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Why was Felicity Huffman’s husband, an equally famous actor, not also charged with trying to bribe and fraud his kids’ way into college?

“Oh, I bet I know why,” sighed one friend, currently mired in her own kids’ school applications. “It’s because the moms have to do everything, including organize the crime.”

Macy, for what it’s worth, actually appeared to be a very involved parent. In the recorded phone calls, it was SPOUSE who brought up that his kid needed high enough scores for Georgetown. It was SPOUSE who declared the kid would perform better if the family could finagle an extended two-day SAT testing period, usually reserved for students with learning disabilities.

A three-day trip to the U.K. that began Wednesday is the young royal’s first visit to a Western country since he ousted a powerful cousin to become heir to the throne in June, a bumpy political transition that led to the arrests of critical clerics, princes and journalists.

For British Prime Minister Theresa May, who is hosting the Saudi prince at her country house, the visit is a chance to burnish commercial ties. Expanding economic links with countries outside the EU is a critical goal as Britain prepares to exit from the bloc in March next year. Saudi Arabia is already its biggest trading partner in the Middle East, with companies from the U.K. investing more in Saudi Arabia than from any other country after the U.S.

To draw foreign firms to the kingdom, the Saudi government is also trying to project a softer image of the ultraconservative country.

Government debt, meanwhile, has ballooned to almost 90% of GDP, up from just 58% a decade ago.

The country's economic malaise is a major issue in presidential elections.

Europe's third biggest economy has suffered years of anemic growth, high unemployment and budget deficits, while neighbors such as Germany and the U.K. have enjoyed a stronger recovery from the global financial crisis.

This week reminded me that #MeToo isn’t going anywhere, and that anyone who tries to punish the leaders will be stopped

What a week it’s been. Between the Golden Globes and Times Up, Oprah and the slew of new allegations against powerful men … it’s a lot. But I have to say that this week gave me hope.

In the end, what stuck with me was the way women stuck up for each other. It reminded me that #MeToo isn’t going anywhere, and that anyone who tries to punish the leaders - whether they are behind the scenes or on the front the lines - will be stopped. In a time when everything feels so hard, that’s something to be grateful for.

US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis has warned Syria it would be "very unwise" to use poison gas in Eastern Ghouta amid reports of chlorine attacks.Mr Mattis did not say President Trump would take military action, but the US struck Syria last April after a suspected gas attack in northern Syria.Fierce fighting is continuing and the Syrian army says it has surrounded a major town in the rebel-held enclave.More than 1,000 civilians have been reported killed in recent weeks.The Syrian military has been accused of targeting civilians, but it says it is trying to liberate the region - the last major opposition stronghold near the capital Damscus - from those it terms terrorists.

Mr Mattis said Mr Trump had "full political manoeuvre room" to respond to chlorine use.

The Syrian army says it has completely surrounded the town of Douma and cut the remaining rebel-held area into two, according to a statement made by the Lebanese Hezbollah militia, which is fighting on the side of the Syrian government.

As Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, tweeted Friday:“@realDonaldTrump is now set for war on 3 fronts: political vs Bob Mueller, economic vs China/others on trade, and actual vs. Iran and/or North Korea. This is the most perilous moment in modern American history — and it has been largely brought about by ourselves, not by events.”

While pundits mull whether the cloud of chaos Trump keeps swirling around him is simple incompetence or strategic plotting, The New York Times reported Friday:“Aides said there was no grand strategy to the president’s actions, and that he got up each morning this week not knowing what he would do. Much as he did as a New York businessman at Trump Tower, Mr. Trump watched television, reacted to what he saw on television and then reacted to the reaction.”

This is all gut and instinct. This is all reactionary emoting by a man of poor character, one addicted to affirmation. He desperately needs to be the king-of-every-hill he sees in the mirror: He was the ladies’ man, businessman, smartest man, toughest man. There was nothing beyond him, and he didn’t have to follow the rules, he only had to follow his instincts.

oe to you, because you build tombs for the prophets, and it was your ancestors who killed them.” Jesus’s rebuke to the Pharisees descended upon me on a cold January morning in 2017, in West Potomac Park in Washington, D.C. On that Monday, the national holiday dedicated to the man at whose memorial I stood, the capital bustled in anticipation of a more pressing political event. That’s why I was at the park, pondering this granite stone of hope, carved out of a mountain of despair. The memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. cast its shadow over me, its presence just as conflicted as those tombs.

