Lori Loughlin’s daughters have reportedly decided not to return to the University of Southern California, blaming potential bullying by classmates and the media.

According to a report from TMZ, both of Lori Loughlin’s daughters have decided that will not return to the University of Southern California. Federal investigators alleged earlier this week that Loughlin paid $500,000 to have her daughters admitted to the university. The alleged scheme involved pretending that Loughlin’s daughters were crew recruits even though the girls had never played the sport. Loughlin allegedly had her daughters pose on rowing equipment to further the lie that they were athletic recruits.

Now, both girls have reportedly decided that they will not return to the University of Southern California. TMZ claims that both girls are concerned about bullying on campus. Loughlin’s older daughter, Olivia Jade, was heavily criticized on Instagram after the scandal broke. She eventually turned off the comment section on her posts.

The TMZ report claims that Lori Loughlin and her husband, fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, support their daughter’s decision to withdraw from USC.

Stay tuned to Breitbart News for more updates on this story.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, so the old saying goes. With the European Parliament deep into its summer break, I found myself wondering whether I prefer the Parliament when it is on annual leave. And if so, is that my fault or the Parliament’s?

I blame Jean-Claude Juncker for putting those questions into my head. It was the president of the European Commission who, at the July plenary session of the Parliament — the last before its summer holiday — denounced the behavior of MEPs as “ridiculous,” precipitating an unseemly spat with Antonio Tajani, the president of the Parliament.

Juncker was upset that so few MEPs attended a debate reviewing Malta’s six-month stint presiding over the Council of the EU. Ever since, I’ve been wondering if the presence of MEPs in the chamber is a reliable measure of the value of the Parliament. After all, plenary debates don’t usually make much of an impression on the outside world. (If, in the last few months, you’ve heard anyone enthuse about a speech given in the Parliament, chances are that the reference was to Bill Clinton or Felipe González at the funeral rites for Helmut Kohl.)

A week after their tiff, Tajani sent Juncker a letter formally notifying him that the Parliament was on vacation until the end of August.

So how do I miss the Parliament while it’s on holiday? To help me count the ways, I turned to a work by the late Julian Priestley, who for 10 years (1997-2007) was secretary-general of the Parliament.

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His 2008 book “Six Battles That Shaped Europe’s Parliament” — recommended holiday reading for EU nerds — is a lively account of the powers of the Parliament and how, formally and informally, they were acquired.

The first battle Priestley recounts was for the Parliament to have a decisive say on the EU’s budget, one of its most important powers. And this is what Tajani’s letter to Juncker on July 13 was essentially about. The EU’s financial rules say that the Parliament is supposed to respond within a specified time to Commission proposals concerning the budget — and that would apply to adjustments to this year’s spending as well as proposals for future spending.

During holiday time, those deadlines would create problems, so Tajani was warning the Commission not to send any such routine requests. In this case, how do we miss the Parliament? We don’t — because budget matters are put on hold for the summer.

The consequence, however, is that discussion of the Commission’s proposal for the 2018 budget will be compressed into September-November, which won’t leave much margin for maneuver if discussions get sticky. The timetable can get complicated: France complained to the European Court of Justice about last year’s parliamentary vote on the EU budget because it was taken in Brussels rather than Strasbourg.

At the grown-up table

The second battle that Priestley identifies is the struggle for the Parliament to win recognition from the member countries — to get the president of the Parliament a place at EU summits and to get national leaders to attend sessions of the Parliament.

Ironic then, that what so irritated Juncker was the Parliament’s casual abuse of such recognition. Joseph Muscat, Malta’s prime minister, came to the Parliament to debate his country’s EU presidency and hardly any MEPs bothered to show up. Like a moody adolescent, the Parliament demands to be taken seriously, but when treated as an adult responds with churlish contempt.

In the summer, there are no EU summits and no plenary sessions, so I miss this unattractive attention-craving behavior not at all.

