Yet he appeared to aspire to be on the magazine’s cover, with a fake 2009 cover story once hanging near the entrance of Mar-a-Lago, the Florida estate where he is spending his vacation, and in many of his other golf clubs, according to a Washington Post article in June. (A White House spokeswoman declined at the time to say whether Mr. Trump had known that the cover wasn’t real.)

At the time of Mr. Trump’s tweet on Friday, an online readers poll on whom the magazine should select showed Mr. Trump in a three-way tie for second and trailing Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, who had 21 percent of the vote. The recipient of the title, who is ultimately decided by Time’s editors, will be announced on Dec. 6.

A spokeswoman for the magazine directed reporters back to Twitter. “The President is incorrect about how we choose Person of the Year,” a message from the magazine’s account said. “TIME does not comment on our choice until publication, which is December 6.”

In between his bookends of institutional critique, the president fit in a few moments of international productivity on Friday.

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In an early-morning phone call with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Mr. Trump discussed the sale of American military equipment, the Syrian refugee crisis and “pending adjustments to the military support provided to our partners on the ground in Syria,” according to a summary provided by the White House.

The Turkish Foreign Ministry later said the pending adjustments meant that the United States would no longer provide weapons to the Y.P.G., a Kurdish militia fighting in Syria against the Islamic State — a military plan Mr. Trump had previously approved, according to reports from Turkish news media.

Mr. Trump’s decision to stop supplying the Syrian Kurds could ease tensions with Mr. Erdogan that have been aggravated by a number of issues, chief among them the Trump administration’s reluctance to turn over a Turkish cleric, Fethullah Gulen, who lives in exile in Pennsylvania and whom Mr. Erdogan accuses of fomenting a failed coup against him in 2016. The Turkish government is also angry over the case of an Iranian-Turkish businessman, Reza Zarrab, who is fighting federal charges in the United States that he evaded Iranian sanctions.

The United States began working closely with the Syrian Kurds during the Obama administration and continued under Mr. Trump. Some critics said on Friday that the decision to stop supplying them amounted to a betrayal, since American forces had relied on the Kurds, and their fighting skills, to retake the Syrian town of Raqqa from the Islamic State.

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Mr. Trump also made another phone call to President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt to offer sympathy and support in the aftermath of the brutal militant attack on a Sufi mosque there Friday that killed at least 235 people.

But for the majority of the day, the president indulged in his favorite moments of relaxation: spending hours on his lush golf course in Jupiter, Fla., accompanied by the professional golfers Tiger Woods and Dustin Johnson, staying mostly out of sight of the news media and sharing his commentary with his millions of Twitter followers. It appeared to be, as noted by the golfers and visitors who shared pictures of him on social media, a good day.

“Great spirits,” Eric Kaplan, a club member, observed on Twitter. “That is one gracious man.”

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Macy’s had hoped for a rush of shoppers on Black Friday. But it appears the crowds were too much of a good thing.

Macy’s credit card payment system buckled due to a higher than anticipated volume of transactions, the retailer said, leading to delays that slowed the checkout process at department stores around the country Friday.

The Cincinnati retailer said in a statement that the issue caused some transactions to take longer to process. Tweets by the department store to customers specified the issue affected credit and gift card transactions.

Macy’s said Friday afternoon that it had “fully resolved today’s system issues” and that it did not anticipate any additional delays.

Egypt’s President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi has vowed to respond with “the utmost force” after 235 people were killed at a North Sinai mosque during Friday prayers.

The al-Rawda mosque in the town of Bir al-Abed was bombed and fleeing worshippers were then gunned down.

The Egyptian military has said it has conducted air strikes on “terrorist” targets in response.

No group has yet claimed the attack, the deadliest in recent memory.

Egyptian security forces have for years been fighting an Islamist insurgency in the Sinai Peninsula, and militants affiliated with so-called Islamic State (IS) have been behind scores of deadly attacks in the desert region.

They usually target security forces and Christian churches, and the bloody attack on a mosque associated with Sufi Muslims has shocked Egypt.

“What is happening is an attempt to stop us from our efforts in the fight against terrorism,” Mr Sisi said in a televised address hours after the attack.

“The armed forces and the police will avenge our martyrs and restore security and stability with the utmost force.”

Image copyright
AFP/getty

An army spokesman said “terrorist spots” where weapons and ammunition were reportedly stocked had been bombed by air force jets on Friday in response.

The official also said that several vehicles used in the attack had been located and destroyed.

