Naomi Shavin | Vox

Vox Sentences: Taped, locked up, and held for ransom

2017-05-12T20:00:05-04:00

Vox Sentences is your daily digest for what’s happening in the world, curated by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind. Sign up for the Vox Sentences newsletter, delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday, or view the Vox Sentences archive for past editions.

We know Watergate analogies are pretty played out, but, uh, there’s this rumored White House tape…

Comey as you are, as you were, as a known enemy

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Hello, good evening, and welcome to day four of the Jim Comey firing story.
Friday started off the way most days do in this brave new world of ours: with Trump going on a Twitter rampage. Today's involved barely disguised threats against Comey, like, "James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” [NYT / Peter Baker, Michael D. Shear]
So … is the White House recording Oval Office meetings with officials like Comey? Press Secretary Sean Spicer conspicuously refused to deny it during Friday’s press briefing. [Washington Post / Aaron Blake]
Comey, for one, probably does hope there are tapes, a source close to him told NBC. [Katy Turner / Twitter]
“Sources close to Comey” have been doing an awful lot of talking; they also told the New York Times that at Comey’s dinner with Trump, the president asked the FBI director for a pledge of loyalty; he offered only “honesty.” [New York Times / Michael S. Schmidt]
Then again, Spicer also denied that Trump’s tweet was a threat against Comey, which maybe proved a point that the president made in another morning tweet: “As a very active President with lots of things happening, it is not possible for my surrogates to stand at podium with perfect accuracy!” [WSJ / Rebecca Ballhaus and Louise Radnofsky]
Meanwhile, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein — whose pre-Comey reputation as an apolitical straight shooter has been seriously tarnished, at the very least, since he wrote the memo initially used to justify the FBI director’s firing — is going to brief the full Senate next week. It may not surprise you that Senate Democrats have a lot of questions for him. [Washington Post / Ed O’Keefe and Paul Kane]
Oh, and the Trump Organization’s law firm wrote a letter saying that Trump’s tax returns (which he still hasn’t released) show no income from Russian sources or debt owed to Russians, “with a few exceptions.” But it’s basically impossible to know for sure without seeing the tax returns ourselves. (And the law firm was named Russia Law Firm of the Year in 2016, for what that’s worth. [Vox / Matthew Yglesias]

Don't you dare mess with the NHS

A massive hacking attack hit thousands of computers in at least 74 countries Friday, crippling, most notably the computer systems of public hospitals throughout Britain and the Spanish telecom Telefonica. [Vox / Timothy B. Lee]
The culprit is a bit of “ransomware” called WannaCry, which, true to the term “ransomware,” freezes access to any computers it infects until the computer user pays $300 in bitcoin. [Reuters / Jamillah Knowles]
The effect on the British hospital system has been devastating. Patients have had surgeries canceled and been unable to get MRI scans. One doctor told the BBC, “Patients will almost certainly suffer and die because of this.” [BBC]
To hackers, this isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. Hospitals are the most common target of ransomware — because the stakes are literally life and death, computer users are particularly likely to pay to regain access to their machines. [Wired / Kim Zetter]
The WannaCry attack wasn’t directed at the NHS, though. It appears to have spread opportunistically as a worm — which means it could continue to spread. [Wired / Lily Hay Newman]
We know how the WannaCry ransomware works. It was designed to exploit a vulnerability in Windows operating systems that the NSA had kept secret as a potential tool in its cyberoperations — but was revealed to the public in March, when hackers released a trove of documents purportedly revealing secret NSA hacking ops. [Politico / Eric Geller]
At the time, cybersecurity experts warned that those vulnerabilities could be exploited by criminals (and some even blamed the NSA for not locking its stuff up better). [Motherboard / Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai]
Microsoft put out a “patch” for the vulnerability as soon as the docs got leaked — so quickly that some thought the NSA had tipped them off. By Friday, most individual consumers with Windows machines had already been protected (thanks to the magic of software updates). But business networks tend to lag — which makes them a bigger, better target for malware in general, and particularly this worm. [Wired / Lily Hay Newman]
The same is true of governments. One of the biggest victims of Friday’s attack — perhaps ironically to residents of, say, the US or France — was the interior ministry of Russia. [The Verge / Russell Brandom]

