Hasta La Gadget!

Chris Pratt knows the highs and lows of fatherhood all too well. His 4-year-old son, Jack, was born nine weeks early and spent the beginning of his life in the NICU.

But today he is a happy and healthy little boy, who brings a lot of joy and laughter to his dad’s world. 

In honor of Pratt’s 38th birthday today, we’ve rounded up some of our favorite parenting moments from the actor. Keep scrolling for some “lols” and “awws.”

When he and Jack were the cutest father-son duo at a local parade

Pratt and his son stole the show at the Seafair Torchlight Parade in Seattle last year.

When he and his wife got competitive about bedtime stories

“I’ll read the left page, and she’ll read the right page. And I start affecting a little accent for the character, and then she’s like, ‘Oh!’ And she then starts gesticulating and laughing, and before long, it’s like we’re completely not even paying attention to whether or not he’s even [paying attention]. We’re so competitive with one another, it’s like ‘I’m calling in my hair and makeup team. I’ve got my costume!’”

When he taught Jack how to fish

“This kid will be my partner in the bass masters pro am when he’s old enough. We’ll take the bass fishing world by storm,” he captioned a sweet Instagram video. 

When he made an emotional speech about having a preemie

“I’ve done all kinds of cool things as an actor. I’ve jumped out of helicopters and done some daring stunts and played baseball in a professional stadium, but none of it means anything compared to being somebody’s daddy,” Pratt said in his speech at the March of Dimes Celebration of Babies in 2014. 

Reflecting on his son’s time in the NICU, he recalled, “I made promises in that moment about what kind of dad I wanted to be and I just prayed that he’d live long enough that I could keep them.”

When he talked about his unusually polite toddler

“It’s super frustrating because you’re like, ‘Alright, now. Jack, I think it’s time for bed,’ and he’ll say, ‘Hm, I thought about it and no thanks, Dad, not right now,’ and I’m like, ‘He’s so polite! What am I supposed to do?’” Pratt said on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.” 

When his son was totally trolling him

Pratt told Jimmy Fallon about his son’s visit to Universal Studios. “He came home the other day and he was like, ‘Dad, I met the real Jurassic World guy.’ I was like, ‘That guy?! No!’”

Pratt said the same thing happened when Jack went to Legoland and saw the real Emmet from “The Lego Movie.” 

“I think he knows,” the actor joked. “I think he’s just being mean.”

When he explained his thoughts on family photos on social media

“Those are those little snapshots into our life,” he said in an interview with Yahoo. “It’s really cool. Those types of moments are the most meaningful. It’s the little tiny life things. Being able to see that moment forces me to remember that that is the moment I’m teaching my son to tie his tie. So much of this stuff that we do, you’re never really present. You’re focusing on the next thing.”

When he set an example of giving back

Pratt often visits Children’s Hospitals and hospital NICUs to meet with patients.

When he looked back on his son’s first months.

“We were scared for a long time. We prayed a lot. It restored my faith in God, not that it needed to be restored, but it really redefined it. The baby was so beautiful to us, and I look back at the photos of him and it must have been jarring for other people to come in and see him, but to us he was so beautiful and perfect.”

When he struggled to discipline his son

“I take him into the other room, take a chair, face it into the corner and say, ‘You’re in a time-out. Now I want you to sit here and think,’” Pratt told Conan while describing his response to a dinnertime tantrum. But as he and his wife continued eating, they noticed that the toddler seemed perfectly at ease, Pratt added, doing a hilarious impression of his son’s content face.

“I was like, ’I don’t think this seems like punishment to him.’” 

When he learned the use for babies

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One month after taking office, Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt hosted BP’s U.S. chairman at his office to discuss issues the company “works with” the agency on. The next day, Pruitt met with two top executives from Chevron Corporation to discuss “regulatory reform.” The day after that, he spent two hours mingling with 45 CEOs from oil and gas companies at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.

It’s not unusual for the nation’s top environmental regulator to meet with leaders of some of the industries he or she regulates. But Pruitt, who came into the agency with a reputation for siding with fossil fuel interests, has virtually ignored conservation and public health advocates, according to calendars released under the Freedom of Information Act and first reported by E&E News.

