• Huge survey shows how incredibly common campus sexual assault is:
A new survey of campus sexual violence in the United States has found that more than 1 in 4 undergraduate women from 33 large universities have experienced sexual assault while they were students. Fewer than 30 percent of those women, who were assaulted by force or while they were unable to consent, filed a report or sought help or counseling from their schools—typically because they believed they could handle it alone, were too embarrassed or ashamed, or felt that what they had experienced was not serious enough to merit assistance.
The survey of more than 181,000 students, conducted last spring and published this week by the Association of American Universities, is the largest of its kind. It is the second iteration of another large study published in 2015, which included data from many of the same institutions and had broadly similar results.
• Trump can’t even get the easy stuff right: In a livestream talk with Jessica Meir and Christina Koch, who had just worked outside the International Space Station, the first time that there has been an all-female spacewalk. But, as might have been predicted, Trump botched his hurrah by noting “this is the first time for a woman outside of the space station,” repeating soon thereafter that it was “the first-ever female spacewalk.” Not so. Numerous female astronauts have gone on extravehicular activities since 1984 when the first spacewalks by a woman were taken by Russian cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya, and later the same year by the American astronaut Kathryn Sullivan.
• Boeing pilot warned about “egregious” flight-control program on the 737 Max in 2016: That software program was later implicated in a pair of crashes in which 346 people died, leading to the grounding of the new airplane, and big financial problems for Boeing. Emails show the pilot told regulators to delete the mention of the software from pilot manuals.
MIDDAY TWEET
• Public could wind up paying to clean up after financially fragile frackers: Justin Mikulka at DeSmog writes:
Increasingly, U.S. shale firms appear unable to pay back investors for the money borrowed to fuel the last decade of the fracking boom. In a similar vein, those companies also seem poised to stiff the public on cleanup costs for abandoned oil and gas wells once the producers have moved on.
“It’s starting to become out of control, and we want to rein this in,” Bruce Hicks, Assistant Director of the North Dakota Oil and Gas Division, said in August about companies abandoning oil and gas wells. If North Dakota’s regulators, some of the most industry-friendly in the country, are sounding the alarm, then that doesn’t bode well for the rest of the nation.
• The ever fabulous Tom Sullivan comments at Digby’s Hullaballoo:
Premature maybe, but Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson is already surveying possible replacements for President Donald Trump atop the Republican ticket in 2020. From Trump Loyalists to “True” Conservatives to Collaborationist Critics to Trump Kids to Neocon Revivalists, there isn't much there to inspire Trump's con-fed, resentment-stoked base should MAGA hats end up remaindered on eBay.
But it could happen. The Trump train and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's impeachment train are on a collision course, and the wheels are already coming off Trump's. The acting president's political legs have quickly gone wobbly. His already limited verbal ability has sunk to fourth-to-sixth-grade level. News outlets on Wednesday had to verify with the White House that the street corner-language letter Trump sent to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on October 9 was not a hoax.
• Scientists argue that climate activists need to pay attention to contraception: In an article in the journal BMJ Sexual & Reproductive Health, John Bongaarts and Regine Sitruk-Ware assert that "Improving access to effective contraception is one such policy that thus far has been largely ignored by the international climate community." Globally, there are an estimated 99 million unintended pregnancies every year, 44% of the total. By the end of this century, the United Nations estimates that 11 billion people will be living on the planet, 3 billion more than now. While those extra billions will present many environmental problems—including crowding out other species—without drastic action to keep those extra billions from adding to the ever-growing level of atmospheric greenhouse gases, the climate crisis will be a lot worse. Bongaarts and Sitruk-Ware argue that improved access to contraception would mean "slower future population growth could reduce emissions globally by an estimated 40% or more in the long term."