Supreme Court Allows Texas Abortion Clinics to Remain Open →

The Supreme Court on Monday allowed nine Texas abortionclinics to remain open while the justices consider whether to hear an appeal from a decision effectively ordering them to close.

The vote was 5 to 4, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. voting to deny the stay.

The case concerns two parts of a state law that imposes strict requirements on abortion providers. One requires all abortion clinics in the state to meet the standards for “ambulatory surgical centers,” including regulations concerning buildings, equipment and staffing. The other requires doctors performing abortions to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital.

Other parts of the law took effect in 2013, causing about half of the state’s 41 abortion clinics to close. If the contested provisions take effect, abortion rights advocates said, the number of clinics will again be halved.

The remaining clinics, lawyers for abortion providers said, would be clustered in four metropolitan areas: Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston and San Antonio. “There would be no licensed abortion facilities west of San Antonio,” the providers’ brief said, “and the only abortion clinic south of San Antonio would have a highly restricted capacity.”

Greece’s Debt Crisis Explained →

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras of Greece surprised the rest of Europe over the weekend by calling for a referendum that will ask voters whether to accept terms put forth last week by eurozone creditors — terms he says are unacceptable.

So far, the creditors have refused to grant an extension of the current bailout program beyond Tuesday. Without that extension, Greece has no chance to receive the €7.2 billion remaining in the current program. (The conditions under which Greece might get that money are what the months of fighting have been about.)

Any arrangement with Greece after the referendum would, as a legal matter, require new negotiations and a new program.

Inside the Dark Realities of the International Surrogacy Industry →

In the latest Vice for HBO documentary, Outsourcing Embryos,correspondent Gianna Toboni traveled to India to report on the booming gestational-surrogacy industry. Commissioning couples from the U.S. and Europe use Indian surrogacy agencies because they’re as much as six times cheaper than Western alternatives. Surrogacy companies claim to offer opportunities for women to escape poverty, promoting international surrogacy as a win-win for everyone involved.

But, Toboni and her team quickly expose the dark underside of an unregulated and dangerous industry. Women are routinely recruited from slums, made to sign contracts they can’t read, before spending a year living in a facility. Once the baby is born — via cesarean section so that doctors can maximize births per day — the surrogate is sent home, often without the full compensation she was promised. We spoke to Toboni about the lives of surrogate women, how the industry can improve, and the emerging black market for “extra” babies.

Some stuff you should know about Greece before you lose your s*** →

Greece just closed its banks, ATMs, etc. Things were awful, and they've been on the seeming brink of financial collapse for *years*. Some very fascinating history, which ends with this:

8. The truth is, Greece never belonged in the European’s single-currency experiment to begin with but they were too small and inconsequential to say no to. The statistics they submitted were largely fudged and Northern Europe willfully overlooked the country’s well-known culture of black market economics and rampant tax evasion. It was the late 1990’s – optimism was the pervasive sentiment around the globe, ushered in by the hedonist-in-chief in the White House. The Euro Zone even looked the other way when Goldman Sachs enabled the interest-rate swaps and so forth that cooked Greece’s books to the point where they were qualified for inclusion. “F*** it, let ’em in,” said a cigarette-smoking Parisian bureaucrat sometime between his first and second lunch break that day.

9. There are no countries in the modern world that have defaulted on their loans more often than Greece, save for Honduras and Ecuador. Look it up. The fact that history is repeating for the umpteenth time should not cause you to lose your s***. Not that this is going to be a good thing. It’s going to hurt some people. But probably not hurt the world. Greece’s creditors played for time since the latest crisis began five years ago and used that time to minimize the impact of what they all probably expected from day one. When Mario Draghi gave his famous “whatever it takes” speech, he meant whatever it takes to protect the European Union – not whatever it takes to keep Greece in it. Mark Dow makes this case – that a Grexit will be the best thing for both Greece and for the EU in his new post, Greece: It’s Time and It’s Going to Be Okay. Maybe he’s right. Read it and cool off.

Bottom line – Greece has given the world many beautiful and important things and its cultural heritage is among high points in the history of humanity. But finance just isn’t its strong suit. Fortunately for the world, we’ve had time to prepare and the Greek economy is about the size of the economy of Atlanta, Georgia. Contagion is a real risk, but probably not the risk it was when this all began. More to the point, contagion is always a risk, not just when the newspapers begin talking about it.

And besides, it’s not like nobody saw this coming, given the history.

