Electric vehicle maker Tesla Inc wants to start building a new and large vehicle assembly plant in the southwestern United States as early as the third quarter of this year, the company told Texas officials in documents made public this week.

Top officials from Facebook, Google and Twitter were grilled by U.S. lawmakers on Thursday at a virtual hearing on foreign influence and election security ahead of the Nov. 3 presidential contest.

* Indexes mixed: Dow dips 0.25%, S&P flat, Nasdaq up 0.17% (Updates to early afternoon)

A group of 27 leading executives added to calls for Canada to ease coronavirus-led air restrictions in a letter published in the country's Globe and Mail newspaper on Thursday.

Robinhood Markets Inc, the fintech startup credited with helping popularize trading with millennials, said on Thursday it experienced a major trading outage and that while its systems were back online, it was still working to resolve the problem.

* Trial of app showed inaccuracies on Apple's iPhone (Updates with quotes from news conference)

LATAM Airlines Chief Executive Roberto Alvo said on Thursday he expects the region´s largest carrier to be operating at half of pre-pandemic levels by the end of 2020, and that a full recovery was unlikely for at least 3-4 years.

Ford Motor Co next week will show the next generation of its brawny F-150 pickup truck that offers a new sleeper-seat feature and over-the-air software updates in a machine Ford is counting on to help pay off coronavirus-related debts.

The luxury industry will feel the fallout from the coronavirus crisis for the next two years if not longer, Chanel's chief financial officer said on Thursday, warning the French fashion label's 2020 revenues and profit would be significantly hit.

France's top court rejected most of a draft law that would have compelled social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter to remove any hateful content within 24 hours, it said on Thursday.

Top officials from Facebook Inc, Alphabet Inc's Google and Twitter Inc appeared remotely before U.S. lawmakers on Thursday at a virtual hearing on foreign influence and election security.

Portugal's government approved on Thursday plans to create a state-owned development bank to channel funds into certain companies and sectors to bolster the economy.

Robinhood Markets Inc, the fintech startup credited with helping popularize trading with millennials, said on Thursday it was experiencing a "major outage" in equities and options trading, as well as "degraded performance" in cryptocurrency trading. ...

Facebook Inc said on Thursday it filed lawsuits against individuals in Europe and the United States for abusing its platforms to offer automated tools for scraping users' personal data and gathering likes.

* Zalando jumps as pandemic boosts online shopping (Adds comments; updates prices to closes)

U.S. supermarket chain Kroger Co stopped short of raising its annual forecasts on Thursday, saying a coronavirus-driven surge in demand for essential goods was fading as American households reconsider what they have on their shelves.

Eskalera, a technology startup led by Goldman Sachs former human resources head Dane Holmes, has launched an index to measure corporate diversity and inclusiveness, the firm said on Thursday.

* Indexes: Dow flat, S&P up 0.16%, Nasdaq rises 0.47% (Adds quote, details; updates prices)

Bombardier's chief executive told shareholders at its annual general meeting on Thursday that a deal to sell its rail division to France's Alstom SA remains "pretty much on track to our original timeline."

NEW YORK, June 18 (LPC) - Global development banks are mobilizing billions of US dollars in capital to fund initiatives in Latin America as commercial bank lending slumps throughout the region, which is grappling with a spike in coronavirus cases and...