Mr Sisi, the former head of Egypt’s armed forces, has emphasised national security and stability during his time as president.

Three days of national mourning have been declared.

What happened?

Dozens of gunmen surrounded the mosque in vehicles and opened fire on those trying to escape after bombs were set off.

The assailants are reported to have set parked vehicles on fire in the vicinity to block off access to the mosque, and they fired upon ambulances trying to help victims.

At least 100 people were wounded, reports say, overwhelming hospitals.

It is the deadliest militant attack in modern Egyptian history. Bir al-Abed is about 130 miles (211km) from Cairo.

Can Sisi curb a stubborn insurgency?

By Orla Guerin, Cairo correspondent

This is a major challenge to the Egyptian state.

If this was IS, it is always worth considering the broader regional dimension. In the last few months, IS has had massive territorial losses in Iraq and across the border in Syria.

If IS was behind this, this could be an attempt to remind supporters around the world that they are still here, still relevant and can still inflict terrible damage on their enemies.

What we don’t know right now is if the Egyptian security establishment, if President Sisi, has anything else in the arsenal to try.

He has already tried the hardline military approach – there has been a massive military operation going on in the Sinai peninsula for years. It has not delivered results that time and time again the Egyptian establishment has promised.

But it is unclear if they have something new they can try to attempt to curb this very stubborn Islamic insurgency which today has inflicted such terrible damage.

Who was targeted?

Locals are quoted as saying that followers of Sufism, a mystical branch of Sunni Islam, regularly gathered at the mosque.

Although Sufis are widely accepted across much of the Muslim world, some jihadist groups, including IS, see them as heretics.

• Egypt’s militant groups explained
• Sisi the strongman
• What is Sufism?

The head of IS’s “religious police” in Sinai said last December that Sufis who did not “repent” would be killed, after the group beheaded two elderly men reported to be Sufi clerics.

The victims of the mosque attack also included military conscripts.

The number of victims is unprecedented for an attack of this type, says the BBC’s Sally Nabil in Cairo. She adds that this is the first time that worshippers inside a mosque have been targeted by militants in North Sinai.

Image copyright
EPA

Who might be behind the attack?

Militant Islamists stepped up attacks in Sinai after Egypt’s military overthrew Islamist President Mohammed Morsi following mass anti-government protests in July 2013.

Hundreds of police, soldiers and civilians have been killed since then, mostly in attacks carried out by the Sinai Province group, which is affiliated to IS.

Sinai Province has also carried out deadly attacks against Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority elsewhere in the country, and said it was behind the bombing of a Russian plane carrying tourists in Sinai in 2015, killing 224 people on board.

• Egypt disputes desert shootout reports
• Sinai plane crash: What we know
• The IS affiliate in Sinai

It has been operating mainly in North Sinai, which has been under a state of emergency since October 2014, when 33 security personnel were killed in an attack claimed by the group.

Sinai Province is thought to want to take control of the Sinai peninsula in order to turn it into an Islamist province run by IS.

Image copyright
Reuters

Journalists, including from state-sponsored outlets, have not been allowed to report from North Sinai in the last few years.

Correspondents say that the frequency of attacks raises doubts about the effectiveness of military operations against militants.

What has the reaction been internationally?

Arab League chief Ahmed Aboul Gheit condemned the attack as a “terrifying crime which again shows that Islam is innocent of those who follow extremist terrorist ideology”.

Governments in the UK, US, France, Russia, Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere have deplored the massacre.

Skip Twitter post by @realDonaldTrump

Will be calling the President of Egypt in a short while to discuss the tragic terrorist attack, with so much loss of life. We have to get TOUGHER AND SMARTER than ever before, and we will. Need the WALL, need the BAN! God bless the people of Egypt.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 24, 2017

End of Twitter post by @realDonaldTrump

By Brad Lendon, Zachary Cohen and Steve George, CNN

Updated 9:12 AM ET, Thu November 23, 2017

Chat with us in Facebook Messenger. Find out what’s happening in the world as it unfolds.

It was a once-in-a-decade display of American firepower.

The aircraft carriers USS Ronald Reagan and USS Carl Vinson steam with their strike groups and ships from Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Force during bilateral training in June.

Jan-31

Tuesday 31 January:
USS Antietam runs aground in Tokyo Bay

The USS Antietam, a guided-missile cruiser, damaged its propellers and spilled hydraulic oil into the water after running aground while the ship was anchoring in Tokyo Bay.

