Some state colleges in California are apparently not impressed by the Parkland high school shooting survivor who helped become a voice for a global gun control movement. David Hogg, 17, has so far been rejected by four University of California campuses -- UCLA, UCSD, UCSB and UC Irvine, he told TMZ. According to the UC site, a minimum 3.4 GPA is required for non-California residents to get in. The Florida teen has a 4.2 GPA and an SAT score of 1270. "At this point, we're already changing the world," Hogg, a senior at Stoneman Douglas High School, told the outlet.

FiveThirtyEight pitted 50 movies against 12 new ways of measuring Hollywood's gender imbalance The Bechdel-Wallace Test -- more commonly abbreviated to the Bechdel Test -- asks two simple questions of a movie: Does it have at least two named female characters? And do those characters have at least one conversation that is not about a man? A surprising number of films fail the test. Although the test is punchy and has become pervasive, it doesn't address the core inequalities in Hollywood films. Alison Bechdel -- an acclaimed cartoonist who was awarded a MacArthur "genius" grant in 2014 and whose memoir was adapted into a Tony Award-winning musical -- in no way set out to solve Hollywood sexism when she wrote the test into a comic strip in the mid-1980s.

Drudge has for years used his site as a web traffic pipeline for Russian propaganda sites, directing his massive audience to nearly 400 stories from RT.com and fellow Russian-government-run English-language news sites SputnikNews.com Those numbers spiked in 2016, when Drudge collectively linked to the three sites 122 times. Drudge's increasing affinity for and proliferation of Russian propaganda comes amid what The New York Times calls "a new information war Russia is waging against the West."

The notorious dark web marketplaces Alphabay and Hansa were shut down in July following "landmark" action by police forces in the US and Europe to unmask who was running them. They join a long list of other forums, chat rooms and boards that appeared and were blazingly popular with the criminal underworld before they were compromised and closed. Darkode, GhostMarket and the Silk Road, have more in common than just the trajectory of their genesis and demise. They all follow the modus operandi of a landmark forum set up in 2001 called Carder Planet. Designed for criminals who specialised in monetising lists or "dumps" of credit card numbers, it has had an influence far beyond that select group.....

The chances of a government shutdown just went up. After all of the news over the past week -- North Korea, the special congressional election in Georgia, the White House trying to resuscitate health care (again) -- this could be the story that drives the weekend and next week: The chances of a government shutdown just increased. "White House budget director Mick Mulvaney said Thursday that he hopes to use negotiations to keep the government open past April 28 in an effort to force Democrats to back some funding for creating a new wall along the U.S.-Mexico border," the Washington Post writes. "Mulvaney said the White House would be open to funding some of the Democrats' priorities -- such as paying insurance subsidies under the Affordable Care Act -- if Democrats agree to fund some of the more controversial parts of President Trump's agenda, notably the border wall." If this is the White House's position, it could be precarious: Democrats (and even some Republicans) are opposed to spending money for Trump's border wall.

The most frequent criticism was summed up by a woman who wrote: "You do not understand the'staying power' that the two major parties have in elections. They are not going to let an outsider into their club. A man put it this way: "They can wait out the Tea Parties and the crazies. Mavericks can't get a major party nomination." No matter who wins in November, I contend that the moderates in both parties will rise again, if only because the extremists and the folks on the fringes are not very good at governing.) As I wrote in 2011, "this is one of those times when fewer and fewer Americans believe that good politicians exist.

Most presidential campaigns spend their time and money appealing to people who vote regularly in elections. According to a Trump campaign memo obtained by FiveThirtyEight, the campaign pursued a highly unorthodox strategy of courting unlikely voters during the primaries, focusing on people who rarely participate in GOP primary elections. The campaign relied on free media, including Trump's frequent TV appearances, to turn out regular voters, according to the memo. But survey and voter data shows that Trump won the Republican nomination thanks in large part to Republicans who typically vote in general elections, not by bringing people entirely disconnected from the electoral process to the polls. As Trump heads into the general election, the campaign's thinking during the primaries, and the ad-hoc process by which it built an operation to target and reach out to voters using data, may offer clues about how it will approach voter turnout in the fall.