Vox Sentences: Details emerge on the Canadian parliament shooting

1. Ottawa, the day after

Constables guard the central rotunda of the Canadian Parliament. (Andrew Burton / Getty Images)

• The Canadian police have confirmed that the shooter who killed a soldier and terrorized Parliament yesterday was a lone gunman — debunking early reports of another shooter.

  [NYT / Ian Austen and Alan Cowell]

• The shooter, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, had been at a homeless shelter for about ten days before the shooting, where he "would talk about being anti-Canadian and tell others how his relatives had been fighters in Libya," according to witnesses.

  [Ottawa Citizen / Peter Henderson]

• Zehaf-Bibeau was planning on going to Syria at the time of his death.

  [ABC News / Meghan Keneally and Randy Kreider]

• The shooter's parents released a statement: "I am mad at our son, I don’t understand and part of me wants to hate him."

  [AP]

• According to Canadian authorities, there is no connection between the shooting and a Monday attack on soldiers in Quebec.

  [Reuters / Randall Palmer and David Ljunggren]

• Zehaf-Bibeau was Muslim, but we don't know how, if at all, that influenced his actions. And jumping to conclusions is dangerous.

  [Vox / Amanda Taub]

• Prime Minister Stephen Harper will push for increased surveillance and detention powers.

  [FT / Geoff Dyer and Robert Wright]

• Gun crime in Canada is more common than you might think.

  [Washington Post / Max Ehrenfreund]

2. Ebola update

Volunteers who responded to a nationwide appeal by the German Red Cross (DRK) to help in the fight against ebola in Africa put on isolation suits during training at the Bundeswehr facility on October 23, 2014 in Appen, Germany. (Joern Pollex/Getty Images)

• Ebola has now spread to Mali.

  [Vox / Julia Belluz]

• A highly promising possible Ebola vaccine was shelved about a decade ago, out of concerns it wouldn't sell.

  [NYT / Denise Grady]

• But now pharma execs and donors are "thrashing out details of a push to accelerate development of vaccines and treatments."

  [FT / Andrew Ward]

• Roboticists also want to get involved in the Ebola-fighting effort.

  [NYT / John Markoff]

• This virus-killing robot might already do the trick.

  [TechCrunch / John Biggs]

• The CDC will start monitoring people coming to the US from Guinea, Liberia, or Sierra Leone — even if they lack symptoms.

  [NYT]

• The new measures probably won't work.

  [Vox / Julia Belluz]

• Rwanda's easing up on its screening of travelers coming from the US and Spain.

  [Washington Post / Adam Taylor]

• But North Korea is refusing all international travelers because of Ebola fears (not that it had many to start with).

  [Washington Post / Anna Fifield]

• 21 maps and charts that explain Ebola.

  [Vox / Julia Belluz and Joss Fong]

3. The UNC fake class scandal

Kenneth Wainstein presents his report on academic fraud at UNC. (Chuck Liddy/Raleigh News & Observer/MCT via Getty Images)

• "For 18 years, thousands of students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill took classes with no assigned reading or problem sets, with no weekly meetings, and with no faculty member involved." Libby Nelson explains.

  [Vox / Libby Nelson]

• Known as "paper courses," the classes only required a final paper — but the papers that were turned in were often extremely shoddy. And sometimes they weren't turned in at all.

• Nearly a quarter of the students in the classes were football and basketball players, many of whom struggled academically. The academic advisor who blew the whistle claims she "taught members of the football and basketball team to sound out multisyllable words and piece together simple sentences."

  [Businessweek / Paul Barrett]

• In athletes' cases, Julius Nyang’oro, the professor for many of the classes, would "assign grades based largely on his assessment of the impact that grade would have on the student’s ability to remain eligible" for their sports.

  [NYT / Sarah Lyall]

• The classes were also popular in the Greek scene at the school — and remember, most of the students weren't athletes, although that's what coverage of the scandal has focused upon.

  [Business Insider / Peter Jacobs]

• There's some precedent for this kind of thing — in 1999, it came out that a tutor had "completed more than 400 assignments for at least 20 basketball players" at the University of Minnesota.

  [Sporting News / Kami Mattioli]

• The scandal raises a larger question: "What happened at UNC is an extreme symptom of a widespread problem: nobody outside colleges really knows what, or if, students are learning."

  [Vox / Libby Nelson]

• There are surveys trying to measure what students are learning. In the rare cases when schools release the results, they can be surprising: one found that the University of Texas campuses in San Antonio and El Paso outperformed the flagship in Austin.

  [Washington Post / Dylan Matthews]

4. Misc.

• Could close governor's races save Democrats' Senate hopes too?

  [NY Mag / Jonathan Chait]

• Fix American government by making it more like Britain's.

  [Bloomberg View / Clive Crook]

• The evidence that climate change causes violence is stronger than you might imagine.

  [Washington Post / Chris Mooney]

• The Oscar Pistorius case, explained.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• Is Obama too reserved in crises?

  [Businessweek / Joshua Green]

• Economists aren't too excited about the GOP's jobs plan.

  [NYT / Jackie Calmes]

• Just because the economy's growing doesn't mean wages necessarily are.

  [Washington Post / Jared Bernstein ]

• A graphical guide to which chess pieces are likeliest to perish.

  [Oliver Brennan via Enrique Guerra-Pujol]

• 13 scenes that explain how horror movies work.

  [Vox / Todd VanderWerff]

• Ello is very serious about being an ad-free social network; here's how: "users will eventually be able to download widgets and modifications, paying a few dollars for each purchase."

  [NYT / Michael de la Merced]

• Melanie Griffith grew up with a pet lion in the house and the resulting photos are kind of the best.

  [Mashable / Chris Wild]

5. Verbatim

• "Don’t be distracted by for whom the belle trolls; she trolls with glee."

  [NYT / Jon Caramanica]

• "A list of categories, scrawled on a whiteboard, reminds the workers of what they’re hunting for: pornography, gore, minors, sexual solicitation, sexual body parts/images, racism."

  [Wired / Adrien Chen]

• "I mean, we suck. We really do."

  [Labor Secretary Tom Perez via Bloomberg / Kathleen Hunter]

• "As the sounds of Celine Dion wafted from the sound system of the Weeping Willow café on a recent evening, half a dozen Russian soldiers sat down to a vodka-soaked dinner."

  [FT / Courtney Weaver]

• "Chinese people used to fear pandas as metal-devouring half-pigs, and kill them for their fur."

  [Foreign Policy]

• "I’ll soon find myself part of a tiny house community-in-exile, and I’ve spent a lot of time grappling with that: the uncertainty, the loss, the betrayal."

  [Washington City Paper / Andrew Lapin]

• "When you find yourself rubbing the genitals of a wombat, you might start to rethink your life choices."

  [EarthTouch / Jason Goldman]