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Bill Cosby Will Face Criminal Charges for Sexual Assault

Mother Jones

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Bill Cosby will face criminal charges for allegedly sexually assaulting Andrea Constand, a former Temple University employee, inside the comedian’s Pennsylvania home in 2004.

Kevin Steele of the Montgomery County district attorney’s office announced in a press conference Wednesday morning that Cosby is being charged with aggravated indecent assault. He is expected to be arraigned later this afternoon.

“Today, after examination of all the evidence, we are able to seek justice on behalf of the victim,” Steele said.

This is the first time Cosby has been formally charged with sexual assault, after decades of ongoing rape allegations against the 78-year-old entertainer.

Below is a docket listing the charges filed against Cosby:

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For more on the different statutes of limitations for filing rape or sexual assault charges in each state, head over to our explainer here.

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Bill Cosby Will Face Criminal Charges for Sexual Assault

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Six Embarrassing Things Republicans Said About Cybersecurity Last Night

Mother Jones

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Huge hacks, Internet-savvy terrorists, and controversial legislation has made cybersecurity big news this year, but candidates from both parties barely mentioned the topic until Tuesday night’s Republican debate in Las Vegas. That’s when Republican candidates finally addressed cybersecurity and Internet privacy at length, but the results weren’t always pretty. Here are some of the lowlights:

1. Candidates demand encryption “backdoors.” Again: “There is a big problem. It’s called encryption,” said Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who delivered the night’s sharpest attack on encrypted Internet tools that allegedly help terrorists evade US law enforcement and intelligence services. Kasich, along with Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) and former New York Gov. George Pataki, called for “backdoors,” or methods of decrypting message that would allow the government a way to read them. It was the latest episode in a debate that’s grown louder since the shootings in Paris and San Bernardino, California; there have been claims that both sets of attackers used encrypted messages to evade detection, though none of those claims have been proven. Nevertheless, key members of Congress on both sides of the aisle have said they’re working on a bill mandating backdoors in the wake of the attacks.

But encryption is also a vital part of the Internet’s basic infrastructure, and millions of people now use encrypted apps and programs to protect the privacy of their emails and messages. And giving the government access to encryption means allowing anyone else, including criminals, hackers, and foreign governments, access into those messages as well, according to cryptography experts.

2. Santorum thinks metadata isn’t personal information: Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum was one of several candidates who wanted to undo the USA Freedom Act, the law passed in May that ended the National Security Agency’s ability to engage in a mass collection of the phone records of Americans. Santorum brushed the law aside, arguing the program didn’t impinge on people’s privacy. “This metadata collection is not collecting people’s phone calls, their voices, they’re not collecting information that’s personal,” he said at the undercard debate.

The first part is true, but the second isn’t even close. Metadata includes phone numbers, location data, call times, and other information that intelligence agencies use to create create extensive, detailed profiles of a target—or anyone else.

3. Donald Trump doesn’t understand how the Internet works: Trump again called for shutting down at least parts of the Internet to try and stop ISIS from using online tools to recruit and plan attacks. “I would certainly be open to closing areas where we are at war with somebody,” he said. Whether or not that’s possible—and it’s probably not, given that many people in Syria rely on satellite connections after years of war—it would likely be horrible for Syrians and Iraqis, whose countries’ communications’ infrastructures have been heavily damaged by war. Many Syrians rely on Internet connections to maintain contact with family and the outside world, and human rights activists rely on the web to document atrocities by the Assad regime and ISIS.

4. Fiorina comes up short on the tech test: Fiorina is trying to cast herself as the field’s technology expert thanks to her years leading Hewlett-Packard, one of the country’s biggest tech companies. “A lifetime of politics is not necessarily the right kind of experience anymore. It matters that you understand technology,” she told the conservative website Breitbart in a pre-debate interview on Tuesday. But her evidence of tech-savvy during the debate was nothing more than a story about helping the NSA in the days after 9/11 by sending them a large shipment of servers. Fiorina’s other big suggestion was to ask the private sector for help in improving cybersecurity, something that already routinely happens.

