The list of prominent men accused of sexual harassment is growing.

Eight women have told The Washington Post that veteran television host Charlie Rose sexually harassed them between the late 1990s and 2011.

Three of the women spoke on the record, revealing their identities, says the Post. Five others spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. The Post says that all of the women were between the ages of 21 and 37 at the time of their unwanted encounters; had offered “striking commonalities” in their accounts; and all had confided with friends, family and colleagues about the incidents at the time.

Their allegations of Rose’s groping, lewd phone calls and his walking around naked in their presence are laid out in a lengthy article published Monday.

In the immediate aftermath of the Post‘s report, CBS News announced it is suspending Rose and PBS said that it would halt distribution of his show.

Rose is the second major media news figure to be suspended from work Monday in the face of allegations of sexual improprieties.

The New York Times, earlier in the day, announced that it has suspended one of its star reporters, White House correspondent Glenn Thrush, after several women accused him of unwanted kissing and touching.

The Charlie Rose show airs on PBS. Rose, 75, is also a co-host of CBS This Morning and a contributing correspondent for 60 Minutes.

The Post reports:

“Most of the women said Rose alternated between fury and flattery in his interactions with them. Five described Rose putting his hand on their legs, sometimes their upper thigh, in what they perceived as a test to gauge their reactions. Two said that while they were working for Rose at his residences or were traveling with him on business, he emerged from the shower and walked naked in front of them. One said he groped her buttocks at a staff party.”

In a statement provided to the Post, Rose apologized for his past behavior.

“It is essential that these women know I hear them and that I deeply apologize for my inappropriate behavior. I am greatly embarrassed. I have behaved insensitively at times, and I accept responsibility for that, though I do not believe that all of these allegations are accurate. I always felt that I was pursuing shared feelings, even though I now realize I was mistaken.”

The Post reports that they found additional female former employees of Rose’s who said they had been harassed. About two dozen spoke with the paper on the condition of anonymity.

“Six said they saw what they considered to be harassment, eight said they were uncomfortable with Rose’s treatment of female employees, and 10 said they did not see or hear anything concerning.

” ‘He was always professional with me,’ said Eleonore Marchand Mueller, a former assistant of Rose’s who worked for him from 2003 to 2005. ‘I never witnessed any unprofessional incidents.’ “

One woman, Kyle Godfrey-Ryan, described as one of Rose’s assistants in the mid-2000s, said that she had reported the talk show host’s unwanted advances to Rose’s longtime executive producer, Yvette Vega.

For her part, Vega, in a statement to the Post, said she should have protected the young women.

“I should have stood up for them,” said Vega, 52, who has worked with Rose since the show was created in 1991. “I failed. It is crushing. I deeply regret not helping them.”

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It has been a little more than a year since President Trump, then candidate-Trump, faced furious criticism over the now-infamous Access Hollywood video featuring his comments about groping women. He subsequently faced a barrage of sexual harassment claims. While the moment sparked a national conversation about sexual harassment, it did not quash his presidential aspirations.

In the following months, sexual harassment remained in the news, with accusations at Fox News, lawsuits and the resignations of prominent TV personalities.

But this fall, the floodgates seemed to open. After revelations about movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, the hashtag #MeToowas born and more allegations surfaced in Hollywood, in sports, in business, in politics and at media organizations, including NPR. Accusations of sexual harassment are not new, but this year’s reactions and consequences have been different.

In a new hourlong special, “Sexual Harassment: A Moment of Reckoning,” Weekend Edition Sunday host Lulu Garcia-Navarro looks at the significance of this moment, as so many women and men go public with their stories. She explores why it’s happening now and whether it represents a cultural turning point.

Guests:

Wade Hankin, a 25-year-old man from Seattle who launched a partner hashtag to #metoo — #ihave — in a post in which he admitted his own inappropriate actions involving women and encouraged other men to do so as well.

Radio journalist Mary Beth Kirchner, who recently reported on Jackson Katz, an educator who has spent 27 years giving talks and workshops to boys and men on the dangers of “boys will be boys” attitudes.

