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Good morning, I’m Mattha Busby with today’s essential stories.
Hollywood actors charged over college admissions scam
Felicity Huffman, Lori Loughlin and more than 30 other wealthy Americans paid bribes to guarantee their children could attend elite schools including Yale and Stanford, prosecutors said. Dozens were arrested on Tuesday, with Huffman – the Desperate Housewives star – appearing in court to be told she could be released on a $250,000 bond. Operation Varsity Blues exposed how parents spent thousands, millions in some cases, through a now disgraced businessman as part of a fraud which was aided by college coaches and insiders at testing centers, federal prosecutors said.
Photoshopped To deceive administrators, the affluent students would often have their faces edited on to the heads of athletes, with one boy presented as “an elite high school pole vaulter” despite having never played the sport.
Exams The director of a private college preparatory school would stand in for students in SAT tests, while in other cases grades would be artificially inflated and children would claim to have learning difficulties, according to the court filing.
US under pressure to ground Boeing plane as EU halts flights
US aviation authorities have maintained that the Boeing 737 Max is safe following a second fatal crash involving the plane in less than five months. US regulators have become increasingly isolated after the EU suspended all flights by the plane, with a number of other countries also grounding the jet. The scare has wiped billions of dollars off the market value of the world’s biggest plane-maker, and its stock fell further on Tuesday.
Pilots Trump tweeted that modern planes were “becoming far too complex to fly”, declaring that he did not want “Albert Einstein to be my pilot”, prior to reportedly having a conversation with the CEO of Boeing.
Liftoff Though flights will be affected by airspace and airport bans, a number of airlines are still operating the 737 Max, including Air Canada, Flydubai, and American Airlines.
MPs vote down Brexit bill, raising the possibility of no-deal
Theresa May suffered another humiliating defeat as MPs ignored her pleas to “get the deal done” and voted overwhelmingly against her Brexit deal, yet again undermining her authority. With just 17 days until the UK is due to leave the EU, the vote provoked further uncertainty and MPs will today decide whether to exit without a deal. Although Conservative MPs will have a free vote on that decision, it almost certainly will not pass, and the House of Commons will on Thursday be given the opportunity to delay Brexit by requesting that the EU extends the withdrawal period.
More talks? The EU has indicated that it does not want further negotiations, while the prime minister’s spokesman said Downing Street was not in favour of a deal that would keep the UK in the bloc’s customs union.
Next. Even in the event of a pause, May is determined to find a resolution ahead of the European elections in 10 weeks’ time. Parliament, however, might take another view. A general election could still be called, but that is unlikely.
California governor to place moratorium on death penalty
Governor Gavin Newsom is expected to sign new executive order on Wednesday morning that will mean 737 inmates awaiting execution will not be put to death during his period in office, bringing the state in line with Colorado, Oregon, and Pennsylvania as momentum for an end to capital punishment nationwide grows. However, voters in the golden state rejected an initiative that would have repealed the death penalty in 2016.
Executions. California has the biggest death row population in the country, with one in four US inmates on death row incarcerated in the state.
Crib sheet
Actors’ brains show different patterns of activity depending on whether they are in character or not, according to a study in which method actors trained to take on the role of Romeo or Juliet and then responded to a series of personal questions.
Google was hit by outages affecting users of its products across the world for several hours. Many of Gmail’s billion users were unable to send emails and had problems opening attachments (including the author of this briefing) until the issues were resolved.
Genetics might reduce the effectiveness of hormonal contraceptives such as the pill or implants, a study has suggested. A small proportion of women who take such precautions still become pregnant, which experts have until now often put down to the method not being used correctly or existing pregnancy.
There are 1,237 animal species globally that face threats to their survival and “will almost certainly face extinction” without conservation intervention, according to research that found intrusions into habitats were “extensive”.
Must-reads
Should we allow the “digital wellness” movement to cure our phone addiction? That could absolve the tech industry of responsibility for encouraging screen time and making life harder for independent digital wellness developers. Regardless of who is to blame, Moment – an app that tracks phone use – is growing in popularity.
Cory Brooker: from high school football star, mayor of a struggling city to two-term senator The man who could be the Democrats’ presidential candidate has faced scrutiny over what he really stands for. Often favouring optimistic rhetoric over policy detail in his speeches, the Yale graduate is nonetheless beginning to rack up the endorsements.
Hum. Hum. Can you hear it? Hum. As many as 4% of people can apparently hear this strange low-pitched noise whose origin has never been found. It could be a form of noise pollution that most city dwellers screen out, but thanks to mainstream scientists largely avoiding the topic, we cannot know for sure. This is in part why a university lecturer set up the World Hum Map and Database to search for the source.
Too many choices. Netflix signals that it will make more interactive stories after the success of Black Mirror’s Bandersnatch, with decision-making dynamics likely to be employed again. Todd Yellin, product VP, told a Mumbai audience on Tuesday: “It could be a romance, where the audience gets to choose: should she go out with him or him?”
Opinion
Richard V Reeves, author and senior fellow in economic studies, writes that regardless of the college admissions corruption scandal, entrance into elite US colleges is slanted in favour of the wealthy.
The whole system is rigged in favor of more affluent parents. It is true that the conversion of wealth into a desirable college seat was especially egregious in this case – to the extent that it was actually illegal. But there are countless ways that students are robbed of a ‘fair shot’ if they are not lucky enough to be born to well-resourced, well-connected parents
Sport
The NBA’s all-time leading scorer Kareem Abdul Jabbar writes that he is elated and inspired to see LeBron James close in on his record, after the Lakers forward surpassed Michael Jordan last month.
Tiger Woods admits that his recent neck injury is a consequence of surgery on his back. However, the 43-year-old insisted that it would not damage his chances at the Players Championship or the Masters.
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