Fiorina also seemed clueless about the state of cybersecurity laws during the Breitbart interview. She claimed the Obama administration had ignored critical legislation that would let private companies share information on cyberattacks with the government. But at the same time the Republicans were debating on stage on Tuesday, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) was wedging that same legislation, which Congress debated for months, into the trillion-dollar spending deal approved later that night.

5. Bush cheers China’s hacking of journalists: The Washington Post reported on Monday that when China stole millions of US government personnel records, it also got the information of journalists who had applied for government credentials—and Jeb Bush seemed pretty happy about it. “Maybe that’s the only part that’s good news, so you guys can get a feel for what it’s like now to see this type of attack,” said the former Florida governor, breaking briefly into an awkward half-smile.

6. Lindsay Graham says to get a flip phone: “This is why I own a flip phone, you don’t have to worry about all this stuff,” Graham quipped. Actually, your flip phone, in addition to being terrible, would still leave its records all over your cell carrier’s network for the government to access. Please do not listen to this awful advice. Also, Lindsey Graham now has an iPhone.

To be fair, cybersecurity also prompted the night’s most substantive exchange. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio attacked Sens. Rand Paul and Ted Cruz along with others who voted for the USA Freedom Act, which prevents the NSA from accessing or collecting records in bulk without a ruling from a federal judge. It’s proponents say the Act protects Americans from unconstitutional surveillance while making intelligence more effective, because investigators must target specific data and not drown in huge amounts of records. Both men hit back hard supporting the case for NSA reform. Cruz defended the law—and its national security benefits—so well that Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the Senate’s most outspoken privacy advocate, backed him up in a press release issued during the debate.

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Six Embarrassing Things Republicans Said About Cybersecurity Last Night

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This Judge Just Condemned Wisconsin’s Abortion Law as Unconstitutional. Read the Withering Ruling.

Mother Jones

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The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Monday that a Wisconsin law requiring abortion providers to gain admitting privileges at nearby hospitals is unconstitutional.

The law that was struck down is known as a TRAP law—short for “targeted regulation of abortion providers.” According to the Guttmacher Institute, Wisconsin is one of eleven states that have required similar admitting privileges. (Courts have blocked these requirements in six of those states.) The law is particularly effective in conservative regions where hospitals are less likely to grant those privileges to abortion providers. The law’s supporters say the law ensures continuity of care if complications arise from the procedure. The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists notes that less than one half of one percent of all abortions involve major complications.

The 2-to-1 decision comes at a time when the constitutionality of TRAP laws are in question nationally. Just over a week ago, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a challenge to Texas’ “HB 2,” which decreased the state’s number of abortion clinics from 41 to 18 by implementing a host of TRAP laws. The ruling, due next year, will be the most notable reproductive rights ruling since Roe v. Wade.

Judge Richard Posner, writing for the 7th Circuit majority, stated that the regulation qualifies as an “undue burden” and that the medical grounds for such a requirement is “nonexistent.” Posner also had some words for abortion foes: “Opponents of abortion reveal their true objectives when they procure legislation limited to a medical procedure— abortion—that rarely produces a medical emergency.”

Posner—nominated by President Ronald Reagan—is known for his tart legal arguments, as we’ve noted previously. This case is no exception:

A great many Americans, including a number of judges, legislators, governors, and civil servants, are passionately opposed to abortion—as they are entitled to be. But persons who have a sophisticated understanding of the law and of the Supreme Court know that convincing the Court to overrule Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey is a steep uphill fight, and so some of them proceed indirectly, seeking to discourage abortions by making it more difficult for women to obtain them. They may do this in the name of protecting the health of women who have abortions, yet as in this case the specific measures they support may do little or nothing for health, but rather strew impediments to abortion. This is true of the Texas requirement, upheld by the Fifth Circuit in the Whole Woman’s case now before the Supreme Court, that abortion clinics meet the standards for ambulatory surgical centers—a requirement that if upheld will permit only 8 of Texas’s abortion clinics to remain open, out of more than 40 that existed when the law was passed.