There are some things Jeff Sessions will prosecute aggressively

Attorney General Jeff Sessions sent a memo to federal prosecutors Wednesday (which was released to the public on Friday) directing them to “charge and pursue the most serious, readily provable offense” — even when doing so will trigger a Congressionally-set mandatory minimum sentence. [Vox / German Lopez]
Sessions’s directive reverses a memo sent by then-AG Eric Holder in 2013, which told prosecutors that if they didn’t feel a drug offender deserved the full length of a mandatory sentence, they could leave the amount of drugs he was found with out of their charging documents — since minimum drug sentences are largely based on weight. [AP / Sadie Gurman]
Because so many federal prosecutions are for drug crimes, the “Holder memo,” as it was called, made a big impact while it was in place — reducing the number of times that prosecutors charged mandatory minimums by a quarter. (Bear in mind, though, that most prisoners in the US are in state prisons.) [The Atlantic / Juleyka Lantigua-Williams]
The Holder memo was an aberration. Prosecutors are traditionally given some flexibility (which the Sessions memo preserves), but they’re generally told to charge the biggest thing they can convict someone for — which is just what they’re being told to do again. [Crime and Consequences / Bill Otis]
But the day-to-day power that prosecutors have over the criminal justice system — who to charge, what to charge them for, and what sentence to accept in plea deals (which is how 95 percent of cases are settled) — is immense. So anything that encourages prosecutors toward either more lenient or harsher sentences has an outsized impact. [Vox / German Lopez]
Stack this on top of the memo Sessions sent last month, directing federal prosecutors to do more to charge low-level immigration crimes, and you have a crystal-clear picture of the Trump/Sessions agenda at the DOJ — which has perhaps represented the biggest break with Obama-era policy that’s actually been implemented so far. [The Daily Beast / Betsy Woodruff]
Sessions can’t order US attorneys to focus on some crimes and not others. In theory, they have autonomy. But it depends on who Sessions and Trump appoint — after having summarily fired US attorneys in March, they haven’t hired very many to replace them. [Business Insider / Michelle Mark]

Miscellaneous

Jim Fallows covered the Watergate scandal as a young journalist at the Washington Monthly. Here's why he thinks the Comey scandal is a bigger deal. [The Atlantic / Jim Fallows]
The rate of maternal death in the US is triple that of Canada, and six times that in Scandinavia. A major reason why: We focus care on newborns rather than on new mothers. [NPR / Nina Martin, Renee Montagne]
A bunch of super-prestigious private schools — like Philips Andover, Punahou, Milton Academy, Head-Royce, the Singapore American School — are planning to get rid of traditional transcripts and GPAs in favor of two-page qualitative descriptions of the "skills" students have "mastered." This is great for rich kids who go to these schools. For poor kids at other schools, it's terrible news. [Washington Post / Catherine Rampell]
3 winners and 3 losers from the upcoming nuclear holocaust. [McSweeney’s / Dan Cluchey]
KRS-One tried to eulogize a fallen Beastie Boy in his new single but wound up honoring the memory of Ad-Rock, who is extremely alive. [AV Club / Sean O’Neal]

Verbatim

“He sings through tears! Think of how hard that is to do, to sing an entire song and cry simultaneously. I couldn’t do it. I physically couldn’t do it. I’d sound like a goat.” [Neil Patrick Harris to NYT Mag / Joel Lovell]
“Zero Dark Thirty got a crucial point wrong. It wasn’t stopping torture that stopped intel. It was stopping interrogation. It was going to droning, to killing. You get no intel from corpses.” [Zainab Ahmad to New Yorker / William Finnegan]
“Since I was 20, I believed that women should have the same rights as men, because we deserve them. But I didn’t know what that really meant until I was at home having my cable installed, and the cable installer—a man—offered to route my wires from my cable box to my television. I was offended and screamed into my bleeding room, ‘I can do it myself!’ Thanks to KEDSUM 200PCS ADHESIVE CABLE CLIPS, WIRE CLIPS, CAR CABLE ORGANIZER, CABLE WIRE MANAGEMENT, DROP CABLE CLAMP WIRE CORD TIE HOLDER FOR CAR, OFFICE AND HOME I really could.” [Jezebel / Joanna Rothkopf]
“Asking an Economist writer if he or she has heard the expression ‘prime the pump’ is like asking Sports Illustrated writers if they’ve heard of ‘RBIs’ or asking someone at Playboy if they’re aware that you can have your body surgically enhanced.” [Washington Post / Philip Bump]
“‘Sapiosexual’ seems to circulate primarily as a layer of pretension on top of a more traditional sexual identity. It’s a sexual orientation for people who think that they’re too smart to have a sexual orientation.” [Daily Beast / Samantha Allen]