My relief will, however, be short-lived, because Juncker will deliver a “State of the Union” speech to the Parliament on September 13. Juncker has promised that his speech will take on board responses to the Commission’s various reflection papers on the future of the EU. And if you believe that, you qualify for a Charlemagne Prize in Naivety. Avert your eyes from the sight of two EU institutions propping each other up with their own insecurities.

Battle No. 3 was to acquire for the Parliament a role in the appointment of the European Commission. The upshot is that once every five years, after the election of a new Parliament, the summer is taken up with preparation for a new Commission: the commissioners-designate and the keenest MEPs spend their summer holidays prepping for the confirmation hearings in September.

But this is not one of those summers — the next change of the Commission isn’t due until 2019. Instead, just before the summer break the European Parliament subjected the new commissioner from Bulgaria, Mariya Gabriel, to only the gentlest of examinations, perhaps because she’d been an MEP for the past eight years. I wish that the Parliament was capable of maintaining rigorous standards of scrutiny of appointments, but in practice, the Parliament’s independence is compromised by MEPs’ deference to instructions from political groups and national interests.

Fourth on Priestley’s list was the struggle to get MEPs employed on the same common EU statute with a standardized salary (rather than earning the same as national lawmakers). The reform was characterized by Josep Borrell (president of the Parliament between 2004 and 2006) as something that all the EU institutions needed but nobody wanted.

Priestley’s account gives credit to Juncker, who was then prime minister of Luxembourg, for using his presidency of the Council of the EU to get the change pushed through.

Despite that breakthrough, and the introduction of a common statute for MEPs’ assistants, scandals still taint the Parliament — whether an individual MEP’s abuse of allowances or the allegations against France’s Front National MEPs that they diverted EU funds to national political activities. Those accusations are denied, but evidence accumulates that the Parliament’s internal controls are inadequate. One of the comforting aspects of the Parliament being on holiday is that the opportunities for skulduggery with attendance and travel allowances are reduced.

Search for work

It’s hard to excuse the Parliament’s failure to invest time in safeguarding its reputation given that its legislative workload has slackened. The fifth battle that Priestley describes is the struggle for legislative power. Successive treaty reforms have given the Parliament more and more say over legislation. All but the most hardened Euroskeptic would concede that this is the area where Parliament does its most valuable work — in the scrutiny of draft legislation. It’s through the unglamorous labor of the Parliament’s various committees, where individual MEPs have to combine political savvy with a mastery of technical detail, that the Parliament contributes most to the EU, and to its own reputation.

By definition, during the summer break, when the committees are not meeting, I miss that work. But here’s the rub: the difference between holiday-time and term-time is not as big as it used to be. The marked reduction in legislative proposals from the Juncker Commission has reduced the opportunities for the Parliament to respond — and for individual MEPs to burnish their reputations.

That’s not to say there aren’t important legislative dossiers before the Parliament — reform of the common European asylum system, rules on passenger name records and data privacy, a directive on copyright in the digital single market, for instance. Still, there are fewer than in the past. So this summer, I miss the Parliament’s legislative work, but not as much as in previous years.

The sixth battle was arguably the most dramatic — the one that saw the Parliament precipitate the resignation of Jacques Santer’s European Commission in March 1999. Priestley characterizes that as a battle to hold the Commission to account. But his record of events shows how accidental and haphazard was the sequence of events that toppled Santer: the holding to account was an improvised response to a confluence of scandals in 1998-1999. What the EU’s good health requires is routine run-of-the-mill mechanisms of accountability.

It’s not just the financial crisis and the migration crisis that have raised doubts about accountability. Notwithstanding a parliamentary inquiry, I’m unconvinced that the EU has got to grips with the regulatory failures that gave rise to Dieselgate. The ongoing crisis about contaminated eggs carries uncomfortable reminders of a 2011 outbreak of E. coli that was a much more serious failure of RASFF — the EU’s rapid alert system for food and feed.