How Crisis Text Line Founder Nancy Lublin Is Saving Lives, Text by Text →

Launched in 2013, CTL is the first around-the-clock hotline in America to provide its services solely over text messaging, and it's changing the game for helping young people in distress. Through word of mouth alone, as many as 350 teens and adults now tap out messages to trained volunteer counselors on 741741 every day, and the data from those conversations is providing tantalizing possibilities for how to reach people before a crisis even starts.

Hooray for Obamacare →

What about costs? In 2013 there were dire warnings about a looming “rate shock”; instead, premiums came in well below expectations. In 2014 the usual suspects declared that huge premium increases were looming for 2015; the actual rise was just 2 percent. There was another flurry of scare stories about rate hikes earlier this year, but as more information comes in it looks as if premium increases for 2016 will be bigger than for this year but still modest by historical standards — which means that premiums remain much lower than expected.

And there has also been a sharp slowdown in the growth of overall health spending, which is probably due in part to the cost-control measures, largely aimed at Medicare, that were also an important part of health reform.

What about economic side effects? One of the many, many Republican votes against Obamacare involved passing something called the Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act, and opponents have consistently warned that helping Americans afford health care would lead to economic doom. But there’s no job-killing in the data: The U.S. economy has added more than 240,000 jobs a month on average since Obamacare went into effect, its biggest gains since the 1990s.

Finally, what about claims that health reform would cause the budget deficit to explode? In reality, the deficit has continued to decline, and the Congressional Budget Office recently reaffirmed its conclusion that repealing Obamacare would increase, not reduce, the deficit.

Put all these things together, and what you have is a portrait of policy triumph — a law that, despite everything its opponents have done to undermine it, is achieving its goals, costing less than expected, and making the lives of millions of Americans better and more secure.

American schools are 'more segregated than they were in the 1960s,' says Hillary Clinton →

The Clinton campaign pointed us to a passage in a 2014 study by UCLA Graduate School of Education’s Civil Rights Project that tracked the amount of southern black students attending white schools in the South. By that yardstick, schools are slightly less integrated now than they were in 1968. That’s the year the Supreme Court mandated the enforcement of desegregation in Green vs. County School Board and diverse classrooms really started to become reality.  

Clinton, however, bookended the 1960s as the point of comparison and her claim doesn’t hold true for the better part of the decade. Jim Crow laws were still in place until the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and despite the Brown decision, most black students in the South still didn’t attend white schools,"the kind of schools that provided strong potential opportunities for diverse learning experiences," according to the study. In 1967, one in 100 black students went to a white school. In 1960, it was one in 1,000.

"It’s true that segregation for blacks is worse today than it was in 1968, but it’s certainly not worse than 1964 and before," said Gary Orfield, a UCLA professor of education and lead author of the study Clinton cited...

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Clinton does have a strong point that American schools have relapsed into monochrome. Classrooms were the most diverse from the 1970s through the early 1990s. At peak integration, four out of 10 black southern students attended a white school, while less than a third of all black students attended black schools.

"We’ve lost a lot of the progress we gained, no doubt about that," Clotfelter said.

Experts say the backslide was the consequence of a series of judicial decisions, beginning with Milliken vs. Bradley in 1974, a relatively unheard of but seminal case in the desegregation saga...

Unacceptable Impact: The Supreme Court takes a stand against housing discrimination. →

On Thursday, in a 5–4 opinion  written by Justice Anthony Kennedy and joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan, the Supreme Court held that the 1968 Fair Housing Act—passed in the wake of Martin Luther King’s assassination, huge riots, and urban destruction—allows federal action against “disparate impact” as well as overt discrimination. This ruling not only affirms an essential tool in combating racial discrimination, it upholds the view that racial disparities are a national problem that the government ought to combat.

Disparate impact—the idea that, whether intentional or not, something is discriminatory and illegal if it has a disproportionate “adverse impact” on a particular group—is easy to understand, on account of its universal presence in the United States. Explicit racial bias is frowned on and most Americans strive for tolerance and fair treatment. Yet, there are vast racial gaps in almost every part of American life, from incarceration and the criminal justice system, to education, health care, and even air quality. While it’s tempting to blame “personal responsibility” or a nebulous “culture of poverty,” neither can explain broad trends of racial inequality that snare minorities of all education and income levels. Put simply, racism is so embedded in the structure of American society—from how we distribute wealth to how we determine punishment—that neutral, “colorblind” actions can easily produce unequal, racist results.

This is most apparent in housing, where cities and towns can create and bolster segregation through exclusionary zoning, and banks can target minorities for the worst, and most dangerous, mortgage loans. Both practices have disproportionately hurt blacks and Latinos, and both practices have been targeted for lawsuits and federal investigation...