Watch this: Why the world is worried about Turkey

How Turkey’s president gained so much power. [YouTube / Sam Ellis, Yochi Dreazen]

Impeachment of the president, explained

What a Kenyan village can teach us about a universal basic income

Aetna CEO in private meeting: “Single-payer, I think we should have that debate”

Picking a good FBI director won’t fix anything

Let’s obliterate the myth that humans have a bad sense of smell

Vox Sentences: So … that happened

2017-05-10T10:10:08-04:00

Vox Sentences is your daily digest for what’s happening in the world, curated by Dylan Matthews, Naomi Shavin, and Dara Lind. Sign up for the Vox Sentences newsletter, delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday, or view the Vox Sentences archive for past editions.

Trump fired Comey … over Clinton’s emails, of course.

Trump to Comey: You’re fired

FBI Director James B. Comey has been fired by the White House — with the official justification being Comey’s handling of the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. A statement from the White House press secretary reads, “President Trump acted based on the clear recommendations of both Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.” [New York Times / Michael D. Shear, Matt Apuzzo]
In a letter from Trump to Comey, also made public, Trump insisted that the firing is by no means, definitely not, in no way related to an investigation into his associates’ ties to Russia. “While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the bureau,” he wrote. [Vox / German Lopez]
Comey’s handling of the email investigation is an old story (it predates Trump asking him to stay on as FBI director when he arrived in office) but the fallout has continued. On Monday, reports emerged that Comey had given inaccurate testimony to Congress last week. Comey said Clinton aide Huma Abedin forwarded “hundreds of thousands” of emails to her husband, Anthony Weiner, for him to print for her, some of which contained classified information. In reality, Abedin forwarded a few Clinton emails (it’s unclear whether these were classified or unclassified), and the rest ended up on Weiner’s laptop via backups of Abedin’s BlackBerry. [ProPublica / Peter Elkind]
Apparently the FBI has been deliberating how to handle the incorrect statement Comey made since, and how to correct the record. This afternoon, the FBI sent a letter to Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley supplementing the Comey testimony, explaining how the emails actually got on Weiner’s computer. [Vox / Andrew Prokop]
The full rationale for Comey’s firing — at least, the official version — comes from a memo written by Deputy AG Rosenstein. Rosenstein argued that the FBI’s credibility “suffered substantial damage,” writing, “I cannot defend the director’s handling of the conclusion of the investigation of Secretary Clinton’s emails, and I do not understand his refusal to accept the nearly universal judgment that he was mistaken.” [Washington Post / Devlin Barret]
The immediate effect of all of this, at the very least, is that the FBI will need a new director. Which, Vox’s German Lopez writes, “also lets Trump put someone new in place who will oversee the ongoing investigation into his presidential campaign’s ties to Russia.” [Vox / German Lopez]
But for an administration that fired their national security adviser long after they ostensibly should have, the Trump administration took the advice to fire Comey extremely promptly. And reports are already surfacing that Sessions was directed to come up with reasons to fire Comey last week — the emails are just a pretext. [NYT / Michael S. Schmidt]
If true, that’s worrisome — not least because it would mean that Sessions, after recusing himself from the Trump/Russia investigation in March, then stepped in to fire one of the officials leading the investigation. That connection has led many Democrats — and a few Republicans — to call for a special prosecutor to look into Trump’s Russia ties, to make sure the Sessions-led Justice Department (and whoever leads the FBI next) doesn’t cover up what suddenly seems like a bigger scandal than it previously did. [CNBC / Christine Wang]
Here is an explainer about Watergate. No, no reason. Why do you ask? [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