Pruitt’s calendars show far fewer meetings with environmental and public health advocates. On Earth Day, the agency issued a press release feting the “great natural resources that the United States is blessed with” and touting a meeting with The Nature Conservancy and the National Audubon Society. A church, an interfaith group and the Indiana chapter of the NAACP were also included on a list of 25 organizations Pruitt met with that an EPA spokeswoman provided to HuffPost.  

That lopsided courting of fossil fuel executives lays bare a major shift in how the agency is operating, former EPA officials told HuffPost. It also demonstrates what one legal scholar described as the “fatal flaw” in administrative law that allows an industry-friendly agency boss to buddy up to polluters with little oversight.

“It’s not surprising,” Liz Purchia, who left her post as the EPA’s communications director under President Barack Obama in January, told HuffPost. “It’s confirming everything that people who opposed Scott Pruitt all had expected.”

Pruitt spent his six years as Oklahoma’s attorney general suing the EPA to block environmental regulations more than a dozen times, often at the behest of big oil and gas firms. In 2011, he allowed Oklahoma’s biggest natural gas driller to write a complaint to the EPA on his letterhead, which he then signed and sent as his own with few changes.

Thousands of emails released just before Pruitt’s confirmation as the EPA’s 14th administrator revealed a deep, chummy alliance with oil, gas and utility companies forged during his years as Oklahoma’s attorney general. His administration would amount to a “fox guarding the henhouse,” League of Conservation Voters President Gene Karpinski warned in January.

Pruitt battled the Obama EPA’s power plant rules on lawyerly technicalities, arguing that the agency had overstepped its regulatory authority and insisting that any need to curb global warming was beside the point. He is similarly operating within the bounds of the law now, legal scholars said.

Agency chiefs are allowed to seek outside counsel through federal advisory committees, which must report their meetings to the public under federal law. The EPA has 23 committees, including a financial advisory board, scientific counselors and a council devoted to the Great Lakes.

On Tuesday, Pruitt cleared the way to stack the EPA’s Board of Scientific Counselors with allies after he dismissed dozens of advisers, according to The Washington Post.

But agency law gives Pruitt the right to seek counsel from anyone, as long as his meetings clear a low legal bar: If Pruitt isn’t meeting exclusively with one person or industry, he’s free to do as he wants ― provided he maintains what critics see as a fig leaf in groups like The Nature Conservancy and Audubon.

“That’s the fatal flaw in this legal regime,” Sid Shapiro, the Fletcher chair of administrative law at the Wake Forest University School of Law, told HuffPost. “On the one hand, we want agencies to reach out and become more informed about issues and policies. But on the other hand, we’ve left them able to meet with a very selected group of people without any kind of legal remedy to those that might object.”

Pruitt’s not just meeting with oil and gas executives. Lynn Good, chief executive of the utility giant Duke Energy, requested time with Pruitt to spell out her “policy priorities,” and got 45 minutes on March 9.

Bob Murray, the bombastic coal baron who sued the EPA, booked two 30-minute meetings with Pruitt on March 28 and 29, though the topic of the meetings was not specified on the calendar. The first meeting took place the day after President Donald Trump signed an executive order instructing Pruitt to review the Obama administration’s signature policy to curb greenhouse gas emissions from power plants ― which Murray blamed last year for “virtually destroying” the coal industry.

The Trump administration hasn’t been shy about courting the fossil fuel industry. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson spent the previous 40 years of his career at Exxon Mobil Corp., including the last nine as its chief executive. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke spoke in March at the same American Petroleum Institute confab at the Trump International Hotel that Pruitt attended. The White House issued an executive order overturning bans on oil exploration off the Arctic and Atlantic coasts, iced out funding for energy efficiency and climate programs in its proposed budget and axed rules requiring drillers to report methane pollution.

“We’d try to always have a balance,” Stan Meiburg, a former acting deputy EPA administrator who spent 39 years at the agency before retiring in January, told HuffPost. “At least the appearance of balance.”  

