Parents in college admissions scandal tell judge there was no conspiracy
A Palo Alto couple accused of paying $25,000 to rig their son’s college entrance exam asked a federal judge this week to dismiss the indictment against them, claiming there was no conspiracy among the parents entangled in the college admissions scandal.
Amy and Gregory Colburn’s defense, which is detailed in a document filed in federal court in Boston on Monday, is the first to be made public since prosecutors announced charges against a cadre of wealthy parents, coaches and others in the cheating scheme. […]
Their defense attorney, David S. Schumacher, argued in the motion that even if it were true that his clients paid a test proctor to correct their son’s SAT exam, as authorities have alleged, they did not act in concert with other parents. In that case, Schumacher said, prosecutors don’t have the legal ground to support the conspiracy charge.
Star Tribune
Sen. Bernie Sanders challenges Sen. Amy Klobuchar in her home state
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who won Minnesota’s last Democratic presidential caucuses, isn’t ceding the state’s 2020 primary to Sen. Amy Klobuchar.
There are early signs of enduring Sanders strength: More than 30,000 Minnesotans have signed up to support him since he joined the race Feb. 19, said Claire Sandberg, his campaign’s national organizing director.
At least 81 house parties for those volunteers will be held on April 27 across Minnesota — in all eight congressional districts — as part of a nationwide launch of organizing efforts, she said.
Grist
Elizabeth Warren’s latest policy proposal shares roots with the Green New Deal
For all her experience and name recognition, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren is being out-fundraised by relative newcomers like Texas’ Beto O’Rourke and Indiana’s Pete Buttigieg this quarter. But when it comes to policy proposals, the Democrat is still outpacing most of her rivals in the 2020 Democratic primary.
On Monday, Warren released a proposal that promises, among other things, an executive ban on new offshore leases and drilling on government-owned lands on her first day in office. It marks her sixth policy plan in three and a half months, and is one of the primary field’s first climate proposals that touches on the themes laid out in the Green New Deal.
Warren’s proposal includes free access to national parks for American citizens and pledges to restore protections to national monuments like Bears Ears that were rolled back by the Trump administration. Most interestingly, she introduces the framework for the kind of conservation workforce that would put a smile on FDR’s face.
McClatchy
On Israel, Kamala Harris breaks with liberal 2020 pack
California Sen. Kamala Harris is resisting pressure from the left flank of her Democratic party to take a more critical stance on the Israeli government and its policies towards Palestinians, holding firmly to her moderate approach to U.S.-Israel relations in her 2020 run for president.
In the Senate and on the campaign trail, Harris is opposing the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement targeting Israel, foreign aid cuts to the state, condemnatory votes on Israel at the United Nations and public criticism of its leadership — all tactics increasingly popular with the Democratic base and adopted by several of her Democratic presidential rivals.
Unlike those rivals, Harris is standing by her association with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, as the advocacy organization becomes a lightning rod within the Democratic Party.
Politico
Guantanamo military tribunal hit with another legal setback
A federal appeals court dealt another severe blow to the beleaguered Guantanamo Bay military tribunals Tuesday, tossing out three years worth of rulings in a key terror case after deciding the judge overseeing the proceedings did not appear to be impartial.
In a blistering opinion, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals held that Air Force Col. Vance Spath created “an intolerable cloud of partiality” over the military commission by pursuing a job at the Justice Department while simultaneously presiding over the case against Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri, the alleged mastermind of the USS Cole bombing in Yemen in 2000.
The unanimous opinion from a three-judge panel also accused Spath of a “lack of candor” for obscuring his pending job change by not revealing it when he halted proceedings in the case in July 2018.
Judge: Barr sowing public mistrust with Mueller report handling
Attorney General William Barr has created public distrust about whether the Justice Department is committed to sharing as much as possible about the Russia probe's findings, a federal judge said on Tuesday.
“The attorney general has created an environment that has caused a significant part of the public … to be concerned about whether or not there is full transparency,” U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton said during a hearing Tuesday afternoon on a Freedom of Information Act suit demanding access to a report detailing the findings of special counsel Robert Mueller.
Walton, an appointee of President George W. Bush, did not elaborate on what actions or statements by the attorney general have generated those perceptions.
NPR News
A Rare Sight At Brigham Young University As Students Protest The Honor Code Office
Sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Brigham Young University is known for its adherence to church teachings and for its strict Honor Code, which regulates everything from beards to premarital sex. Student protest is uncommon.
But last Friday, 300 gathered at the school's flagship campus to question its Honor Code Office, chanting, "God forgives me, why can't you?"
Students allege that the university is mistreating victims of sexual assault and harassment, especiallyy women and LGBTQ students.
They say the administration has used the code against victims, and some say they have been punished for reporting their own sexual assaults.
