up as “incidental collection” by U.S. spy agencies targeting foreign agents. Nunes did not initially …

Gilbert Baker, a San Francisco-based activist and artist best known for creating the rainbow flag representing gay rights, has died at the age of 65, his longtime friend announced on social media on Friday. “My dearest friend in the world is gone. Clive Baker gave the world the rainbow flag, he gave me forty years of love and friendship,” Cleve Jones said on Twitter. No details were immediately available on the cause of Baker’s death or where he died. According to the biography posted on his official website, he had been living in New York City. Jones also tweeted a photo of Baker with former President Barack Obama, inviting mourners to meet him under a rainbow flag in the Castro district of San Francisco on Friday evening to remember his friend. Baker, who was born in Kansas in 1951, was stationed in San Francisco in the early 1970s while serving …

Hotels offer congee and other Chinese staples for room service. Casinos train staff members on Chinese etiquette. Restaurants, tourist sights and shopping malls translate signs, menus and information booklets into Mandarin. The American hospitality industry is stepping up efforts to make Chinese visitors feel more welcome, since they are projected to soon surpass travelers from the United Kingdom and Japan as the single largest overseas demographic. And it’s not just the typical tourist hubs of New York and Los Angeles, where such efforts have long been commonplace. Smaller cities like Boston, Las Vegas, Seattle and Washington, D.C., are increasingly getting into the act, industry officials say. “Americans traditionally lag behind what other international designations do for different cultures,” said Elliott Ferguson, CEO of Destination DC, the city’s convention and tourism organization, which last year launched “Welcome China,” a certification program for local businesses. “We just kind of assume that one …

U.S. media outlets say terrorist groups have been testing explosive devices that can be hidden in a laptop and that can evade some commonly used airport security screening methods. CNN and CBS said Friday that U.S. intelligence officials had told them militants with al-Qaida and Islamic State have been developing innovative ways to plant explosives in electronic devices. The news organizations said the new intelligence suggested that the terror groups have obtained sophisticated airport security equipment to test how to conceal the explosives in order to board a plane. They said the intelligence played a significant role in the Trump administration’s recent decision to prohibit travelers flying out of 10 airports in eight countries in the Middle East and Africa from carrying laptops and other electronic equipment onboard in the cabin area. Devices banned on certain flights Earlier this month, the U.S. government banned laptops and other large electronic devices, …