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She cheated, and then she scored.bribery scandal ever prosecuted. Huffman, 56, pleaded guilty in the high-profile case last May. She admitted spending $15,000 to have a paid-off proctor correct answers on her daughter’s SAT test two years ago.“This was a gift,” James Cohen, a law professor at Fordham University, told the Daily News Friday. “I think it’s a low sentence. It’s a defense win.”After walking into the courthouse holding hands with her actor husband William H. Macy Friday afternoon, Huffman told the judge she took “full responsibility” for her crime.She recalled driving her daughter Sophia to the test center in 2017 and knowing deep down it was wrong.“I remember thinking, ‘Turn around, just turn around.’ To my eternal shame, I didn’t,” Huffman said, according to BuzzFeed.“I can only say, I am so sorry Sophia,” Huffman continued. “I was frightened, I was stupid, and I was so … [Read more...] about Felicity Huffman sentenced to 14 days in prison for bribery

GIVEN THAT their home country was built on oil, it is appropriate that the social hub of Venezuelan exiles in Miami should be a diner at a petrol station. El Arepazo is in Doral, a suburb near Miami’s international airport with a golf resort belonging to President Donald Trump. It is a shrine to a Venezuela lost. It is wallpapered with blown-up black-and-white photos of Caracas in the 1950s and 1960s. Along with strong coffee it sells arepas, the cornmeal griddle-cakes that are a Venezuelan staple. Morale among the clientele is sagging. “Trump is deserting us,” says Pedro Pereira, who abandoned his dairy farm near Lake Maracaibo in 2017 because of threats, extortion and chronic shortages of electricity and animal medicines. He was full of hope in January this year when Juan Guaidó, the head of the national assembly, proclaimed himself interim president and was recognised by 55 countries who shared his view that Nicolás Maduro’s second term as … [Read more...] about Negotiating a way out of Venezuela’s morass

SINCE ITS discovery by astronomers in 2015, the exoplanet K2-18b has elicited much excitement. Swirling around a red-dwarf star about 110 light-years away from Earth, the distant world sits in a so-called Goldilocks zone—not close enough to its host star to be too hot and not far enough away to be too cold—that could allow liquid water to flow across its surface. That is a crucial condition for life as we know it. Now astronomers have cranked up the speculation. Follow-up images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope suggest K2-18b (artist’s impression below) has an atmosphere containing large amounts of water vapour—the first exoplanet in a habitable zone to have this confirmed. Most exoplanets previously found with atmospheres have been gas giants, similar to Neptune or Jupiter. K2-18b instead looks like it could be a rocky planet twice as big as Earth, perhaps covered in vast ice-covered seas. To make the discovery of atmospheric water, Angelos Tsiaras, an … [Read more...] about The first planet beyond the solar system confirmed to have water

IN OCTOBER 1908, on a windy field at Farnborough, south-west of London, a handlebar-mustachioed former Wild West showman named Samuel Cody completed the first official controlled flight of a powered aeroplane in Britain. Since then many other pioneering aircraft, from Concorde to the giant Airbus A380, have flown at what became the biennial Farnborough air show. The aerospace centre that stages the show is now preparing for another sort of revolutionary aircraft to take to the sky. These new planes are variously described as flying taxis, passenger drones or, as the industry terms them, urban air mobility (UAM) vehicles. Around 200 such craft are at various stages of development around the world, according to experts at Farnborough’s first global urban air summit in early September. Some prototypes are already carrying out test flights and operators hope to begin commercial services within the next few years. Uber, which runs an app-based taxi-hailing service, aims to start … [Read more...] about Flying taxis are taking off to whisk people around cities

The John Lewis Partnership has mostly been doing the right things and as such critics of Britain’s largest employee owned business are hard to find. There was more evidence of that to be found in some otherwise gloomy looking results produced by an organisation that puts most of its rival retailers to shame.   Faced with an extraordinarily difficult backdrop, and uncertainties bordering on the frightening, the partnership has reacted with prudence.  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 USD 0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras. Subscribe now It’s been hoarding cash and managed to reduce its debt pile by £469m to £2.4bn over the six months to 27 July.  The bonuses paid to employee partners have been sharply reduced. That could be likened to a dividend cut at a shareholder owned plc. But grumbling employees are easier to deal with than the massed ranks of the City of London if … [Read more...] about Why we should worry for the future of John Lewis