Lin Farley, a journalist and author who helped popularize the term “sexual harassment” in the 1970s.

Kaitlin Prest, host of The Heart podcast, “an audio art project about intimacy and humanity.”

Cathy Young, contributing editor for Reason magazine, who wrote a recent Los Angeles Times column suggesting some offenders are being punished excessively.

Human resources consultant Laurie Ruettimann, who explains how organizations address sexual misconduct.

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When he started working as a bartender a few years ago in Seattle, Howie Echo-Hawk says he began experiencing discrimination. First, a bar manager told him to get a respectable haircut.

“I had a Mohawk, which is the traditional style of my people and I wore it because of that,” he said. Echo-Hawk is a member of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma.

Rather than argue, Echo-Hawk cut his hair. Then, a few months later, he broke his ankle and had to take some time off.

“When I finally came back to work, one of the managers their told me: ‘That’s what happens when you Indians get your firewater,’ ” he said. “And so, I filed a complaint very quickly, and basically put in my two weeks notice.”

About a third of Native Americans say they have experienced discrimination in the workplace when seeking jobs, or when getting promotions or earning equal pay, according to a new poll by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Slightly more said they were on the receiving end of slurs or negative comments based on race.

Still in Seattle, Echo-Hawk says racial misconceptions followed him to his first communications job. His company launched an advertising campaign using indigenous people in it. He says those images have been widely criticized by Native communities, because they posed indigenous peoples in colorful outfits that didn’t accurately represent their culture or heritage.

“I was pretty livid,” he said.

Echo-Hawk met with his bosses several times, and they offered a compromise. But, he said, afterward, his superiors treated him differently. The whole experience left a sour taste in his mouth.

“This is something that I feel is important for anybody who is trying to understand someone who has to talk about their oppression to the people who benefit from that oppression, you’re pleading your humanity, and to do that is hard.”

That is hard if you already have a job, and even harder if you’re seeking one. In the NPR poll, almost two-thirds of Native Americans living in majority Native areas say the availability of local jobs was worse than other places. About the same amount also say Native Americans are paid less than white people for equal work.

The Cherokees are trying to change that.

Diane Kelly is the executive director for career services for the Cherokee Nation. When she started in this office 40 years ago, one of her main jobs was to protect tribal members against workplace discrimination.

“A lot of the people back then were working as temps, they weren’t actually working on a full-time basis. They were working during seasonal-type work, and the ones that were maintained and kept were normally not the Indian people,” she said.

Kelly says her work is now changing. Today, the tribe employs more than 11,000 people, not including contract work with Native-owned businesses. With federal support, Kelly helped established one of the largest tribal employment offices in the country.

“Anybody that wants a job today can get a job,” Kelly said. “I’m serious. There are jobs everywhere.”

Chief Bill John Baker made job growth a priority in part because of the legacy of centuries of oppression against Native peoples. He says were it not for the Cherokee Nation’s economic success, many tribal members would have little to no employment opportunities.

“Anytime we put out a hiring call, we try to hire family first,” he said.

The Cherokee Nation is hiring everyone from janitors to doctors, and the tribe is trying to remove employment barriers through scholarships and education and job training programs, Baker said.

“As long as we’ve got Cherokee citizens that are needing jobs, we’re going to try and put those paychecks in the hands of tribal citizens,” he said.

By circumventing a legacy of institutional discrimination, some tribes like the Cherokee Nation are not only providing jobs for their members, but they’re also becoming major economic forces in their regions. The Cherokees report they now have an annual economic impact of more than $2 billion in Oklahoma.

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Documentary filmmaker Christopher Rufo doesn’t make enough money to have to pay Seattle’s new high-earners tax, but he still wants to keep Seattle income-tax-free. So much so, he joined around 30 plaintiffs suing the city.