May-9

Tuesday 9 May:
USS Lake Champlain collides with South Korean fishing boat

The guided-missile cruiser was struck by a 60- to 70-foot-long South Korean fishing boat while conducting operations in international waters near the Korean Peninsula, the Navy said.

June-17

Saturday 17 June:
USS Fitzgerald collides with Philippine cargo ship

The collision between the Fitzgerald, a guided-missile destroyer, and the ACX Crystal on June 17 claimed the lives of seven US sailors. It took place 56 nautical miles off the coast of Honshu, Japan, in an area heavily traveled by commercial shipping.

Aug-21

Monday 21 August:
USS John S McCain collides with oil tanker off Singapore

The US guided-missile destroyer collided with a Liberian oil tanker in crowded shipping lanes off Singapore, leaving 10 US sailors dead and five more injured. The accident left a large highly visible hole in the US ship.

Nov-18

Saturday 18 November:
USS Benfold struck by Japanese tugboat

The guided-missile destroyer USS Benfold was struck by a Japanese tugboat while participating in a scheduled towing exercise off Japan. The tug boat lost propulsion and drifted into the US ship, the Navy said. No one was injured.

F/A-18 Hornets fly over US and South Korean warships during an exercise off the Korean Peninsula.

F/A-18 Hornets fly off the carrier USS Carl Vinson off the Korean Peninsula in March. US officials say they’ve had to scavenge parts to keep the F/A-18s flyable.

The US 7th Fleet this year has participated in about 160 exercises with other countries, including this one with Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Force.

The littoral combat ship USS Coronado fires a Harpoon missile during Exercise Pacific Griffin, conducted with the Singaporean navy.

Chat with us in Facebook Messenger. Find out what’s happening in the world as it unfolds.

Lawyers for Mr. Flynn and Mr. Trump declined to comment. The four people briefed on the matter spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly.

A deal with Mr. Flynn would give Mr. Mueller a behind-the-scenes look at the Trump campaign and the early tumultuous weeks of the administration. Mr. Flynn was an early and important adviser to Mr. Trump, an architect of Mr. Trump’s populist “America first” platform and an advocate of closer ties with Russia.

His ties to Russia predated the campaign — he sat with President Vladimir V. Putin at a 2015 event in Moscow — and he was a point person on the transition team for dealing with Russia.

The White House had been bracing for charges against Mr. Flynn in recent weeks, particularly after charges were filed against three other former Trump associates: Paul Manafort, his campaign chairman; Rick Gates, a campaign aide; and George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser.

But none of those men match Mr. Flynn in stature, or in his significance to Mr. Trump. A retired three-star general, Mr. Flynn was an early supporter of Mr. Trump’s and a valued surrogate for a candidate who had no foreign policy experience. Mr. Trump named him national security adviser, he said, to help “restore America’s leadership position in the world.”

Among the interactions that Mr. Mueller is investigating is a private meeting that Mr. Flynn had with the Russian ambassador and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, during the presidential transition. In the past year, it has been revealed that people with ties to Russia repeatedly sought to meet with Trump campaign officials, sometimes dangling the promise of compromising information on Mrs. Clinton.

Mr. Flynn is regarded as loyal to Mr. Trump, but he has in recent weeks expressed serious concerns to friends that prosecutors will bring charges against his son, Michael Flynn Jr., who served as his father’s chief of staff and was a part of several financial deals involving the elder Mr. Flynn that Mr. Mueller is scrutinizing.

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The White House has said that neither Mr. Flynn nor other former aides have incriminating information to provide about Mr. Trump. “He likes General Flynn personally, but understands that they have their own path with the special counsel,” a White House lawyer, Ty Cobb, said in an interview last month with The New York Times. “I think he would be sad for them, as a friend and a former colleague, if the process results in punishment or indictments. But to the extent that that happens, that’s beyond his control.”

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Mr. Flynn was supposed to have been the cornerstone of Mr. Trump’s national security team. Instead, he was forced out after a month in office over his conversations with the Russian ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak. Mr. Flynn’s handling of those conversations fueled suspicion that people around Mr. Trump had concealed their dealings with Russians, worsening a controversy that has hung over the president’s first year in office.

Four days after Mr. Trump was sworn in, the F.B.I. interviewed Mr. Flynn at the White House about his calls with the ambassador. American intelligence and law enforcement agencies became so concerned about Mr. Flynn’s conversations and false statements about them to Vice President Mike Pence that the acting attorney general, Sally Q. Yates, warned the White House that Mr. Flynn might be compromised.