Parliament’s record of holding the Council and Commission responsible after such failures is patchy at best. There was a valid point underlying Juncker’s irritation with MEPs for not wanting to review the Maltese presidency: the Parliament has to earn its credibility by doing the dull but worthy stuff.

All of which suggests that my starting point was ill-defined. I don’t want a Parliament that is desperate for my attention or affection. I want a Parliament that wins my grudging respect; one that is not — to borrow Juncker’s well-chosen word — “ridiculous.”

Tim King writes POLITICO‘s Brussels Sketch

Late-night legend Jay Leno said the scandal over parents, many of them Hollywood figures and CEOs, cheating their children’s way into elite colleges was the “legal definition” of white privilege.

“(T)his stupid college thing that’s going on, that just broke this week–that is the ultimate… you know, I always hear the term ‘white privilege,’ and what does that mean–this is the legal definition of it,” Jay Leno told Fox News.

“[It’s] just rich people buying their way into something they don’t belong to,” the 68-year-old said.

Leno also said that minority students were at a disadvantage because of legacy admissions.

“I mean, how many black, brown, yellow, orange kids got screwed out of college because somebody knew somebody or someone’s grandfather went there before. I think it’s going to be a good thing–it’s going to break it all up and make it more egalitarian for everybody, so I think it’s a good thing,” Leno said.

News broke this week that elite parents, including Desperate Housewives actress Felicity Huffman and Full House actress Lori Loughlin, were charged as part of a scam to get their children into prestigious colleges using false information.

Prosecutors said parents paid an admissions consultant from 2011 through last month to bribe coaches and administrators to label their children recruited athletes to boost their chances of getting into college. The consultant also hired ringers to take college entrance exams, and paid off insiders at testing centers to alter students’ scores.

Some parents spent anywhere from $200,000 to $6.5 million to guarantee their children’s admission, officials said.

Actor Dean Norris responded to the news by slamming the parents.

“When I think of all the kids who studied hard, stayed up late, had part time jobs to pay for their college application fees, and then were denied rightly deserved places in elite colleges because some rich fuckwads cheated for their already privileged kids— I’m disgusted,” the Breaking Bad actor said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

The Czech Republic’s Prime Minister-designate Andrej Babiš fired back at the European Union over its decision to sue the country for not complying with the bloc’s migration policies.

In an interview published Saturday by the Pravo newspaper, Babiš said the EU’s push to force his country to accept asylum-seekers would only fuel the rise of extremist parties.

“The (European) Commission can withdraw the charge at any moment. We have to negotiate on this and to offer different models, like guarding the borders or help to other countries. But we don’t want any refugees,” Babiš said, according to Reuters.

The Commission said Thursday it would take Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic to the European Court of Justice over their refusal to take in asylum seekers.

The Commission also took legal proceedings over Hungary’s asylum law to the next step, by issuing a formal request for Budapest to comply with EU rules. It said Budapest’s response to a Commission letter expressing concerns about the law was “found to be unsatisfactory as it failed to address the majority of the concerns.”

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Peter Tork, who rose to teen-idol fame in 1966 playing the lovably clueless bass guitarist in the made-for-television rock band The Monkees, has died.

He was 77.

Jane Blumkell of fellow Monkee Micky Dolenz’s production company tells The Associated Press Tork died Thursday morning.

The accomplished multi-instrumentalist was performing in Los Angeles clubs when he learned of a casting call for “four insane boys,” who would star in a TV show about a struggling rock band.

He, Dolenz, David Jones and Michael Nesmith became overnight sensations when the show took off in 1966.

He left the group in 1968 amid creative differences but reunited for tours with the others every few years. His last was in 2016.

Tork also recorded blues and folk music and made several TV appearances.

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Haven’t been paying close attention to the high-stakes Brexit negotiations? Don’t worry, you haven’t missed anything yet.

The United Kingdom’s negotiating team arrived in Brussels Monday for the third formal round of talks aimed at charting an orderly path out of the European Union. But although the Brits got to show they were in the European capital working on an uncharacteristically sunny public holiday, no actual negotiating took place.