South Korea elects Moon, and sunshine (policy) could be on its way

On Monday, South Korean voters chose Moon Jae-in as their next president. He is a liberal who plans to limit the power of big business in a country known for its anti-labor policies. He is also a child of North Korean refugees and aims to reshape the country’s policy for dealing with its turbulent neighbor, North Korea. [New York Times / Choe Sang-Hun]
Moon’s election is the culmination of a 60-day snap campaign after former President Park Geun-hye (the country’s first female president and daughter of dictator Park Chung-hee) was officially impeached and removed from office on March 10 in a corruption and influence-peddling scandal. [Financial Times / Bryan Harris]
The election saw the highest turnout in South Korea in two decades of presidential elections — and a historic turn away from the country’s conservative party, which has held power in South Korea almost exclusively (except for a period from 1998 to 2008 when the South was under progressive leadership), toward Moon. [New York Times / Choe Sang-Hun]
While Moon comes from the left, he’s not out of left field. He served as chief of staff to former President Roh Moo-hyun — a fellow progressive who followed what’s called the “sunshine policy” toward North Korea. [Guardian / Justin McCurry]
The sunshine policy (which was in place from 1998 to 2008, when liberals had control of the government) was marked by engagement with North Korea rather than sanctions. Two South Korean presidents actually visited Pyongyang during the days of the sunshine policy — Roh and Kim Dae-jung, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts of economic and political engagement with North Korea. [CNN / Pamela Boykoff, James Griffiths]
One of the biggest questions facing the country’s new president, then, is this: “In South Korea, Will Moon Bring Back Sunshine?” (Great headline, Foreign Policy.) But seriously, while it’s a tough question, the answer seems like yes. [Emily Tamkin / Foreign Policy]
Moon advocates for opening up dialogue with North Korea, as he considers the hardline stance that conservatives in his country took since 2008 to have been a failure. In some sense, this aligns with Trump’s statement about being open to meeting Kim Jong Un, whom he called a “smart cookie.” [Guardian / Justin McCurry]
Realistically, though — despite Moon saying he and Trump are “on the same page” — their stances are pretty far apart. Moon seems skeptical of the kind of aggressive US involvement that Trump seems inclined toward. For example, Moon plans to review Park’s decision to let the US deploy the THAAD missile defense system in South Korea. He’s also said he’s interested in reopening a factory park on the north side of the Korean border — a joint project between South and North Korea. [Vox / Jennifer Williams]