The conversations with the Russian ambassador that led to Mr. Flynn’s undoing took place during the presidential transition. When questions about them surfaced, Mr. Flynn told Mr. Pence that they had exchanged only holiday greetings — the conversations happened in late December, around the time that the Obama administration was announcing sanctions against Russia.

While Mr. Pence and White House press officers repeated the holiday-greetings claim publicly, Mr. Flynn and the ambassador had in fact discussed the sanctions. That invited the idea that the incoming administration was trying to undermine the departing president and curry favor with Moscow.

Mr. Trump sought Mr. Flynn’s resignation only after news broke that Mr. Flynn had been interviewed by F.B.I. agents and that Ms. Yates had warned the White House that his false statements could make him vulnerable to Russian blackmail.

Since then, Mr. Flynn’s legal problems have grown. It was revealed that he failed to list payments from Russia-linked entities on financial disclosure forms. He did not mention a paid speech he gave in Moscow, as well as other payments from companies linked to Russia.

The former F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, has testified before Congress that Mr. Trump asked him to end the government’s investigation into Mr. Flynn in a one-on-one meeting in the Oval Office the day after Mr. Flynn was fired. Mr. Trump’s request caused great concern for Mr. Comey, who immediately wrote a memo about his meeting with the president.

And investigators working for Mr. Mueller have questioned witnesses about whether Mr. Flynn was secretly paid by the Turkish government during the presidential campaign. Mr. Flynn belatedly disclosed, after leaving the White House, that the Turkish government had paid him more than $500,000.

Mr. Flynn’s firing was, in some ways, the first domino that set off a cascade of problems for Mr. Trump. After the president ousted Mr. Comey, news surfaced that the president had requested an end to the Flynn inquiry, a revelation that led to Mr. Mueller’s appointment. That, in turn, raised the profile of an investigation that the president had tried mightily to contain.

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The first woman, a 38-year-old book editor who was living in Minneapolis at the time, told HuffPost that she had just finished performing with a feminist choir at the Women’s Political Caucus event, which Franken and his wife, Franni Bryson, attended. After the ceremony, she and other members of the choir approached him for photos.  

Tens of thousands of people wanted by law enforcement officials have been removed this year from the FBI criminal background check database that prohibits fugitives from justice from buying guns.

The names were taken out after the FBI in February changed its legal interpretation of “fugitive from justice” to say it pertains only to wanted people who have crossed state lines.

What that means is that those fugitives who were previously prohibited under federal law from purchasing firearms can now buy them, unless barred for other reasons.

Since the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) was created in 1998, the background check system has prevented 1.5 million people from buying guns, including 180,000 denials to people who were fugitives from justice, according to government statistics.

It is unclear how many people may have bought guns since February who previously would have been prohibited from doing so.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions sent a memo Wednesday to the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives instructing them to take several steps to improve NICS.

The system, he said, is “critical for us to be able to keep guns out of the hands of those . . . prohibited from owning them.”

[One illegal gun. 12 weeks. A dozen criminal acts. The rapid cycle of gun violence.]

The criminal background check system has come under scrutiny in recent weeks after the Air Force said it failed to follow policies for alerting the FBI about the domestic violence conviction of Devin P. Kelley, who killed more than two dozen churchgoers in Sutherland Springs, Tex., this month. Because his conviction was not entered into NICS, Kelley was allowed to buy firearms.

Two years ago, Dylann Roof, who killed nine people at a historic black church in Charleston, S.C., was able to buy his gun after errors by the FBI and local law enforcement led to his name not being entered into criminal record databases when he was arrested and had admitted to drug possession.

The interpretation of who is a “fugitive from justice,” a category that disqualifies people from buying a gun, has long been a matter of debate in law enforcement circles — a dispute that ultimately led to the February purging of the database.

“Any one of these potentially dangerous fugitives can currently walk into a licensed gun dealer, pass a criminal background check, and walk out with a gun,” Robyn Thomas, executive director of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, wrote in a letter to FBI Director Christopher A. Wray on Wednesday. The Giffords organization, founded by former Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, called on the FBI and ATF to “correct this self-inflicted loophole” and recover all guns illegally purchased this year because of the purge of names from the database.

Rifles for sale at a gun shop in Merrimack, N.H. (Dominick Reuter/AFP/Getty Images)

For more than 15 years, the FBI and ATF disagreed about who exactly was a fugitive from justice.