On Friday, a trial court judge is scheduled to hear legal challenges to the city’s new income tax on the wealthy, approved this summer by the Seattle City Council to raise revenue for services in a state that does not have an income tax.

Under the new law, the city taxes income over $250,000 a year for individuals and over $500,000 for couples at 2.25 percent. The tax is approved but isn’t being collected yet.

Rufo does not want Seattle to end up like Youngstown, Ohio, one of the cities in his upcoming PBS film on economically depressed American cities. His footage of Youngstown, playing on the screen in front of him, shows a backhoe chewing through a white two-story house, reducing it to shards within minutes.

“Pretty much the only economic activity that you’ll see in some of these neighborhoods is the demolition industry,” he says.

The message of his research is this: “We can’t take the prosperity for granted. Eventually the tech industry will either slow down, or shrink, or as we’re seeing with Amazon, move somewhere else,” Rufo says.

Amazon is considering proposals right now for a second headquarters.

In enacting the income tax Seattle is going against a state Supreme Court precedent from the 1930s when the state Constitution was amended to include an extremely broad definition of property, says Republican Rob McKenna. He served two terms as Washington’s attorney general and now represents the plaintiffs in this lawsuit.

The new definition included “anything tangible or intangible, subject to ownership,” McKenna says. “The Supreme Court ruled that that definition being as broad as it is, encompasses income.”

Another clause in the state Constitution mandates all property be taxed the same, so all income must also be taxed uniformly, he says. And because state law doesn’t allow for an income tax, cities can’t impose one.

On the other side is Paul Lawrence, an attorney litigating the case on behalf of the city of Seattle.

“There’s no provision in the state Constitution that says you can’t have an income tax,” he said.

Instead, what’s preventing a state income tax is an interpretation — a wrong interpretation, Lawrence says. Because, he says, income is not property.

“It comes to you; you then take it and turn it into property — whether it’s a stock or bond or a piece of property — but it’s a very different type of thing,” he says.

And income, he says, should be allowed to be taxed under Washington state law.

Some business owners support the tax. Molly Moon’s Homemade Ice Cream chain founder and CEO, Molly Moon Neitzel, is in favor of it to fund the city’s pressing needs, like affordable housing, she says. She doesn’t earn enough to be taxed, but hopes one day to be taxed more on future high income, “so that [her] employees can have a better quality of life in the city of Seattle.”

Washington state is often said to have one of the most regressive tax structures in the nation, because of its reliance on property and sales taxes. Ideas for new taxes come out of Seattle city hall all the time.

It’s not the tax structure that keeps her business in town, Neitzel says, but rather “the community, the kinds of things people want to buy here, how beautiful it is.”

Downhill from her shop, near the shore of Lake Union, is the heart of Amazon headquarters. New office buildings and high-end condos are everywhere. And so is a question: how to respond to all this growth and all this money?

Whichever side loses initial volleys over the new tax will probably appeal it to the state’s highest court.

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A portrait of Christ by Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci has shattered all previous records for artworks sold at auction or privately, fetching a whopping $450.3 million on Wednesday at Christie’s in New York.

Salvator Mundi (Savior of the World), is one of only a score of da Vinci’s still in existence and the only one held privately.

The bidding opened at $75 million and ran for 19 minutes.

The New York Times reports:

“There were gasps throughout the sale, as the bids climbed by tens of millions up to $225 million, by fives up to $260 million, and then by twos. As the bidding slowed, and a buyer pondered the next multi-million-dollar increment, Jussi Pylkkanen, the auctioneer, said, ‘It’s an historic moment; we’ll wait.’

Toward the end, Alex Rotter, Christie’s co-chairman of postwar and contemporary art, who represented a buyer on the phone, made two big jumps to shake off one last rival bid from Francis de Poortere, Christie’s head of old master paintings.”

The name of the buyer was not immediately released. The final bid was $400 million, but the sale price includes a premium paid to Christie’s.