New H. naledi data changes what we know about our evolutionary tree

In 2015, news broke that scientists had discovered evidence of a previously unknown member of the human evolutionary family tree, based on studying several skeletons found deep in a cave in South Africa. The new species was called Homo naledi; judging by bones from several individuals, it possessed a unique blend of primitive and modern evolutionary qualities. One paleontologist described it for National Geographic: “You could almost draw a line through the hips — primitive above, modern below.” [National Geographic / Jamie Shreeve]
But it was unclear how old the bones were — which meant no one knew how long ago this creature had lived, and how it might fit into the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens. Because the brain was estimated to be roughly the size of an orange (which is relatively small for a hominin), scientists guessed at the time that it must have been quite close to the root of the Homo genus family tree — which would make it more than 2.5 million years old. [New York Times / John Noble Wilford]
On Tuesday, the research team announced a surprising result: The Homo naledi species is significantly younger than expected. Using six different dating methods, the team studying Homo naledi found that the remains of individuals they’ve been studying are between 335,000 and 236,000 years old. [National Geographic / Michael Greshko]
Here’s why this matters: The age of Homo naledi now suggests that at that point in time, in the midst of our own evolution as Homo sapiens, the hominin family tree was more diverse than originally thought — with more hominins, and more diverse kinds of hominins, on the planet at the same time. [New York Times / Associated Press / Malcolm Ritter]
To get a better sense of how and when various hominins coexisted, the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History clusters several species near the top of the family tree (closest to the present day). Some you’ve probably heard of, and others you may not have: Homo rudolfensis, Homo habilis, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo erectus, Homo floresiensis, Homo neanderthalensis, and Homo sapiens (us). Previously undated, Homo naledi isn’t currently on the tree. [Smithsonian Museum of Natural History]
No one knows for sure how much these species overlapped and if and how any of them interacted. But on Tuesday, National Geographic described the time period that Homo naledi are now considered part of: “Around 230,000 to 330,000 years ago, there weren’t just precursors to anatomically modern humans on the landscape: There would have been Neanderthals in Europe and Asia, Denisovans in Asia, potentially some Eurasian pockets of our ancestors Homo erectus, as well as the forerunners of H. floresiensis. Amid this pantheon, H. naledi would be the first known that lived in Africa at that time, other than some scattered evidence of archaic forms of H. sapiens.” [National Geographic / Michael Greshko]
This latest discovery about Homo naledi isn’t the only recent shake-up to our understanding of our family tree — nor it is the only one having to do with smaller, more primitive-seeming hominins. Homo floresiensis, a species often called the “hobbit” species because it only grew to be about 3.5 feet tall (and which is considered to have existed as recently as 60,000 years ago), was originally thought to have evolved from a shared ancestor of modern humans. But in April, researchers announced that it was far more primitive than originally thought, and that it likely followed its own evolutionary path from Homo habilis, the oldest known member of the human genus, rather than a shared ancestor of ours closer up the family tree, like Homo erectus. [Guardian / Melissa Davey]
Which means that as recently as 60,000 years ago, Homo sapiens shared the planet with hominins that could have actually been relatively far from us on the evolutionary tree. And as of today’s news, it seems 200,000 years ago the precursors to Homo sapiens possibly overlapped with Homo naledi. “Our ancestors did not live in a single-species world the way we do,” paleoanthropologist Alison Brooks told the Washington Post. “The real take-home message of this paper is that we were not alone until very recently.” [Washington Post / Sarah Kaplan]
The questions these discoveries raise are endless. Here are a few great ones that the Washington Post raised after the Homo naledi news broke: “Was Naledi a result of, and perhaps a contributor to, hybridization within the Homo family tree? Could Naledi be responsible for some of the stone tools found in South Africa during the period it was alive? Should paleoanthropologists shift their focus from East Africa to the continent's less-studied southern regions?” [Washington Post / Sarah Kaplan]
One thing’s for sure: The Smithsonian will need to do some updating to its exhibit on evolution.

Miscellaneous

More Republicans say there is "a lot of discrimination" against Christians and white people than say there's a lot of discrimination against black people. [FiveThirtyEight / Perry Bacon Jr.]
There's a lot of talk in the US about making a "Breitbart for the left." In Britain, it's already happened, and it's pretty wild. [BuzzFeed / Jim Waterston]
They say innovation is slowing down — but then how do you explain this Bluetooth-connected saltshaker? [NY Mag / Jake Swearingen]
Owners of BMWs and Mercedes are two and half times more likely to brag about it on Facebook than people who buy “ordinary” cars. [NYT / Seth Stephens-Davidowitz]
Pinky Weitzman is an accomplished violist and multi-instrumentalist who's played with Magnetic Fields and Belle and Sebastian. But by day, she's also a senior official at the ACLU. [NBC News / Alex Seitz-Wald]

Verbatim

“These Le Pen voters are trapped in a exurban nativist bubble. They are out of touch with the needs and values of real French people, like me." [New Statesman / Helen Lewis]
“I always knew that going to private school wasn’t just about eating really great lunch food; it was also about being set up for a very comfortable future. But for the first time ever I realized that the future I was being set up for would not include many brown and black faces.” [The Guardian / Stephenie Jimenez]
“Jack Donovan — a 42-year-old skinhead icon and right-wing extremist — lived the gay life once. It was in the 1990s, after he left his parents’ blue-collar home in rural Pennsylvania to study fine art in New York, when he danced go-go in gay clubs, hung out with drag queens, and marched for gay pride. But then he dropped out, learned how to use tools and work as a manual laborer, studied MMA, and decided he wasn’t gay — just ‘an unrepentant masculinist.’” [NY Mag / Maureen O’Connor]
“So Americans smile a lot because our Swedish forefathers wanted to befriend their Italian neighbors, but they couldn’t figure out how to pronounce buongiorno. Seems plausible.” [The Atlantic / Olga Khazan]
“Stradivarius violins are testaments to our ability to delude ourselves. Just as expensive wines don’t taste any better than cheap plonk under blinded conditions, these antique instruments don’t sound any better than modern ones.” [The Atlantic / Ed Yong]

