Bill Cosby has been charged with sexual assault by Pennsylvania prosecutors. The charges stem from a 2004 incident involving a basketball manager at Temple University, believed to be Andrea Constand.
The charges are happening now — 11 years after the incident — not because new information just came out; rather, the charges are based on evidence prosecutors had all along, but didn't think was strong enough to build a case on. Then the evidence became public last year, causing a new round of scrutiny.
Of course, having dragged their feet for so long didn't stop the Pennsylvania prosecutors from getting a photo-op out of Cosby's "perp walk" — which is one reason why I (Dara) agree with this 2011 column by Gene Healy that perp walks are gross even when the schadenfreude is understandable.
Cosby didn't cause this shift. But it's certainly affected him. As the several women who'd accused him of assault got renewed attention in recent years, new accusers came forward as well.
The result: one of the biggest reputational collapses of the century. Bill Cosby was once America's Dad. He is now, as the New York Daily News writes (in an editorial that you should really read all the way through), "America's Predatory Step Uncle."
Cosby's fall is particularly ironic given that he'd spent the last decades of his career as a "pull up your pants" racial moralist — a juxtaposition that Adam Serwer made earlier this year, by annotating Cosby's famously controversial "Pound Cake" speech based on what we've learned about his private life since then.
The Puerto Rican government will be paying interest on its direct debt on time. But as Treasury Secretary Jack Lew put it this week, Puerto Rico is basically in default already. It's already shifting money between creditors, and taking money out of pension funds to pay its debts.
Puerto Rico has been teetering on default for the last six months. But its debt crisis has been foreseeable for several years — even though it kept getting more money lent to it thanks to a loophole in US bond policy.
Both parties in Congress have proposed bills that would give Puerto Rico some debt assistance. But they can't agree on a single proposal, and debt relief got left out of the spending bill passed in December.
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has promised to take up Puerto Rican debt relief in the first quarter of 2016, so there might be a solution before the island misses its next set of debt payments on May 1.
The federal government is planning to issue a new round of economic sanctions to companies and individuals allegedly involved in developing Iran's ballistic missile program.
Iran's government might treat the new sanctions as a violation of the nuclear deal it approved earlier thie year. At the time, Iran said that the deal would be nullified if any future sanctions were imposed on Iran.
Then again, Iran also believed that the bill passed by Congress earlier this month, restricting visa-free travel to the US by Iranian nationals, was a violation of the nuclear deal, and the deal as a whole still stands.
The US is also mad with Iran for an incident Saturday in which an Iranian ship fired unguided rockets within 1,500 yards of an American aircraft carrier — a ship which, the US says, wasn't in Iranian waters at the time.
At least six prominent Bangladeshi atheists have been murdered by Islamists in the past few years — and those who haven't been killed are living in constant fear.
What if huge ongoing pain and deprivation — from chronic pain, or depression, or abuse, or addiction, or imprisonment — isn't an aberration, but something most people endure in some way or another?
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