“Salvator Mundi is a painting of the most iconic figure in the world by the most important artist of all time,” said Loic Gouzer, co-chairman of post-war and contemporary art at Christie’s was quoted by The Associated Press as saying. “The opportunity to bring this masterpiece to the market is an honor that comes around once in a lifetime.”

The 26-inch-tall painting has had an intriguing history. It dates to about 1500 and depicts a figure of Christ dressed in Renaissance-style attire, with the right hand raised in benediction and the left holding a crystal orb.

It was recorded in the collection of King Charles I of England in 1649 but was auctioned to the Duke of Buckingham in 1763. It then disappeared until 1900, over which time it was assumed to have been lost or destroyed.

When it finally resurfaced, it was damaged from restoration attempts and was purchased by British collector Sir Frederick Cook. At the time it wasn’t seen as an authentic da Vinci, but instead attributed to one of his disciples.

In 2011, Salvator Mundi went on public display. At the time, the BBC wrote:

“Cook’s descendants sold it at auction in 1958 for £45 and it was acquired by a US consortium of art dealers in 2005.

“After undergoing extensive conservation treatment [completed in 2011], it was determined to be an original Da Vinci work.”

It was put on the block for Wednesday’s auction by Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev, who had purchased it for $127.5 million in a private sale in 2013.

The previous record for a painting sold at auction was set in 2015 when Pablo Picasso’s Women of Algiers (Version O)went for $179 million to an anonymous buyer. A private sale of Willem de Koonig’s Interchange, also in 2015, fetched $300 million.

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There are a lot of anxious graduate students at universities around the country right now.

That’s because to help pay for more than $1 trillion in tax cuts for U.S. corporations, the House Republican tax plan would raise taxes on grad students in a very big way. These students make very little money to begin with. And many would have to pay about half of their modest student stipends in taxes.

“The past week this is what I’ve been talking about with other graduate students and classmates. I think we’re all shocked,” says Tamar Oostrom. She’s in her third year of getting her Ph.D. in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

She and her classmates have been crunching the numbers. “This bill would increase our tax by 300 or 400 percent. I think it’s absolutely crazy,” Oostrom says.

In exchange for helping to teach courses or working with professors on research projects, MIT gives students such as Oostrom a modest $30,000 stipend. And as part of the deal she also doesn’t pay tuition. The arrangement is typical for many students at MIT and other universities.

That tuition price tag at MIT is technically about $50,000, even though students like Oostrom don’t have to pay it. Under the tax plan proposed by House Republicans, these students would have to report that tuition forgiveness as income.

Ryan Hill, a fourth-year Ph.D. student at MIT, already pays taxes on his $30,000 stipend. But, he says, adding in the value of his free tuition, he’d have to pay taxes as if he made $80,000 a year. And that’s a massive difference for Hill and his wife, who works part time on top of caring for their new baby.

“I wish we didn’t have to stress about money as much as we already do,” Hill says. “It’s already been very hard to just emotionally get through this time of life because we have to be so frugal.”

The couple already gave up dental insurance to save money. And Hill says his wife sews clothes for their baby so they don’t have to buy clothes.

About 145,000 grad students received a tuition reduction in 2011-12, the American Council on Education says.

Hill and other MIT students say the tax proposal is ill-conceived. So do economists, who say it would discourage Americans from seeking advanced degrees at a time when the country badly needs a better educated workforce.

Kim Rueben, a senior fellow in the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center at the Urban Institute, said the plan wouldn’t harm just grad students. If young people opt out of graduate education, the damage would be felt throughout the economy.

“Dollar for dollar, this might be the most misguided part of the plan,” she says. “What you’re doing is increasing the cost of going to graduate school … and ignoring the fact that the government makes much more money if people have more education.”

So, Rueben says, the relatively small amount of money taken from grad students to pay for other cuts would stymie the country’s growth in the future.

Larry Lyon, vice provost and dean of Baylor University’s graduate school, was blunt. “I’ve been promoting graduate education for over 20 years,” he said, and the plan is “probably the most serious threat to doctoral education we have ever experienced.”

