Bill Cosby is charged in a 2004 assault; Puerto Rico is about to miss more debt payments; and the US considers new sanctions against Iran.
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TOP NEWS
Bill Cosby's day in court
Handout/Getty Images
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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.
[BuzzFeed News / Nicolas Medina Mora]
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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."
[New York Daily News]
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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.
[BuzzFeed News / Adam Serwer]
Puerto Rico in debt trouble again
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
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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.
[The Guardian / Dominic Rushe]
A bad week for US-Iran relations
Cristina Young/U.S. Navy via Getty Images
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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 Hill / Julian Hattam]
MISCELLANEOUS
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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?
[Slate Star Codex / Scott Alexander]
VERBATIM
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"Not long after graduation, she married a man she’d just met because, as she later put it, she 'couldn’t afford a car and he had one.'"
[NY Mag / Kim Brooks]
WATCH THIS
Alex Wong/Getty Images and Vox / Estelle Caswell and Liz Scheltens
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