After the Voting Rights Act was passed, in 1965, the revolution’s center of gravity shifted north, along with the stragglers of the Great Migration—toward de facto as opposed to de jure racism. Baldwin’s frequent premonitions of unrest in the streets began to come true. In his 1966 essay, “A Report From Occupied Territory,” he discussed the “powder keg” of poverty, joblessness, and discrimination in urban ghettos and warned that it “may blow up; it will be a miracle if it doesn’t.” King, by then, had sensed the same trouble brewing in the slums as Baldwin had. In his 1966 campaign against segregated housing in Chicago, which moved his strategy of nonviolent protest from the South to the North, he tried to wield his activism machine against the social and economic troubles that Baldwin described. He was repaid with violent counterprotests.

King spoke of a “white backlash”—a term he helped popularize—to his movement. But in retrospect, the strength of the reaction he predicted and endured often receives short shrift. The support of white moderates who recoiled at images of Negro children sprayed by hoses and attacked by dogs was instrumental in passing laws that ended legal segregation and protected voting rights.

The disease seems widespread, affecting venture-capital darlings and legacy brands, flattening local news while punishing international wires. Almost no one is safe, and almost everyone is for sale.

It’s tempting to think that this is the inevitable end game of Google and Facebook’s duopoly. The two companies already receive more than half of all the dollars spent on digital advertising, and they commanded 90 percent of the growth in digital ad sales last year.

what’s happening in media right now is more complex. We’re seeing the convergence of four trends.

WeWork locations in New York, where the throw pillows implore busy tenants to “Do what you love.” Neon signs demand they “Hustle harder,” and murals spread the gospel of T.G.I.M. Even the cucumbers in WeWork’s water coolers have an agenda. “Don’t stop when you’re tired,” someone recently carved into the floating vegetables’ flesh. “Stop when you are done.”

Welcome to hustle culture. It is obsessed with striving, relentlessly positive, devoid of humor, and — once you notice it — impossible to escape. “Rise and Grind” is both the theme of a Nike ad campaign and the title of a book by a “Shark Tank” shark. New media upstarts like the Hustle, which produces a popular business newsletter and conference series, and One37pm, a content company created by the patron saint of hustling, Gary Vaynerchuk, glorify ambition not as a means to an end, but as a lifestyle.

From this point of view, not only does one never stop hustling — one never exits a kind of work rapture, in which the chief purpose of exercising or attending a concert is to get inspiration that leads back to the desk.

What’s behind all this good news?The most overarching explanation would be that the Enlightenment worked. The idea that if we — we being humanity — set ourselves the goal of improving well-being, if we try to figure out how the world works using reason and science, every once in a while we can succeed.

You have argued that there is such a thing as human nature. Do you think we can transcend it?Part of human nature allows us to control the other part of our human nature. Even though humans tend to be unreasonable, it can’t be the case that we’re incapable of reason — otherwise, you’d never be able to make the argument that we’re being unreasonable. Even if we tend to backslide to irrationality, that doesn’t mean we should indulge that when we are deliberating how to run a society.

I was surprised by how much interest there’s been from centrist politicians, who are desperate for a coherent narrative to defend centrist liberalism, cosmopolitanism, open society, from the threats both by populists and by the hard left. I think there is a hunger for a coherent worldview that isn’t just the status quo, the un-Trumpism. We can do better than that. We ought to use reason and science to enhance human well-being.

The H-1B visa in particular, both its supporters and detractors argue, desperately needs an overhaul. Yet competing interests and disagreement over what needs fixing mean that, even with Trump’s administration having put restricting immigration flows at the center of its agenda, change is far from guaranteed.

The H-1B is one of several visa categories that allow foreign citizens to work while in the United States. Designed in the early 1990s as a temporary program to fill labor-market needs in highly specialized fields, such visas are issued in low numbers each year: This year’s cap was 85,000 in a nation with a labor force that’s estimated to be about 163 million people.

The White House has become more selective about approving new H-1B applications and changed the rules governing renewals so that the process is no longer automatic, as in Mahoney-Steel’s case.

after spending billions of euros to accommodate the newcomers, Germany is beginning to reap some gains. The number who are either working or participating in a job training program has been growing, and was at more than 400,000 as of the end of 2018. Of those, 44,000 were enrolled in apprenticeships, according to German business groups.

That’s on pace with, or even slightly ahead of, what many experts had predicted. 

we’re on track,”

For months, we had been tracking riots and lynchings around the world linked to misinformation and hate speech on Facebook, which pushes whatever content keeps users on the site longest — a potentially damaging practice in countries with weak institutions.

Time and again, communal hatreds overrun the newsfeed — the primary portal for news and information for many users — unchecked as local media are displaced by Facebook and governments find themselves with little leverage over the company

Some users, energized by hate speech and misinformation, plot real-world attacks.