Watch this: Why the Myers-Briggs test is totally meaningless

I-N-T-P … E-N-F-J … B-U-L-L … S-H-I-T. [Vox / Estelle Caswell, Joseph Stromberg] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5pggDCnt5M

Trump wants to create an amazing new tax loophole — here’s how to use it for yourself

North Korea is more rational than you think

America has a water crisis no one is talking about

Pepe the Frog was killed by his creator. But his alt-right legacy lives on.

The author of Rise of the Creative Class is grappling with its dark side

Vox Sentences: Emmanuel Macron won the French election. Now comes the hard part.

2017-05-08T20:00:04-04:00

France gets a new president; Texas gets a new law against sanctuary cities; 82 Chibok girls get their freedom.

France’s new President Macron has his work cut out for him

Pro-EU, pro-immigration centrist Emmanuel Macron won France’s presidential race yesterday, in a notable rebuke of far-right populism following Donald Trump’s victory and a near win for the far right in Austria’s presidential election. [NYT / Adam Nossiter]
Macron, 39, will be the youngest president since France’s Fifth Republican began in 1958, and it will also be his first time holding elected office. He won 66.1 percent of the vote, far outpacing his performance in pre-election polls. [FiveThirtyEight / Harry Enten]
His opponent Marine Le Pen ran as the National Front candidate, and while she distanced the party from its platform when her Holocaust-denying father ran it, she still called for a total halt to all immigration, exiting the euro, and cozying up to Putin. At 33.9 percent of the vote, she outperformed her father’s runoff performance in 2002, but still fell far short of winning. [Wall Street Journal / William Horobin, Stacy Meichtry]
She arguably didn’t even get second place. Of the total votes cast, Macron got 20,257,167. Le Pen received 10,584646. But abstentions and white ballots together, indicating dissatisfaction with both candidates, totaled 15,461,849. [CNN / Eliza Mackintosh, Judith Vonberg]
Despite her loss, Le Pen’s rise nonetheless signaled a growing receptivity of French voters to far-right populism, something Macron himself discussed in his victory speech: “I understand the anger, the doubt, the anxiety that many have expressed, and I will do everything I can in the coming five years to make sure they never have a reason to vote for extremism again.” [BuzzFeed News / Alberto Nardelli]
Macron won’t be able to accomplish much without a parliamentary majority. Polling is scarce, but one recent projection showed his En Marche party getting the largest share of seats, followed by the center-right Republicans with the Socialist and National Front way, way behind. [Reuters / Adrian Croft]
Macron picked up most people who voted for far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Socialist Benoît Hamon in the election's first round, and almost half of Republican François Fillon’s supporters, following much speculation that Mélenchon’s anti-establishment voters would fail to turn out to defeat Le Pen. [Financial Times / John Burn-Murdoch, Billy Ehrenberg-Shannon, Aleksandra Wisniewska, Aendrew Rininsland]
So who came out ahead in the election, ultimately? The EU and Europe, for sure, as well as immigrants and refugees. Meanwhile, Trump and Putin are surely both frustrated that their preferred candidate lost. [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