Bloomberg
Trump Stirs Alarm That He May Be Giving China a New Trade Weapon
High on the list of … Donald Trump’s priorities as he tries to close a trade deal with counterpart Xi Jinping is making sure China faces consequences if it doesn’t live up to its promises. Yet in pursuing that goal Trump may also be giving China a new cudgel to use on American companies and striking another blow to the international rule of law.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has said the U.S. has made its own commitments to China and agreed that both sides will be subject to an enforcement mechanism. “This will be a two-way agreement in enforcement,’’ Mnuchin said Monday, after saying over the weekend that the U.S. would be open to “certain repercussions.”
Details of the U.S. commitments and how the enforcement mechanism will operate remain scant. But Mnuchin’s comments have caused plenty of raised eyebrows from legal scholars to the business community and Congress.
Ars Technica
Apple and Qualcomm settle patent fight after one day in court
A high-stakes trial between Apple and Qualcomm kicked off yesterday in a San Diego courtroom. But this afternoon, the companies announced that they had reached a deal in the case.
The news sent Qualcomm stock soaring more than 20 percent. Apple stock saw little change.
Apple and Qualcomm had been locked in a global, years-long legal battle over patent royalties. Qualcomm demands that companies license its patent portfolio before they can buy the company's chips. It's an unusual arrangement, and critics argue it is an abuse of Qualcomm's dominant position in the wireless chip market.
Notre Dame Cathedral will never be the same, but it can be rebuilt
In a statement, French President Emmanuel Macron vowed to rebuild the cathedral, beginning with a national donation program to raise funds for the effort. It's clear that reconstruction at Notre Dame will be a massive undertaking, but its exact scale depends on exactly what's left behind when the fire finally dies away.
While architects have enough detailed information about the cathedral to pull off a technically very precise reconstruction, the craftsmanship is unlikely to be the same. Today, the stone that makes up the cathedral would be cut using machinery, not by hand by small armies of stonemasons as in the 12th century. "Nineteenth-century and 20th-century Gothic buildings always look a little dead, because the stone doesn't bear the same marks of the mason's hand," Murray told Ars Technica.
Entire forests of 400-year-old oak trees to replace the roof timbers will inevitably also be nearly impossible to come by, so it's likely that Notre Dame will never be quite the same. But, at least in the immediate aftermath, there appears to be a will to rebuild, and Murray notes that France has a large historical restoration industry. "There are companies very, very well equipped to take this sort of thing on," he told Ars Technica.
Hackers could read non-corporate Outlook.com, Hotmail for six months
Late on Friday, some users of Outlook.com/Hotmail/MSN Mail received an email from Microsoftstating that an unauthorized third party had gained limited access to their accounts and was able to read, among other things, the subject lines of emails (but not their bodies or attachments, nor their account passwords), between January 1 and March 28 of this year. Microsoft confirmed this to TechCrunch on Saturday.
The hackers, however, dispute this characterization. They told Motherboard that they can indeed access email contents and have shown that publication screenshots to prove their point. They also claim that the hack lasted at least six months, doubling the period of vulnerability that Microsoft has claimed. After this pushback, Microsoft responded that around 6 percent of customers affected by the hack had suffered unauthorized access to their emails and that these customers received different breach notifications to make this clear. However, the company is still sticking to its claim that the hack only lasted three months.
Not in dispute is the broad character of the attack.
The Guardian
Tory deregulation agenda stalling Brexit talks, says Corbyn
Jeremy Corbyn has said Brexit talks with the government are stalling because of a Tory desire for post-withdrawal deregulation, including as part of a US trade deal.
Corbyn said Labour had been putting forward a robust case for a customs union during the talks over the past week but suggested he feared the two sides would not find common ground.
“There has to be access to European markets and above all there has to be a dynamic relationship to protect the conditions and rights that we’ve got for environment and consumer workplace rights,” he said. “We’ve put those cases very robustly to the government and there’s no agreement as yet.”
Baby T rex goes on sale on eBay, sparking paleontologists' outcry
You wouldn’t normally associate the world of dutiful natural history preservation with sporadic bursts of all-caps letters and exclamation points – or at least not until last month, when the fossil of an infant Tyrannosaurus rex, potentially the only in existence, went on sale on eBay for the “buy it now” price of $2.95m. […]
The skeleton, estimated to be 68m years old, was first discovered in 2013, on private land in Montana. It became the property of the man who discovered it, Alan Detrich, a professional fossil hunter. In 2017, Detrich lent the fossil to the University of Kansas Natural History Museum, where it was still on display when Detrich made the surprise decision to put it up for auction.
Analysis of the skeleton may help to settle a major debate in palaeontology over whether small Tyrannosaurs from North America are infants or should have the separate classification of Nanotyrannus. Such research may now be impossible with the fossil likely to end up in a private collection.
Notre Dame was ‘15 to 30 minutes’ away from complete destruction
Notre Dame Cathedral was within “15 to 30 minutes” of complete destruction as firefighters battled to stop flames reaching its gothic bell towers, French authorities have revealed.
A greater disaster was averted by members of the Paris fire brigade, who risked their lives to remain inside the burning monument to create a wall of water between the raging fire and two towers on the west facade.
The revelation of how close France came to losing its most famous cathedral emerged as police investigators questioned workers involved in the restoration of the monument to try to establish the cause of the devastating blaze.