Days after Donald Trump was accused of using racially charged language during bipartisan immigration talks, charges of bigotry once again threatened the president’s agenda as lawmakers battled Sunday over his choice of words and his intentions.

Meanwhile, lawmakers were still squabbling about what Trump said in the first place. Two Republicans present at the Thursday meeting, Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and David Perdue (R-Ga.), contradicted the accounts of Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), drawing a rebuke from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) for attacking Durbin’s integrity. And after courts last year used the president’s negative comments about Muslims to reject his attempts to implement travel restrictions, a federal judge who temporarily reinstated the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program said Friday it was “plausible” that Trump acted for racial reasons when he ended the Obama-era initiative.

The White House has not denied the “shithole” comments — Trump himself said only that he did not disparage Haitians — and there’s recognition internally that fighting over his views on race makes it harder to reach an immigration deal, a senior administration official said. “Democrats are going to have absolutely no incentive to cut a deal on anything,” the official said. Trump’s comments were so toxic, the thinking goes, that Democrats will be loath to hand him anything that looks like a win, such as funding for his proposed border wall. The White House has said it wants border security funding and changes to visa programs to be part of any deal related to the young undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers.

The Napoleonic Code was a unified legal code produced in post-revolutionary France and enacted by Napoleon in 1804. Napoleon gave the laws his name, and they both largely remain in place in France today, and heavily influenced world laws in the nineteenth century. It is easy to imagine how the conquering Emperor could spread a legal system across Europe, but perhaps surprising to know it outlasted him across the world.

France, in the century before the French Revolution,

As well as language and economic differences, there was no single unified set of laws which covered the whole of France.

Donald Trump owes each and every American money. And I don't mean the trickle-down economics kind that supposedly accompanies tax cuts to the one percent. I'm talking a check to every man, women and child for $3,239 per week until his presidency ends.

Why? Well, because Trump has cast us all in his dysfunctional reality show, and we deserve to be paid the SAG-AFTRA union minimum for being on a network reality show, which is currently $3,239 per week.

First, there was his ban on immigrants from several Muslim-majority countries, which caused massive protests at our nation's airports. Then there was Trump's announcement he was ending DACA, leaving hundreds of thousands of young people's futures in jeopardy. And who can forget his attempt to ban transgender Americans from serving in our military? Finally, last week, he is reported to have called Africa, Haiti and El Salvador "shithole" places.

We now have ample evidence of what should have been predictable from the start: Almost everyone who signed up to serve President Trump was in a critical way like him, either ideologically or in personal character. The notion that more than a handful were dedicated, non-extremist professionals serving in spite of Trump’s failings rather than because of them has simply failed the test of evidence.

All of it starts to feed on itself. The President is defined by his predation. He attracts these people to him or they are the only options available and he in turn protects them. He’s staffed by the inexperienced, the incompetent and the reprobate. They are unable to hide his nature even when it would be in his interest to allow them to do so. The rush of crises and incapacity yields desperation and lying, in part because of the nature of the situation but even more because these behaviors are validated from the top.

Facebook was a bad actor by complicity in the entire 2016 election Russian interference campaign. As I’ve noted in other posts, it’s an engine built to maximize engagement for ad sales and data collection which operates with no need to price its negative externalities. To pull that out of jargon into more concrete terms, it’s like a factory that is highly profitable in large part because it can dump its toxic waste into the local river. Facebook is designed to do stuff like this.

what’s driving this. It’s built into Facebook’s business model and of a piece with its corporate culture. The business model of Facebook is universal usage. It doesn’t target one demographic or regional or political audience. The whole point of Facebook is that everybody be on it. Much of its network value is bound up in that universality. Everyone’s on Facebook. Everyone has an account.

This business model has critical political implications. Much like a television network, it can’t be perceived as taking sides in America’s increasingly polarized politics. That could cut it off from a big chunk of its potential audience. This fact has shaped the behavior of all of the tech giants over the last decade

The Republican Party is learning what should have been obvious from the outset: Mr. Trump’s chaotic personality can’t be contained. Indeed, combining it with the awesome power of the presidency virtually guaranteed he would become more volatile and transgressive. His presidency is infecting the entire party.

policy is hardly the whole story. When it comes to the Republican Party and Mr. Trump, the most profound and dangerous shift has occurred not in policy but in the province of disposition and demeanor, temperament and cast of mind. This arena is more amorphous than policy but can be at least as important.

At the national level the Republican Party has become a destructive and anarchic political force in American life.