After the EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, and his British counterpart, David Davis, made brief statements — but took no questions — at the European Commission headquarters Monday afternoon, an underwhelmed television reporter (with a British accent) shouted at them: “It sounds like Groundhog Day, gentlemen.”

Davis and Barnier walked away without offering a reply. But it’s hard to imagine they disagreed.

Barnier, as he did in nearly identical circumstances in June and July, welcomed Davis to Brussels and professed to be glad to see him. “Welcome back, David, I am looking forward to working with you this week,” Barnier said, then quickly added: “To be honest, I am concerned. Time passes quickly.”

Barnier said he welcomed the recent position papers published by the U.K. on a range of issues and said he and his team had read them “very carefully.” But he suggested there had been no game-changer. “We must start negotiating seriously,” Barnier said.

He also offered a pointed reminder that the European Council had given him very specific orders: to resolve the most important divorce issues first, before moving on to a discussion of Britain’s future relationship with the EU. The U.K. has insisted that the withdrawal terms and the future relationship are inseparable and should be discussed in tandem.

“The EU27 and the European Parliament stand united,” Barnier said. “They will not accept that separation issues are not addressed properly. I am ready. I am ready to intensify negotiations over the coming weeks in order to advance.”

In a further sign of the snail’s pace of negotiations, officials said that the “working groups” tasked with addressing various technical issues in the negotiations had not met on Monday, meaning the previously agreed-upon four-day cycle of talks has been reduced this month to three days. (And even though the British negotiators are now in town, the talking won’t get underway until 11.30 am on Tuesday, officials said).

Under the EU treaties, there is a two-year deadline to reach a withdrawal agreement or the U.K. is effectively ejected from the EU without any safety net for the array of policy problems created by ending its four-decade membership of the bloc — the so-called “cliff edge” scenario.

That deadline can be extended, or a transitional arrangement adopted, only by unanimous agreement of the U.K. and the 27 remaining EU countries — something Barnier has said will be considered only once the withdrawal terms are agreed. But wide gulfs remain on many of the core withdrawal questions, particularly over how to calculate the so-called Brexit bill and how to guarantee the rights of EU citizens living in the U.K. (and vice versa) after Brexit.

Davis, for his part, said on Monday that he was “pleased to be back in Brussels” and insisted that “we have had a busy few weeks since the last round of talks.” He then quickly clarified that the “we” meant the U.K. on its own, not the U.K. and the EU.

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“The U.K. government has published a large number of papers covering important issues related to our withdrawal and our vision for a deep and special partnership that we want with the European Union in the future,” he said. “They are the products of hard work and detailed thinking that has been going on behind the scenes not just in the last few weeks, but for the last 12 months.”

“For the United Kingdom the week ahead is about driving forward the technical discussions across all the issues, all the issues,” Davis said, making a now familiar pitch for putting divorce terms and the future relationship on the table at the same time.

“We are ready to roll up our sleeves and get down to work again once more … let’s do it,” he said.

Just not on Monday, or Friday, or too early in the morning.

With the arrest Thursday morning of Empire star Jussie Smollett, the actor’s defense team put out a statement celebrating the fact that he was afforded the “presumption of innocence” like any other citizen. But last, year Smollett himself insisted that Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was guilty until proven innocent.

Jussie Smollett turned himself in early on Thursday morning, and the Chicago Police processed him into the system. Concurrent with his arrest, the actor’s team put out a statement reasserting Smollett’s “presumption of innocence” and slamming the Chicago Police for “leaking” information about the investigation to the press.

But last October, Smollett was not so willing to give Brett Kavanaugh the benefits of any presumption of innocence. Smollett tweeted out his support for the unproven claims of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford against Kavanaugh.

As Mediaite’s Julio Rosas pointed out:

In January, Smollett claimed that two men beat him, called him homophobic slurs, and cast Donald Trump slogans at him in an attack in downtown Chicago. The Chicago Police immediately launched a weeks-long investigation into the claim, but evidence that it really happened was sparse.