For years, Republicans lambasted the Obama administration for “picking winners and losers” by bolstering renewable energy like wind and solar to curb planet-warming emissions. By sidling up to fossil fuel companies, the Trump administration is raising new red flags that it is giving favor to heavily polluting industries, said Jordan Libowitz, a spokesman for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group.

“What is a concern is who’s getting the access,” Libowitz told HuffPost. “Is access to secretaries being offered out to everyone on that level, or is it just certain people? If it’s just certain people, that raises a question as to why.”

We’d try to always have a balance. At least the appearance of balance.
Stan Meiburg, former acting deputy EPA administrator.

Now Pruitt is poised to name a deputy with the knowhow and experience to further cement his legal standing. He plans to nominate Jeff Holmstead, a long-time coal and oil lobbyist registered with the EPA, as his No. 2 sometime soon, Axios reported Monday.

A partner at the corporate law titan Bracewell LLP, Holmstead served as assistant EPA administrator under President George W. Bush. During his tenure, the agency weakened environmental rules and attacked scientists, becoming “less independent than its predecessors and more closely tied to the White House’s ideology,” according to the educational nonprofit American Chemical Society.

If confirmed, Holmstead could help Pruitt stave off a bevy of legal challenges from environmental groups fighting his deregulatory agenda.

“Holmstead will probably understand that some of what they’re trying to do won’t pass legal muster,” Eric Schaeffer, executive director of the nonpartisan Environmental Integrity Project, told HuffPost. “But you’ll have bought the industry years of delay, which is the game in Washington.”

Holmstead, whose auto-reply email said he is on vacation rafting in the Grand Canyon, did not respond to a request for comment.

Unlike previous administrations, this White House seems unconcerned with courting critics in environmental circles, Schaeffer said. For now, the best environmental advocates can do is wait and hope the next administration will work hard to rectify the damage done by this one.

“The agency is pretty much under occupation at this point,” Schaeffer said with a sigh. “I’m hoping there will be a strong political rebound and, once these guys are cleared out, that the agency will be in a stronger position than before they came.”

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You could say preschool teacher Melanie Goldsmith’s marriage proposal was a real page-turner.

In November, Goldsmith was reading a book aloud as part of an exercise at a teachers’ meeting at CSUN Lab School in Northridge, California where she works. She quickly realized it wasn’t just any old story but rather a retelling of her love story with her boyfriend of five years Eric Hernandez, who had spent months writing, illustrating and formatting the story of their relationship into a children’s book. 

Almost instantly, Goldsmith realized what was happening and began to get choked up. So she passed the book off to one of her coworkers to continue reading. 

“She did catch on a little earlier than expected,” Hernandez told Inside Edition. “As soon as she saw the first page, she started putting together what was going on.” 

After her colleague read the sentence, “She was so surprised to learn the book was all about them, but she was even more surprised when she saw Chris walk in,” Hernandez entered the room right on cue. 

“Without her knowing, I was in the other room waiting for the right moment of the story to enter and take over reading the story,“ Hernandez explained on their wedding website. “Of course the story ultimately ended with me asking if she would marry me, and most fortunately, she said yes.”

Now the couple is set to wed on July 2. We can’t wait to see how the rest of their storybook romance unfolds. 

HuffPost reached out to the couple for comment but had not heard back at the time of publication. This story may be updated. 

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Apple’s inability to keep its secrets is so bad that even its internal presentation about confidentiality was leaked. But according to internal videos obtained by The Outline, the company is very serious about secrecy. It reportedly conducted an hour…

It was a few weeks after his death in July 2016 when Sakki Selznick learned that her daughter had been giving imaginary high-fives to Philando Castile.

Castile ― or Mr. Phil, as students at J.J. Hill Montessori Magnet School would call him ― often greeted students with high-fives while they waited on line to get breakfast in the cafeteria. Now that Mr. Phil was gone, Selznick’s young daughter worried she’d never get one of his famous high-fives again. One evening, she explained, she was thinking about it and she’d started high-fiving the air, hoping Mr. Phil would respond somehow.

A magical high-five didn’t arrive. Through tears, Selznick explained to her daughter that she would not be getting one.

