The former Academy president also helmed the classics 'The Out-of-Towners,' 'The In-Laws' and 'Plaza Suite' after making his mark in television. Arthur Hiller, the Oscar-nominated director who transitioned from television to helm such classic films as Love Story, The Out-of-Towners and The In-Laws before serving four terms as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, has died. He was 92.

Todd Howley is tall, broad and bulky, with the look of a guy who was the most handsome player on his football team 30 years and 40 pounds ago. He was born in Sarnia and, after high school, spent 17 years working at Oakville’s Elliott Matsuura plant, selling and installing computerized machine tools that are used to cut steel and aluminum. Howley’s clients were the sort of energy companies he dreamed of one day owning. He was good at his job, maybe the best, but he was also condescending and obsessive, which made it hard for others to work with him.

If you have read anything about young people in recent years, you could be forgiven for believing that we are living through a cultural revolution, unprecedented in its destructiveness and self-regard. Millennials don’t just reject the music, art, or clothes of their parents; they also reject the older generation’s major sources of economic and spiritual well-being, like home ownership, cars, even sex.

Is Margaret Atwood a feminist? That’s what I’m trying to work out during our lamentably brief time together squished around a table in the back of a promotional booth at a comics convention in California. Obviously, you might roll your eyes, Have you read The Handmaid’s Tale? Certainly among fourth wave feminists, many of whom, in the UK at least, studied the book as part of the National Curriculum at A-level, Atwood is lionised, especially on Twitter, where she enthusiastically interacts with her 1.27 million followers on a regular basis.

The cop wanted her car keys. Kelli Peters handed them over. She told herself she had nothing to fear, that all he’d find inside her PT Cruiser was beach sand, dog hair, maybe one of her daughter’s toys. They were outside Plaza Vista School in Irvine, where she had watched her daughter go from kindergarten to fifth grade, where any minute now the girl would be getting out of class to look for her. Parents had entrusted their own kids to Peters for years; she was the school’s PTA president and the heart of its after-school program.

These days the “honeypot” is a popular trope in espionage thrillers, with seemingly every high-level informant recruited via seduction by a ravishing female spy. But long before James Bond ever jumped across the roof of a moving train in books or film, the globe-trotting spy Betty Pack was wooing suitors for classified information on both sides of the Atlantic. Few people have elevated the habit of pillow talk to an art form quite like the crafty American-born intelligence officer, who “used the bedroom like Bond used a beretta,” Time magazine noted in 1963.

When she regained consciousness, Nidhi Chaphekar was lying on the floor of Zaventem airport in Brussels, across the room from the bird-shaped statue she had been standing near a few moments before. She tried to open her eyes, but her body wasn’t doing what she wanted it to. Around her was a haze of thick black smoke, which was making her light-headed. She could hear her own internal voice, saying: “Nidhi, you’re alive. Nidhi, it was a bomb. Nidhi, you have to tell your family. The children have exams. Nidhi, come on, get up.”

She is all of 25 and may have already made one of the most significant discoveries of our time. Scientists in Australia this week took a quantum leap in the war on superbugs, developing a chain of star-shaped polymer molecules that can destroy antibiotic-resistant bacteria without hurting healthy cells. And the star of the show is 25-year-old Shu Lam, a Malaysian-Chinese PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, who has developed the polymer chain in the course of her thesis research in antimicrobials and superbugs.

My wife, Adrienne, and I are long-time supporters of unconditional cash giving. From handing $5 to a homeless person on the street in Manhattan to raising $450 to give to a working father of one in rural South Africa — we believe in the virtues of sharing abundance in an empowering fashion that enables people to decide how best to allocate their resources themselves. When we found GiveDirectly in November 2015, an org that gives $1,000, unconditionally, to people who are in extreme poverty...

Experts have denounced a decision by the US military to sentence Chelsea Manning to solitary confinement after she tried to kill herself in an “act of desperation”. Manning, the transgender solider who was jailed for leaking classified information to Wikileaks, faces up to two weeks in solitary for attempting to take her own life, said a campaign group that supports her. A disciplinary board at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, said the punishment was also for possessing a supposedly prohibited book Hacker...

It’s a strange sight: an enormous concrete obelisk, looking a whole lot like the Washington Monument, rising above the treetops about 10 miles east of Hopkinsville, Kentucky. It’s the Jefferson Davis Monument, the second-tallest obelisk in the world, erected in 1924 near the birthplace of the Confederacy’s only president. “It’s creepy here,” my father-in-law said. An obelisk in the middle of nowhere is creepy enough, but he was also referring to the other visitors — a few bikers...

Valentine Strasser was once the world’s youngest dictator, ruling Sierra Leone for four turbulent years. But his fall from power left him broken, exiled, and eventually back home as a mysterious and feared recluse. BuzzFeed News makes an uninvited house call. The run-down mansion rising above the Freetown slum was the first giveaway, but it got even stranger. As Valentine Strasser’s home came into view, my guide screamed in Krio, “I go scared!” then yanked open the car door and bolted. He emerged 50 meters away, behind a tangle of banana trees.

Sungju Lee agreed to answer your questions about escaping his homeland, the regime’s nuclear provocations, and adjusting to UK life.

Dear Madam: Maybe I should have let it go. Turned the other cheek. We had just gotten out of church, and I was with my family and some friends on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. We were going to lunch, trying to see if there was room in the Korean restaurant down the street. You were in a rush. It was raining. Our stroller and a gaggle of Asians were in your way. But I was, honestly, stunned when you yelled at us from down the block, “Go back to China!”

In 1933, with his great scientific discoveries behind him, Albert Einstein came to America. He spent the last twenty-two years of his life in Princeton, New Jersey, where he had been recruited as the star member of the Institute for Advanced Study. Einstein was reasonably content with his new milieu, taking its pretensions in stride. “Princeton is a wonderful piece of earth, and at the same time an exceedingly amusing ceremonial backwater of tiny spindle-shanked demigods,” he observed.

San Salvador’s upstart mayor, Nayib Bukele, has promised a new way forward for a city besieged by decades of violence. His biggest obstacle, however, may not be the city’s gangs, but the city’s idea of itself. By Juan Carlos.

Both Brendan and I have written about the strange martyrdom of Louis Smith. But here is an ugly coda. As readers may recall, the Olympic athlete got drunk at a friend’s wedding and, along with a friend, ended up doing a joke version of the Muslim call to prayer. Something to do with Aladdin apparently. Anyhow, before they knew it the phone-video had made its way onto social media and from there to The Sun. Soon sinister Muslim spokespeople were reminding everyone that their religion was to be ‘respected’ and never to be ‘mocked’. Smith has apparently been getting death threats since then.

I was 29 and mowing the lawn at my mother’s house in Birmingham, Alabama, on a hot day in July 1985 when I looked up and saw two police officers. When my mom saw the handcuffs, she screamed. They asked me whether I owned a firearm, and I said no. They asked if my mother owned one, and I said yes. I asked the detective 50 times why I was being arrested. Eventually, he told me I was being arrested for a robbery. I told him, “You have the wrong man.” He said, “I don’t care whether you did it or not. You will be convicted.”

The changing face of Appalachia—and its role in the presidential race. By Chris Offutt.

With $80 billion, Bill Gates is the world’s richest man. So how does he spend his money? What makes his life worthwhile? And is his a happy marriage? Mary Riddell spends three months with the Microsoft billionaire to find the answers. Microbes fascinate Bill Gates. On his arrival for a recent meeting with Justin Trudeau, the Canadian Prime Minister, Gates is spotted clutching a book on bacteria, presumably so that he might devour a chapter or two should any lull occur in the conversation.