Eventually, police tracked down the two men that Smollett claimed attacked him, but police say the men had a personal relationship with the actor and that he was the ringleader of the attack, not the victim.

Meanwhile, Smollett was allowed to remain free for weeks to go on TV shows to plead his case while being supported by the entire Hollywood community and the mainstream media.

Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston.

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The Argentine should have been given his marching orders but the video assistant referee originally deemed the foul to be accidental

Saturday’s VAR has admitted to reaching the wrong decision after Tottenham’s Giovani Lo Celso avoided being sent off following a reckless challenge on Chelsea captain Cesar Azpilicueta.

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Chelsea ran out 2-1 winners in the contest, but should have had it easier as Lo Celso, who stamped on Azpilicueta’s leg, was allowed to stay on the pitch despite his infringement.

The incident happened shortly after the second half commenced, with video assistant referee David Coote originally reaching the conclusion that the Argentine midfielder’s actions were completely accidental.

Two years after Ireland introduced some of the strictest laws in the world on lobbying transparency, the reforms are being held up as the gold standard for policymakers looking to shine a light on the often murky world of influence peddling.

Calls for transparency are growing louder across Europe, especially in Germany, where a series of scandals have put a spotlight on the car industry’s close ties with senior politicians.

Ireland’s experience, say proponents of the law, has dispelled worries that tough lobbying rules would cripple the industry or limit the ability of politicians to do their job — as MEPs in Brussels resisting similar obligations have argued.

“Transparency is catching hold,” said Sherry Perreault, head of lobbying regulation at Ireland’s Standards in Public Office Commission, who’s traveled across Europe to showcase the Irish reforms. “To see this catching fire outside of Ireland is really terrific.”

The Irish reforms are simple. Any individual, company or NGO that seeks to directly or indirectly influence officials on a policy issue must list themselves on a public register and disclose any lobbying activity. The rules cover any meeting with high-level public officials, as well as letters, emails or tweets intended to influence policy.

For those in the business, the impact of the register and its requirements are primarily about the way the industry is perceived — and, broadly, they’re happy about it.

“I’ve not heard anybody suggest the Lobbying Act has impacted in any way the willingness or the ability to influence [policymakers],” said Conall McDevitt, CEO of Hume Brophy, one of Ireland’s largest lobbying firms. “It’s always better in our industry to have transparency, we’re all the stronger for it.”

Indeed, the push for more transparency is often advocated by lobbyists themselves, eager for legal clarity and happy to present themselves as fulfilling a vital role in modern democracies through the information they provide to policymakers.

“Lobbying has got a very bad name because of the actions of some individuals,” said Cian Connaughton, president of the Public Relations Institute of Ireland. “What the register has done is clarify to people what is happening, who is doing what.”

“It means people can’t say, ‘God knows what’s going on there,'” he added. “The fact that [the] new regime has hopefully increased people’s trust in the system, it’s a big plus.”

Popular revulsion

The tougher laws have their origins in the 2008 financial crisis that brought the Irish economy to its knees. The country’s travails are widely regarded as a consequence of the close relationships between politicians from the Fianna Fáil party, in power at the time of the crisis, and Ireland’s property developers.

“The fact that we had gone through this economic collapse [and that there was] a broadly held belief that influence had been peddled, there was such a ground swell of support for reform,” said Brendan Howlin, currently leader of the Labour Party and minister for public expenditure and reform between 2011 and 2016.

Popular revulsion at corruption had been building for decades. Several inquiries — including one into Ireland’s planning system that found widespread corruption had taken place in the 1980s and 1990s — had concluded that underhand payments had become endemic in the country.

To write what would become the 2015 Regulation of Lobbying Act, Howlin looked at existing rules across the world, including Canada’s, whose government first introduced transparency requirements in 1989 and subsequently strengthened them four times.