Other university administrators across the country appear to be just as appalled as students — the American Council on Education sent a letter to Congress decrying the plan. The letter was signed by over 30 academic organizations, including the Association of American Universities, the Council for Advancement and Support of Education and the American Psychological Association.

The provision exists only in the House tax bill, not the Senate version. Many graduate students are hoping that the proposal doesn’t end up seeing the light of day.

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Buena Vista winery in Sonoma Valley, founded in 1857, is considered the birthplace of California wine. The cavernous cellar, carved into a hill by Chinese laborers, has survived earthquakes, several owners and last month’s fires in Northern California.

Now, the black tree stumps and scorched hills right next to the winery’s buildings show just how close the flames came — less than 30 feet, says Tom Blackwood, general manager at Buena Vista.

“The fire could not have come any closer without hitting the buildings. Buena Vista was surrounded by flames,” says Blackwood, who credited firefighters with saving the winery, which withstood untouched. “We are so lucky.”

But since Buena Vista reopened a couple of weeks ago, Blackwood is facing another problem: a big drop in visitors. During the month before the fires began, Buena Vista saw 6,000 visitors, says Blackwood. But since the winery reopened about two weeks ago, only 500 visitors have shown up.

“If the fires hadn’t happened we would probably see about 50 or more people here at the bar,” says Blackwood, gazing at the winery’s relatively quiet tasting room. “What do we have here, like six people now at the bar?”

Last month’s fires in Northern California hit wine country during peak tourist season. While some businesses burned, many others were forced to close temporarily because of lack of road access or bad air quality when the fires raged. Now that the danger has passed, wineries and restaurants across the region are open and want visitors to return.

Most of the cancellations came from tourists who are not local, according to small businesses in Sonoma Valley — a region where burned hills, homes and cars can be seen.

“Once the fires were under control, we found that very few people had decided to return. There was initially a fear of the entire valley being burned,” says Hunt Bailie, who owns a small segway and bicycle tour company with his wife in the town of Sonoma. He said about 90 percent of his tours were cancelled.

“We found that most folks are interested in returning, but they think it might be too soon,” says Bailie. “Typically October is the time when we can save all the pennies until spring, but that month dried up for us.”

While the affected areas were “very limited,” news coverage all over the world mostly showed destruction from the fires, says Caroline Beteta, who heads Visit California, the organization tasked with attracting tourists to the state.

“Just the imagery alone I would argue did more damage than the actual damage to the tourism infrastructure,” Beteta told a conference of wine marketers in Santa Rosa, the biggest city in Sonoma county. News images of charred houses and red glowing skies flashed behind her.

Tim Zahner, chief operations officer for Sonoma County Tourism, says most hotels and wineries in the county are fine, and are pouring in their tasting rooms today.

“The weather is mild. You know if you’re in Chicago and it’s November and it’s snowing, out here it is not snowing. It’s gorgeous,” says Zahner, who was also attending the wine marketing conference. “It’s a good time to come visit.”

His group and Beteta’s are trying to convince visitors to return to the region. Visit California launched a $2 million dollar advertising campaign to bring back images of sunny vineyards and happy couples enjoying a glass of cabernet sauvignon — wine country images.

Economist Robert Eyler says it’s too early to tell the economic impact of the fires on tourism. But he expects the county to overcome any downturn in visitors.

“The brand of Sonoma and wine country is going to survive because the brand is very very established,” says Eyler, a professor at Sonoma State University. “This is something that is a brand challenge in the short term. I would be flabbergasted if it was in the long.”

That brand is something local small business owners are counting on. People like Mingma Sherpa, who co-owns a Mexican restaurant about two miles from the fire line.

The immigrant from Nepal estimates half of his customers are gone. Before the fires, at least one tour bus would stop here daily, he said.

“Since that happened, most of them have cancelled,” says Sherpa, adding that the sudden loss in revenue forced him to cut shifts for servers and other employees.

“It’s definitely tough. But this town is very special. So hopefully they’ll come back,” he says.

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