The FBI, which runs the criminal background check database, had a broad definition and said that anyone with an outstanding arrest warrant was prohibited from buying a gun. But ATF argued that, under the law, a person is considered a fugitive from justice only if they have an outstanding warrant and have also traveled to another state.

In a 2016 report, Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz urged the Justice Department to address the disagreement “as soon as possible.” Late last year, before President Trump took office, the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel sided with ATF and narrowed the definition of fugitives, according to law enforcement officials. The office said that gun purchases could be denied only to fugitives who cross state lines.

After Trump was inaugurated, the Justice Department further narrowed the definition to those who have fled across state lines to avoid prosecution for a crime or to avoid giving testimony in a criminal proceeding.

On Feb. 15, the FBI directed its employees in the Criminal Justice Information Services Division to remove all entries of fugitives from justice from the background check database and said that “entries will not be permitted” under that category until further notice. Before the FBI memo, there were about 500,000 people identified as fugitives from justice in the database — and all of those names were removed.

Now there are 788.

“Even if the FBI’s revised definition of fugitive from justice is assumed to be legally correct, purging the NICS database of every single individual previously identified as a fugitive from justice was an unjustifiable, alarmingly overbroad, and dangerous decision,” the Giffords group’s Thomas and Robin F. Thurston of the Democracy Forward Foundation wrote in the letter to the FBI.

Federal law enforcement officials say that about 430,000 names of wanted people removed from the database were from Massachusetts.

Commissioner James Slater of the Massachusetts Department of Criminal Justice Information Services said that the reason that his state had so many fugitives in the FBI database is that state policy required sending the bureau the names of all people with an outstanding warrant, whether it was for misdemeanors or felonies.

Because Massachusetts state law prevents fugitives from buying guns, those individuals have now been added back to the federal database under the “state prohibitor” category and will be prevented from purchasing a firearm, he said.

Of the 70,000 others whose names have been purged, the FBI is working with the states to identify which people might have crossed state lines and could be put back into the federal database for that or other reasons.

“The Justice Department is committed to working with law enforcement partners across the country to help ensure that all those who can legally be determined to be prohibited from receiving or possessing a firearm be included in federal criminal databases,” said a Justice Department official who would discuss the matter only on the condition of anonymity.

Sessions in his memo directed the FBI and ATF to work with the Defense Department and other government agencies to improve reporting and identify any other measures that could be taken to prevent guns getting into the wrong hands.

David Chipman, a former ATF official who now works as a senior adviser to the Giffords group, said that, given the confusion over the definition of a fugitive, Congress should pass a new law that makes clear whether people with outstanding arrest warrants can buy a gun.

“I would imagine 99 percent of Americans don’t want people who have a warrant out on them to be able to buy a gun,” Chipman said. “I can’t believe there is a constituency for wanted people. Wanted people are particularly dangerous. They’ve already proven that they’ll break the law.”

Read more:

After Las Vegas, gun-control group seizing moment to push for tighter regulations

No action by Congress or ATF on the device used in Las Vegas shooting

The Trump administration has already been rolling back gun regulations

The photo of a naked Mr. Barton, with his private parts obscured before it was posted, set off waves of speculation in Texas and Washington, where sexual harassment charges are roiling Capitol Hill. The tweets, which appeared on Monday, included an image of a sexually explicit text message, ostensibly sent by Mr. Barton, along with a cryptic reference to harassment.

It was not clear why the photo was posted. Lawmakers called and texted one another Tuesday night and Wednesday morning trying to discern whether the photo was authentic, but received no guidance from the party’s leadership or Mr. Barton.

AshLee Strong, a spokeswoman for Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, said Mr. Ryan had spoken to Mr. Barton on the matter but would “keep those conversations between the two of them.”

Mr. Barton is the longest-serving member of the Texas congressional delegation and was the Energy and Commerce Committee chairman when President George W. Bush was in the White House. He used that perch to promote the interests of his state’s oil and gas industry and even clashed with some fellow Republicans when his committee investigated scientists doing research on climate change.

He had lowered his sights more recently, telling associates that he hoped to claim the investigatory subcommittee of the Energy and Commerce panel. That subcommittee chairmanship is currently vacant because its most recent chairman, Representative Tim Murphy of Pennsylvania, resigned last month after it was revealed that he had encouraged his mistress to seek an abortion.

