Huffman and 12 other parents to plead guilty in college scheme
BOSTON — “Desperate Housewives” star Felicity Huffman and a dozen other prominent parents have agreed to plead guilty in the college admissions bribery scam that ensnared wealthy families and athletic coaches at some of the nation’s most selective universities, federal authorities said Monday.
The actress and the other parents were charged last month in the scheme, which authorities say involved rigging standardized test scores and bribing coaches at such prestigious schools as Yale and Georgetown.
Huffman, 56, was accused of paying a consultant $15,000 disguised as a charitable donation to boost her daughter’s SAT score. Authorities say the actress also discussed going through with the same plan for her younger daughter but ultimately decided not to.
She will plead guilty to conspiracy and fraud, according to court documents. Those charges are punishable by up to 20 years in prison, but the plea agreement indicates prosecutors will seek a sentence of four to 10 months.
Shake-up at Homeland Security
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump and White House allies pressing for a harder line on immigration sped their campaign Monday to clean house at the Department of Homeland Security with a mission far wider than just the departure of Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.
The dismantling of the government’s immigration leadership is being orchestrated by Trump adviser Stephen Miller, the impetus behind some of the administration’s most controversial policies, according to three people familiar with the matter. Beyond changing names and faces, Trump is considering separating migrant families at the border again, resuming the practice that drew so much fury and outrage last year, the same people said.
The head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, L. Francis Cissna, and Homeland Security General Counsel John M. Mitnick are expected to be pushed out of their positions, the officials said. Nielsen submitted her resignation Sunday after meeting with Trump at the White House, and three days earlier the administration withdrew the nomination of Ron Vitiello to lead Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. Other longtime civil servants in agency posts are also on the chopping block, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Leading senators from both parties deplored it all.
“The purge of senior leadership at the Department of Homeland Security is unprecedented and a threat to our national security,” declared Democrat Dianne Feinstein. “President Trump is trying to remake DHS into his own personal anti-immigration agency.”
Vaccines blocked as deadly cholera raged across Yemen
ADEN, Yemen — In the summer of 2017, a plane chartered by the United Nations idled on the tarmac at an airport in the Horn of Africa as officials waited for final clearance to deliver half a million doses of cholera vaccine to Yemen. Amid the country’s ruinous war, the disease was spiraling out of control, with thousands of new cases reported each day.
The green light for the plane to head to northern Yemen never came. The U.N. wasn’t able to distribute cholera vaccines to Yemen until May 2018 and the outbreak ultimately produced more than 1 million suspected cholera cases — the worst cholera epidemic recorded in modern times and a calamity that medical researchers say may have been avoided if vaccines had been deployed sooner.
U.N. officials blamed the canceled flight on the difficulties in distributing vaccines during an armed conflict. But officials with knowledge of the episode told The Associated Press that the real reason was that the Houthi rebels who control northern Yemen refused to allow the vaccines to be delivered, after spending months demanding that the U.N. send ambulances and other medical equipment for their military forces as a condition for accepting the shipment.
By wire sources