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This Judge Just Condemned Wisconsin’s Abortion Law as Unconstitutional. Read the Withering Ruling.

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Just How Few Professors of Color Are at America’s Top Colleges? Check Out These Charts.

Mother Jones

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After allegations of racism on campus led to demonstrations at the University of Missouri and Yale, protests have erupted on college campuses across the country, from Occidental College in California to Georgetown University in Washington, DC. Among the common demands made by the student activists is that their schools try harder to hire more diverse and representative faculties.

Just how well do the professors at America’s top colleges reflect the country’s race and gender breakdown? Each year, universities are required to report diversity data to the National Center for Education Statistics, a branch of the Department of Education. Unsurprisingly, the numbers show that the teaching staff America’s universities are much whiter and much more male than the general population, with Hispanics and African-Americans especially underrepresented. At some schools, like Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and Princeton, there are more foreign teachers than Hispanic and black teachers combined. The Ivy League’s gender stats are particularly damning; men make up 68 and 70 percent of the teaching staff at Harvard and Princeton, respectively.

Here are the race and gender breakdowns of instructional staff at selected universities from the 2013-2014 school year, the most recent data available. A racial breakdown of the entire US population can be found at the bottom of the chart.

A few notes about the data: These charts include the 20 four-year universities with the biggest instructional staffs and the eight Ivy League universities. They also include the University of Missouri. “Other” includes individuals who are Native American, Pacific Islander, multiracial, or declined to report their race. The US population stats come from the Census, which doesn’t separate “foreign” from other races.

In cases where there is more than one campus in a university system, the data shows the diversity of faculty on the main campus. (The campus names that have been shortened are: University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, University of Florida, University of Texas-Austin, University of Colorado-Denver, University of Pittsburgh-Pittsburgh Campus, Pennsylvania State University-Main Campus, University of Washington-Seattle Campus, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, Rutgers University-New Brunswick.)

Want to find a university that’s not on the chart? Hang tight! We’re working on making the diversity data from more than 3,000 colleges and universities available.

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Just How Few Professors of Color Are at America’s Top Colleges? Check Out These Charts.

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The Photos That Helped End Child Labor in the United States

Mother Jones

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In the early 1900s, Lewis Hine left his job as a schoolteacher to work as a photographer for the National Child Labor Committee, investigating and documenting child labor in the United States. As a sociologist, Hine was an early believer in the power of photography to document work conditions and help bring about change. He traveled the country, going to fields, factories, and mines—sometimes working undercover—to take pictures of kids as young as four years old being put to work.

Partly as a result of Hine’s work (as well as that of Mary Harris Jones, who Mother Jones is named after), Congress passed the Keating-Owens Child Labor Act in 1916. It established child labor standards, including a a minimum age (14 years old for factories, and 16 years old for mines) and an eight-hour workday. It also barred kids under the age of 16 from working overnight. However, the Keating-Owens Act was later ruled unconstitutional, and lasting reform to federal child labor laws didn’t come until the New Deal.

In 2004, retired social worker Joe Manning set out to see what had happened to as many of the kids in Hine’s photos as he could find. He’s documented his findings—showing the lives of hundreds of subjects—on his website, MorningsOnMapleStreet.com.

Breaker boys who worked in Ewen Breaker of Pennsylvania Coal Company, South Pittston, Pennsylvania

A group of breaker boys in Pittston, Pennsylvania. The smallest is Sam Belloma.

A young driver in Brown Mine in Brown, West Virginia. Hine said the boy had been driving one year, working from 7 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. daily.

A tipple boy working at Turkey Knob Mine in MacDonald, West Virginia.

A trapper boy working in the Turkey Knob Mine in Macdonald, West Virginia. The boy had to stoop because of the low roof. This photo was taken more than a mile inside the mine.

Drivers in a coal mine in West Virginia

Vance, a trapper boy, was 15 years old when this photo was taken. He was paid 75 cents a day for 10 hours of work. His job was to open and shut this door. Because of the intense darkness in the mine, the writing on the door was not visible until plate was developed.

