Vox Sentences: New York and New Jersey’s awful quarantine policy is showing some cracks

1. The Christie-Cuomo quarantine

Govs. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) and Chris Christie (R-NJ) in September, 2014. (Bryan Thomas / Getty Images)

• Govs. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) and Chris Christie (R-NJ) are buckling on the strict quarantine for returning Ebola health workers they announced Friday. Cuomo will let those quarantined serve out their time at home rather than in a government facility.

  [Financial Times / Barney Jopson]

• Christie let Kaci Wilcox go home to Maine. Wilcox, a nurse, was forced to spend three days in a quarantine tent after returning from Sierra Leone, despite testing negative for Ebola on Saturday.

  [NYT / Liz Robbins, Michael Barbaro, and Marc Santora]

• For its part, the CDC laid out a set of much more reasonable standards for doctors and nurses returning from Ebola-stricken countries: "The new policy, which federal health officials said was an effort in an effort to strike a balance between safety and civil liberties, would require returning heath care workers, or people who had been near Ebola patients, to submit to an in-person checkup and a phone call from a local public health authority."

  [NYT / Michael Shear and Sabrina Tavernise]

• And the White House has been actively objecting to the Christie-Cuomo quarantine.

  [The Guardian / Dominic Rushe, Lauren Gambino, and Dan Roberts]

• Wilcox and other health workers fighting Ebola in West Africa are heroes — and policies like Christie and Cuomo's discourage them from helping.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• "The quarantine by New Jersey of medical workers returning from Ebola-afflicted areas of West Africa is virtually without precedent in the modern history of the nation, public health and legal experts said on Sunday."

  [NYT / Benjamin Weisman and J. David Goodman]

• The quarantine is also quite possibly unconstitutional.

  [Washington Post / Max Ehrenfreund]

• Cuomo suggests that quarantined travelers read his recently released book, in case you had any doubt about the quarantine being political theater.

  [NYT / Nate Schweber]

• Meanwhile, in Mali, no new cases have been confirmed since the death of a 2-year-old, the country's first patient, but public health officials are doing extensive monitoring.

  [AP]

2. ISIS beefs up

A reported ISIS suicide car bomb attack on October 20 in the Syrian city of Kobane. (Gokhan Sahin/Getty Images)

• The US air war in Iraq could face a serious challenge from anti-aircraft weapons, which it's now clear ISIS has.

  [NYT / Kirk Semple and Eric Schmitt]

• ISIS put together a plan for attacking Apache helicopters, which were used by the US along with jets in airstrikes this month. It doesn't seem like fixed-wing planes like the F/A-18 or the F-22 are in much peril.

  [Business Insider / Pierre Bienaimé]

• It's one of a few technical advances the group has made recently; it's now started using Humvees the US gave to the Iraqi military as improvised explosive devices.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• At least 500 militants and at least 32 civilians have died in the US anti-ISIS strikes so far, according to a Syrian human rights group.

  [NYT / Ben Hubbard]

• A deeply reported account of ISIS's treatment of hostages: "in addition to receiving prolonged beatings, he underwent mock executions and was repeatedly waterboarded."

  [NYT / Rukmini Callimachi]

3. What will the GOP Senate do?

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell has solid high-five form. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

• According to forecasts, the Republicans have about a 68 percent chance of retaking the Senate.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• The case that it'll amount to absolutely nothing: "The political roadblocks that have made legislating all but impossible during Obama’s second term aren’t going away. The 114th Congress will probably look a lot like the 113th."

  [New Republic / Danny Vinik]

• The case that it'll amount to something: "There's one big thing that changes the moment Republicans win Senate: nominations."

  [Vox / Ezra Klein]

• The House's #2 Republican, Kevin McCarthy, wants to start before the GOP Senate's even in office: "He would like to use the lame-duck session to pass a long-term government-funding bill, so Washington can begin focusing on big-picture legislating, instead of just trying to keep government’s doors open."

  [Politico / Jake Sherman]

• But Ramesh Ponnuru thinks that's nuts: "McCarthy will be asking Republicans to give up some of their control over the budget in that period by working with a Democratic Senate that's on its way out. Does that sound like something that conservatives in Congress will meekly accept?"

  [Bloomberg / Ramesh Ponnuru]

• Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) says the party will bring back the filibuster for nominations.

  [WSJ / Kristina Peterson]

• Jon Chait is doubtful: "As the Senate majority leader in 2005, McConnell himself threatened to eliminate the judicial filibuster when Democrats started blocking George W. Bush’s federal court picks."

  [NY Mag / Jonathan Chait]

• Meanwhile, anonymous Democrats are worried the GOP will lock up the House for the rest of the decade: "if the Republicans pick up 10 seats or more, then we will have no chance of getting the House back in 2016, and that means we are done until 2020."

  [Financial Times / Richard McGregor]

4. Misc.

• The US recruited Adolf Eichmann's right-hand man as a CIA spy after World War II, along with at least a thousand other ex-Nazis.

  [NYT / Eric Lichtblau]

• Drinking makes people's moral beliefs more utilitarian.

  [The Atlantic / Emma Green]

• A Human Rights Watch reports details what life is like for girls kidnapped by Boko Haram.

  [Washington Post / Adam Taylor]

• A town on Hawaii's Big Island is being slowly overrun with lava.

  [Vox / Brad Plumer]

• Corporations are finally starting to spend their massive piles of cash.

  [Financial Times / Robin Harding]

• Anonymous is joining the Gamergate fray, as if the latter weren't awful and vicious enough already.

  [Washington Post / Caitlin Dewey]

• To a lot of secular Westerners, the possibility of a correlation between irreligion and education is a feature rather than a bug — but it's a dangerous idea for people struggling to expand educational opportunities in deeply religious countries.

  [Businessweek / Charles Kenny]

• School shootings are rare, but that's not stopping inventors from marketing products meant to protect against them.

  [Washington Post / Todd Frankel]

5. Verbatim

• "It was a calamitous turn in the life of the 46-year-old who came to represent a company’s attempt to rebrand itself as youth-focused and hip."

  [Washington Post / Terrence McNally]

• "[Wikipedia's] Ebola Virus Disease article has had 17 million page views in the last month, right up there with the C.D.C.’s Ebola portal and the W.H.O.’s Ebola fact sheet.

  [NYT / Noam Cohen]

• "It’s not just that the link between growth and particular policies is weak—so is the link between growth and politicians as a whole, whatever their ideological persuasion. "

  [Businessweek / Charles Kenny]

• "Measured in Big Macs, McDonald’s workers in Denmark earn the equivalent of 3.4 Big Macs an hour, while their American counterparts earn 1.8, according to a study by Orley C. Ashenfelter, a Princeton economics professor, and Stepan Jurajda, an economics professor at Charles University in Prague."

  [NYT / Liz Alderman and Steven Greenhouse]

• "Mr. DuBois downloaded 19 million profiles from 21 online dating sites. He then wrote software to sort them by ZIP code, and determine the words most frequently used in each location. In the resulting maps, the top-ranked words replace city names. New York is 'Now.' Atlanta is 'God.'"

  [NYT / Steve Lohr via Tyler Cowen]

• "While there are no scientific data to demonstrate that millions of people have become allergic or intolerant to gluten (or to other wheat proteins), there is convincing and repeated evidence that dietary self-diagnoses are almost always wrong."

  [New Yorker / Michael Specter]