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Bill Cosby is sentenced to jail time; a populist wave begins to swell in Brazil.

Bill Cosby faces 3 to 10 years in jail

Gilbert Carrasquillo/Getty Images

• Disgraced comedian Bill Cosby has been sentenced to serve three to 10 years in jail after a court deemed him a “sexually violent predator” on Tuesday. Cosby, who was once known as “America’s Dad,” was convicted in April on charges of drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand in 2004. [NYT / Graham Bowley and Jon Hurdle]
• Cosby’s defense team argued that the 81-year-old, who is legally blind, is too old and dependent to be sent to jail. The prosecutors, however, felt that he didn’t “deserve a free pass because of his advanced age.” [AP / Maryclaire Dale and Michael R. Sisak​]
• Cosby is one of the first celebrities in the #MeToo era to go to trial, receive a guilty verdict, and succumb to the consequences. [Washington Post / Manuel Roig-Franzia]
• The sentencing comes after some 60 women came forward in 2014 and 2015 to accuse Cosby of sexual assault. There was a consistent trend among the accusations against Cosby, which span from the 1960s to the 2000s: He invited them to interact one-on-one, under the guise of mentorship, and then drugged and forced himself on them while they were incapacitated. [Vox / Jenée Desmond-Harris]
• His victims began speaking out after Hannibal Burress highlighted older accusations against Cosby in a standup performance that quickly went viral in 2014. [Guardian / Lucia Graves]
• Because Constand’s assault was the only one to fall within the statute of limitations, her trial has been informally treated as a representation of the many other accusers. In a victim impact statement she read before the sentencing, Constand said, “Bill Cosby took my beautiful, healthy young spirit and he crushed it.” [Vox / P.R. Lockhart]
• The guilty verdict came in Cosby’s second trial, after his first resulted in a mistrial (and after many women in Hollywood came forward to accuse Harvey Weinstein of sexual harassment and assault), and is a testament to the growing power of the #MeToo movement. [Vox / Jen Kirby]

A Trumpish presidential candidate rises to popularity in Brazil

• Far-right, populist presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro is growing in popularity in Brazil as the country’s first round of elections quickly approaches. Bolsonaro is a brash, pro-torture former army captain who many say is racist, homophobic, misogynistic — and quite akin to US President Donald Trump. [The Wire / Shobhan Saxena]
• In April, Bolsonaro was charged with inciting hatred against black people, indigenous communities, LGBTQ people, and women. He’s said women are ignorant and undeserving of equal pay, and once called a female politician “too ugly to rape.” Women across the country have launched a campaign on Twitter called ##EleNão (#NotHim) to protest his candidacy. [NYT / Shasta Darlington]
• Bolsonaro is also disliked within creative and academic communities; 150 prominent artists and scholars signed a manifesto declaring that he was “a clear threat to our fundamental civilisational heritage.” [Guardian / Tom Phillips]
• Polls are reporting that Bolsonaro and moderate candidate Fernando Haddad are almost neck and neck. They will likely not win a majority of the vote (which is necessary to win the election in the first round). As a result, Haddad and Bolsonaro may solely go head to head in a runoff. [Reuters / Brad Brooks]
• Bolsonaro stopped campaigning in early September after surviving an assassination attempt while in a small town north of Rio de Janeiro. He will not return to the public eye until after the October 7 vote. [AP / Mauricio Savarese and Peter Prengaman]
• Brazil is just three decades into its democracy and coming off years of political corruption scandals that saw the downfall and jailing of its beloved former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. [Economist]

Miscellaneous

• During his second speech at the UN General Assembly, President Trump was surprised to face a laughing crowd after he declared that “my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.” [Bloomberg / Jennifer Epstein]
• A new study finds that Glyphosate, a common herbicide, is bad for bees. One scientist from the study says that “people should worry about” the weed killer, which is a predominant cause of declining bee populations. [USA Today / Ashley May]
• Amazon begins broadcasting Thursday Night Football this week, and for the first time, the streams will include the option for commentary from an all-female panel (composed of two veteran sports journalists). [Engadget / Jon Fingas]
• Google is going back on a ban from March and, once again, allowing cryptocurrency companies to advertise on its American and Japanese platforms. It’s unclear what inspired the change. [The Verge / Nick Statt]

Verbatim

“When our criminal justice system also fails to understand this threat [of toxic masculinity], we are in crisis. It is time to talk less about whether we should believe women and more about why we are so desperate, from the outset, to believe men.” [Chitra Ramaswamy questions why we defer to men’s accounts in rape cases / Guardian]

Watch this: Why America needs automatic voter registration

A simple fix to get more Americans to vote. [YouTube / Madeline Marshall]

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