A view of Pennsylvania Coal Company’s Ewen Breaker in South Pittson, Pennsylvania. The dust was so dense at times, it was difficult to see, Hine wrote. A man sometimes stood over the boys, prodding or kicking them, the photographer wrote.

Noon at Pennsylvania Coal Company’s Ewen Breaker in South Pittston

A young leader and a driver for the Pennsylvania Coal Company worked in Shaft #6 in South Pittson. The workers are Pasquale Salvo and Sandy Castina.

At the end of the day, workers for the Pennsylvania Coal Company waited for the cage to go up at Shaft #6 in South Pittson, Pennsylvania. The small boy in front is Jo Pume, a nipper.

A photo of a miner boy named Frank as he was going home. At the time, he was about 14 years old. He had worked in the mine for three years helping his father pick and load. He was in the hospital one year, after his leg was crushed by a coal car, Hine wrote.

Workers at the end of the day in a Pennsylvania coal mine. The smallest boy, near the far right, is a nipper. On his right is Arthur, a driver. Jo, on Arthur’s right, is a nipper. Frank, the boy on the left end of the photo, is a nipper and works a mile underground from the shaft, which is 5,000 feet down.

James O’Dell helped push these heavily loaded cars. He appears to be about 12 or 13 years old, Hine wrote. James worked at Knoxville Iron Co.’s Cross Mountain Mine, which is in the vicinity of Coal Creek, Tennessee. James had been there four months.

Shorpy Higginbotham was a greaser at Bessie Mine in Alabama, working for the Sloss-Sheffield Steel and Iron Company. Hine said the boy told him that he was 14 years old, but Hine suspected the boy wasn’t telling the truth. At work, Shorpy carried two heavy pails of grease and was often in danger of being run over by the coal cars.

A greaser at Bessie Mine in Alabama

Harry and Sallie. Harry was a driver for the Maryland Coal Co. Mine, which was near Grafton, West Virginia. Hine said the boy was afraid of being photographed because he might be forced to go to school. Harry was probably 12 years old, Hine wrote.

Tom Vitol (also called Dominick Dekatis) was photographed in Hughestown Burough, Pittston, Pennsylvania. He worked in Breaker #9 and was probably younger than 14 years old, Hine wrote.

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The Photos That Helped End Child Labor in the United States

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Jeb Bush Just Helped This Dude Make the Worst Mistake of His Life

Mother Jones

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A Pennsylvania man with a strong devotion to Jeb Bush and bizarre viral videos just got the Republican presidential candidate’s name tattooed on his neck.

Vic Berger’s new ink job is the result of an internet promise he made in July, pledging to go through with the tattoo no one asked for once a Vine he created attracted one million loops.

Upon learning of Berger’s tattoo goals, Bush actually took to Twitter to encourage followers to help turn this unfortunate stunt into an indelible reality.

Let’s just hope Berger’s tattoo is a lame temporary one.

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Jeb Bush Just Helped This Dude Make the Worst Mistake of His Life

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How Far Will GOP Candidates Go to Get Into Next Week’s Debate?

Mother Jones

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Trailing in the polls, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee grabbed the media’s attention this weekend by claiming that President Barack Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran is “marching the Israelis to the door of the oven.” On Friday, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz made headlines by calling fellow Republican Mitch McConnell—the Senate Majority Leader—a liar on the Senate floor. A few days before that, Rand Paul literally took a chainsaw to the tax code over an electric-guitar rendition of the “Star Spangled Banner.”

The first Republican presidential debate is next Thursday on Fox News. And under rules set by Fox (with the blessing of the Republican National Committee), just 10 of the 16 declared major candidates—those with the highest average in the five most recent national polls leading up to the debate—will get a spot on the stage. Participants in the second debate, hosted by CNN in September, will also be selected based largely on polling averages. The result is a last-minute scramble by the candidates to crack the top 10 any way they can.

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How Far Will GOP Candidates Go to Get Into Next Week’s Debate?