Unlike other veteran lawmakers who have retired after their time atop influential committees has come to an end, Mr. Barton had shown no interest in leaving Congress.

“I’m the odd duck who didn’t quit,” he joked to The Dallas Morning News in an interview this month.

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His personal life has been more turbulent than his political career. He divorced his first wife in 1993 and his second wife two years ago.

Mr. Barton has young children from his second marriage, and one of them, his 10-year-old son, was at the congressional baseball practice earlier this year when a man sprayed the field with bullets, gravely injuring Representative Steve Scalise, the majority whip, a lobbyist and a Capitol Police officer. Another police officer was injured as well. Mr. Barton is the longtime coach of the Republican baseball team.

Democrats were not planning to aggressively contest Mr. Barton’s conservative-leaning seat: His best-funded Democratic challenger, Jana Lynne Sanchez, had only $16,440 on hand as of the start of October.

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Hackers stole the personal data of 57 million customers and drivers from Uber Technologies Inc., a massive breach that the company concealed for more than a year. This week, the ride-hailing firm ousted its chief security officer and one of his deputies for their roles in keeping the hack under wraps, which included a $100,000 payment to the attackers.

Compromised data from the October 2016 attack included names, email addresses and phone numbers of 50 million Uber riders around the world, the company told Bloomberg on Tuesday. The personal information of about 7 million drivers was accessed as well, including some 600,000 U.S. driver’s license numbers. No Social Security numbers, credit card information, trip location details or other data were taken, Uber said.

At the time of the incident, Uber was negotiating with U.S. regulators investigating separate claims of privacy violations. Uber now says it had a legal obligation to report the hack to regulators and to drivers whose license numbers were taken. Instead, the company paid hackers to delete the data and keep the breach quiet. Uber said it believes the information was never used but declined to disclose the identities of the attackers.

“None of this should have happened, and I will not make excuses for it,” Dara Khosrowshahi, who took over as chief executive officer in September, said in an emailed statement. “We are changing the way we do business.”

Read more: Uber Pushed the Limits of the Law. Now Comes the Reckoning

After Uber’s disclosure Tuesday, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman launched an investigation into the hack, his spokeswoman Amy Spitalnick said.

Hackers have successfully infiltrated numerous companies in recent years. The Uber breach, while large, is dwarfed by those at Yahoo, MySpace, Target Corp., Anthem Inc. and Equifax Inc. What’s more alarming are the extreme measures Uber took to hide the attack. The breach is the latest scandal Khosrowshahi inherits from his predecessor, Travis Kalanick.

Read more: Gadfly’s Shira Ovide says Kalanick must speak

QuicktakeCybersecurity

Kalanick, Uber’s co-founder and former CEO, learned of the hack in November 2016, a month after it took place, the company said. Uber had just settled a lawsuit with the New York attorney general over data security disclosures and was in the process of negotiating with the Federal Trade Commission over the handling of consumer data. Kalanick declined to comment on the hack.

Joe Sullivan, the outgoing security chief, spearheaded the response to the hack last year, a spokesman told Bloomberg. Sullivan, a onetime federal prosecutor who joined Uber in 2015 from Facebook Inc., has been at the center of much of the decision-making that has come back to bite Uber this year. Bloomberg reported last month that the board commissioned an investigation into the activities of Sullivan’s security team. This project, conducted by an outside law firm, discovered the hack and the failure to disclose, Uber said.

Here’s how the hack went down: Two attackers accessed a private GitHub coding site used by Uber software engineers and then used login credentials they obtained there to access data stored on an Amazon Web Services account that handled computing tasks for the company. From there, the hackers discovered an archive of rider and driver information. Later, they emailed Uber asking for money, according to the company.

A patchwork of state and federal laws require companies to alert people and government agencies when sensitive data breaches occur. Uber said it was obligated to report the hack of driver’s license information and failed to do so.

“At the time of the incident, we took immediate steps to secure the data and shut down further unauthorized access by the individuals,” Khosrowshahi said. “We also implemented security measures to restrict access to and strengthen controls on our cloud-based storage accounts.”

Uber has earned a reputation for flouting regulations in areas where it has operated since its founding in 2009. The U.S. has opened at least five criminal probes into possible bribes, illicit software, questionable pricing schemes and theft of a competitor’s intellectual property, people familiar with the matters have said. The San Francisco-based company also faces dozens of civil suits. London and other governments have taken steps toward banning the service, citing what they say is reckless behavior by Uber.