“There wasn’t much opposition to the concept,” Howlin said.

The law uses one of the broadest possible definitions of a lobbyist: anyone who employs more than 10 individuals, works for an advocacy body, is a professional paid by a client to communicate on someone else’s behalf or is communicating about land development is required to register themselves and the lobbying activities they carry out.

That means NGOs and other civil society organizations are just as much subject to the rules as groups representing multinationals or local industries.

Failure to register or filing incorrect information can result in a fine of up to €2,500 and a two-year prison sentence.

As of this week, 1,649 organizations were signed up to the register. Collectively, they had filed 14,551 reports on lobbying activities since the law came into force.

Trending in Europe

As corruption allegations continue to break across the EU, calls for similar action are becoming louder.

Eight EU countries have mandatory registers for lobbyists, according to Transparency International EU, an NGO that campaigns against corruption — though none is as tight as Ireland’s. Lobbying legislation is under discussion in Spain, Italy and Germany, where lawmakers from the Social Democratic Party have recently proposed the introduction of transparency rules for lobbyists.

In France, a far-reaching law known as the Sapin Law is being rolled out, and in Brussels, European institutions will shortly begin discussions to upgrade the existing voluntary register, which as of August had 11,366 organizations signed up.

“In all countries, associations are asking for regulation because it improves the way we work,” said María Rosa Rotondo, managing partner of the Madrid-based lobbying firm Political Intelligence and president of the Public Affairs Community of Europe, a European network of lobbyists.

To many, it’s not the regulations but the lack of consistency across countries that’s the problem. “We need coherence, a balanced approach,” said Rotondo.

For example, Ireland’s rules, which regulate the interaction between lobbyists and anyone defined as a “designated public official” without regard to where that interaction takes place, have caused a headache for firms lobbying Irish MEPs.

Some registers, such as that currently in place for the European Parliament and European Commission, ask lobbyists to disclose how much money they’re spending, while others don’t. And in some countries, like the U.K., the definition of a lobbyist is so narrow that most individuals influencing public policy are not subject to transparency rules at all.

For officials pushing stricter rules, such as Commission First Vice President Frans Timmermans, who wants to beef up the Brussels register, examples like Ireland provide helpful ammunition.

“People should be able to know which special interests try to influence EU policy,” he said.

Vous la connaissez brûlante dans des tenues en PVC, mais l’âme de Nicole Scherzinger est bien plus pure que ce qu’elle veut bien montrer. En catholique pratiquante, la chanteuse a souhaité se rendre à la rencontre du pape.

En son temps, Benoît XVI avait pu rencontrer Charlène de Monaco ou Laura Bush. Mais le temps passe et les papes changent. Ainsi, l’avènement du pape François reçoit au Vatican des visites plus inattendues.

En début de semaine, parmi la foule qui l’attendait au pied de sa demeure, le saint père a eu l’agréable surprise de rencontrer la chanteuse Nicole Scherzinger et son compagnon Lewis Hamilton. Privilège de leur statut de stars, les deux jeunes gens ont pu serrer la main de François et même lui adresser quelques mots. Émue, l’interprète de Don’t cha a retenu de justesse les larmes qui perlaient ses yeux.

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La belle hawaïenne a été élevé dans un environnement résolument catholique. D’Honolulu au Kentucky ou elle a grandit, Nicole Scherzinger a poursuivi une éducation placée sous le signe de la foi. Sa rencontre avec le pape signifie donc beaucoup pour la jeune femme. A tel point que ce bref entretien pourrait avoir convaincu la plantureuse jeune femme de passer un cap avec son amoureux.

Lewis Hamilton a en tout cas su reconquérir le cœur de Nicole. Après des bas, très bas, le couple semble vivre un haut vibrant. Pour la Saint-Valentin le coureur automobile a offert à sa douce une escapade romaine et ce moment unique au Vatican. Et si ce bad boy de la Formule 1 était finalement un gendre idéal?