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John Roberts Now Officially the Fourth Conservative Sellout on the Supreme Court

Mother Jones

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From Quin Hillyer at National Review:

With today’s Obamacare decision, John Roberts confirms that he has completely jettisoned all pretense of textualism. He is a results-oriented judge, period, ruling on big cases based on what he thinks the policy result should be or what the political stakes are for the court itself. He is a disgrace. That is all.

So there you have it. Roberts has now joined a long line of conservative sellouts, from Harry Blackmun to John Paul Stevens to David Souter. After Souter, Republicans swore this would never happen again and insisted on nominating only hardline conservatives with a long paper trail: Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, and Sam Alito. But now Roberts has let them down. It turns out that the ability to hold onto conservative principles while serving under Ronald Reagan is insignificant next to the power of the Washington DC cocktail party circuit.

Still, at least Republicans can now end their embarrassing charade of pretending to have a plan to fix things up if the court had ended Obamacare subsidies in states without their own exchanges. I think it’s pretty safe to say that even the pretense of “working on” a plan to replace Obamacare will now be dumped quietly on the ash heap of history—until Republicans have a presidential nominee in hand, at which point the charade will have to start all over. But I think we already know what their bold new plan it will contain. There are few surprises in the land of conservative ideas.

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John Roberts Now Officially the Fourth Conservative Sellout on the Supreme Court

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Obamacare Survives Supreme Court to Fight Another Day

Mother Jones

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Hey, I finally got one right! The Supreme Court decided to keep Obamacare subsidies intact, with both Roberts and Kennedy voting with the liberal judges in a 6-3 decision. And apparently they upheld the subsidies on the plainest possible grounds:

Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the words must be understood as part of a larger statutory plan. “In this instance,” he wrote, “the context and structure of the act compel us to depart from what would otherwise be the most natural reading of the pertinent statutory phrase.”

Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them,” he added. “If at all possible, we must interpret the act in a way that is consistent with the former, and avoids the latter.”

So this had nothing to do with the possibility that if Congress required states to build their own exchanges in order to get subsidies, that would be unconstitutional coercion on the states. That had been something a few of us speculated on in recent days. Instead it was a white bread ruling: laws have to be interpreted in their entirety, and the entirety of Obamacare very clearly demonstrated that Congress intended subsidies to go to all states, not just those who had set up their own exchanges.

So that’s that. As far as I know, there are no further serious legal challenges to Obamacare. The only challenge left is legislative, if Republicans capture both the House and the Senate and manage to get a Republican elected president. So let’s all hope that doesn’t happen, m’kay?

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Obamacare Survives Supreme Court to Fight Another Day

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Home Weatherization Not As Good a Deal As We Thought

Mother Jones

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Brad Plumer passes along some bad news on the effectiveness of residential energy efficiency upgrades. A massive controlled test in Michigan showed that it doesn’t pay for itself:

The researchers found that the upfront cost of efficiency upgrades came to about $5,000 per house, on average. But their central estimate of the benefits only amounted to about $2,400 per household, on average, over the lifetime of the upgrades. Yes, the households were using 10 to 20 percent less energy for electricity and heating than before — but that was only half the savings that had been expected ahead of time. And households weren’t saving nearly enough on their utility bills to justify the upfront investment.

The culprit appears to be the real world. Engineering studies suggest that residential upgrades should pay for themselves in lower energy costs within a few years, but in real life the quality of the upgrades is never as good as the engineering studies assume:

These engineering studies may not always capture the messiness of the real world. It’s easy to generate ideal conditions in a lab. But outside the lab, homes are irregularly shaped, insulation isn’t always installed by highly skilled workers, and there are all sorts of human behaviors that might reduce the efficacy of efficiency investments.

….In this particular study, the economists found that the federal home weatherization program was not a particularly cheap way to reduce CO2 emissions. Although energy use (and hence carbon pollution) from the homes studied did go down, it came at a cost of about $329 per ton of carbon. That’s much higher than the $38-per-ton value of the social cost of carbon that the US federal government uses to evaluate cost-effective climate policies.

Back to the drawing board.

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Home Weatherization Not As Good a Deal As We Thought

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