Jeronimo Yanez, at the time a St. Anthony police officer, shot and killed Castile last summer during a traffic stop. Castile, 32, left behind not only a girlfriend and her daughter, a mother and a family, colleagues and friends, but also 395 adoring students at the Saint Paul, Minnesota, elementary school where he worked.

The students have spent the past year mourning Castile, a loss that was felt anew last week with the news that Yanez had been acquitted of any wrongdoing.

Now that Castile’s killer has been found not guilty, the young children are grappling with another uncomfortable truth: The justice system doesn’t always deliver justice.

In a country where many schools are segregated by race and class, J.J. Hill is a small bastion of diversity, a Montessori school that draws from surrounding progressive neighborhoods. About 47 percent of the students are Asian, black or Hispanic, with a number of Somalian and Hmong immigrants. The rest of the students are white. For the most part, everyone gets along, parents say. The fact that this harmonious racial coexistence does not extend beyond the school’s four walls is a reality students had to confront when a cop killed their nutrition services supervisor last summer.

For some white families, it was surprising that an incident of stark police brutality could happen to someone in their circle. The shock mobilized them to action via protests and petitions. For some black families, the reality of police violence was something for which they had long prepared their children.

But the fact that it happened to Mr. Phil ― a man whom parents describe as exceedingly gentle and unfailingly kind, a man who did everything “right” ― was something no one could have prepared for.

Selznick, who is white, previously lived in an all-black neighborhood in Los Angeles. She says she isn’t naive about the harsh facts of police brutality. But when a jury found Yanez not guilty of second-degree manslaughter last week, she felt like she had been tricked into the idea that there would be some sense of justice. Earlier reports of a deadlocked jury had given her hope. “I got snookered,” she said.

When Selznick’s 10-year-old daughter learned of the verdict, she seemed overwhelmed. She said she could no longer remember Mr. Phil’s face. Selznick’s 16-year-old son, who also knew Castile, almost put a hole through the wall in anger.

“They’re right at the age where they believe there will be social justice,” Selznick said. “That’s a lie.”

Zuki Ellis’ son, entering fourth grade, isn’t likely to forget about Castile’s death any time soon. Ellis is black. She’s never tried to conceal from her son the realities of racism or police brutality. But this was the first time anything had happened to someone so close.

“He has the same question a lot of us have: How does something so awful happen and no one is accountable for that?” Ellis said. “How do you kill Mr. Phil and nothing happens?”

They’re right at the age where they believe there will be social justice. That’s a lie.
Sakki Selznick

This year, when kids at J.J. Hill had to face school without Mr. Phil, regardless of their race, some students emerged from the experience as changed individuals.

Tony Fragnito, a small business owner who is involved in local politics, says his two boys, one going into third grade and one into fourth, were noticeably different. They were more somber and had less energy when they got home from school. Then, in November, the election happened, building on the trauma of Castile’s death. After Donald Trump won, Fragnito’s younger son packed a suitcase and said he was moving to Canada with his Somali friends from school because “it’s not safe for them anymore.”

Andrew Karre, a children’s book editor, recalled that when his 9-year-old son found out about Castile’s death, he asked a simple but difficult-to-answer question: “Why was the police officer scared?” Karre’s son followed Yanez’s trial on public radio. When the verdict was announced, the family headed down to the Capitol to protest. Given the facts of the case, Karre said, his son was troubled by the outcome. 

John Horton, a teacher at J.J. Hill who also has two kids enrolled, said Castile’s death would often come up in class. The children drew connections to Castile when learning about civil rights issues. They tried to make sense of Castile’s death in relation to a larger context of injustice. But for many, he said, it still seemed senseless.

“I think a lot of the adults are still trying to work through it, and the kids see this,” Horton said. “They see the instability and the not understanding from the adult side.”

The school has mostly dealt with the grief head-on. Teachers got special training, and counselors were available for therapy throughout the year. A handful of teachers sported pins with Castile’s face on them. There is a bench in his honor, and a tree in his name.  

But some parents are still struggling to provide answers to questions they can’t figure out themselves.

“It has been a hard year,” Ellis said. “I don’t imagine the next year will be easier.”

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