The new Texas law against sanctuary cities

On Facebook Live last night, with no advance public notice, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill into law that essentially requires local governments to comply with federal immigration agents. [NPR / Doreen McCallister]
The law allows police to ask about immigration status during traffic stops or any other legal detention — and prohibits cities, counties, and universities from setting policies that tell officers not to ask. Additionally, it requires police and jail officials to comply with any request from federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to hold immigrants after they’d be released from jail so ICE can pick them up — and allows any law enforcement official who doesn’t comply with an ICE request to be fined, jailed, or removed from office. [Dallas News / James Barragan]
Abbott and Republicans characterize the bill as a ban on “sanctuary cities” — which they (like the Trump administration) characterize as lawless places that refuse to help enforce immigration law. But no city in Texas fits that caricature. Not even Austin, which is widely considered a sanctuary city, has any rule prohibiting its police department from cooperating with ICE or asking about immigration status during unrelated investigations and stops — or even discouraging it. [Texas Monthly / Doyin Oyeniyi]
Instead, the state law targets local policies that govern when jail officers agree to hold immigrants for ICE. Many localities (including in Texas) make a practice of turning people convicted of serious crimes over to ICE, but not people who’ve been convicted of or charged with, say, traffic offenses. [Vox / Liz Scheltens, Dara Lind]
From that perspective, it’s taking discretion away from local law enforcement — and Texas’s chiefs are duly steamed. Two police officers, interim Chief for Dallas David Pughes and Houston Chief of Police Art Acevedo, penned an op-ed for Dallas News before the bill was signed. “Broad rules, such as those imposed by SB 4, that push local law enforcement to take a more active role in immigration enforcement will further strain the relationship between local law enforcement and these diverse communities,” they write. [Dallas News / David Pughes, Art Acevedo]
The Trump administration has made its own effort to go after “sanctuary cities.” But it’s limited in what it can do. The federal government doesn’t have the authority to force local police to help out federal efforts, and a nascent attempt to deny federal grants to “sanctuaries” has been nipped in the bud by a federal judge (who thinks it, too, goes beyond what the feds can actually do). [New York Times / Vivian Lee]
The state is on much firmer footing. The shakiest part of the law, constitutionally, is the provision allowing local police to ask suspected immigrants for papers. The bill’s critics have compared Texas’s law to a 2010 Arizona law that was mostly struck down by the Supreme Court in 2012. But Abbott and defenders of the bill point out that the “show me your papers” provision of the Arizona law wasn’t preemptively struck down — the Supreme Court just said it would be watching closely, and Arizona folded. [CBS News / Associated Press]
Just to be sure, though, Abbott isn’t waiting to get sued by cities or civil rights groups. He’s suing them preemptively, in the hopes that he can get a good ruling out of the courts in time for the law to go into effect on September 1. [AP via Houston Chronicle]

82 more Chibok girls have been released by Boko Haram

It’s been more than three years since militant extremists from the Islamist group Boko Haram kidnapped 276 schoolgirls from the Chibok Government Secondary School in Nigeria. Though several dozen escaped soon after, and families and supporters in Nigeria have continued to hold #BringBackOurGirls rallies to demand the return of the rest, 219 remained missing — until recently.
In April 2016, the group released a proof-of-life video with 15 of the girls — the first time it was confirmed that any of them were still alive. [Washington Post / Kevin Sieff]
In May of that year, one girl was found pregnant in a forest. In October, 21 of the girls were freed in government negotiations with Boko Haram. Near the end of 2016, a girl was freed during a raid on a forest hideout. And in January 2017, a girl was found wandering near a forest where Boko Haram has a stronghold. [Wall Street Journal / Joe Parkinson, Gbenga Akingbule]
This past weekend marked the Nigerian government’s biggest breakthrough yet (with an assist in negotiations from the government of Switzerland and the International Committee of the Red Cross): Boko Haram freed 82 more girls in exchange for government-held prisoners. [Washington Post / Kevin Sieff]
113 of the girls remain missing — in addition to hundreds, or even thousands, of other people Boko Haram has kidnapped (and to say nothing of the thousands they’ve killed or the nearly 2 million they’ve driven from their homes). [Reuters / Felix Onuah, Ahmed Kingimi]
It’s unclear how many girls remain in captivity, or what the prospects look like for their freedom — or even what condition they’re in. In August 2016, Boko Haram released a video in which one kidnapped girl claimed that five of her schoolmates were killed in airstrikes against the group. A Boko Haram fighter tells the Nigerian government, “Some of the girls are crippled, some are terribly sick and some of them, as I had said, died during bombardment by the Nigerian military.” [Wall Street Journal / Gbenga Akinbule]
The current president of Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari, took office (in a historic peaceful transfer of power) in May 2015, in a race partly determined by predecessor Goodluck Jonathan’s utter incompetence at fighting Boko Haram — including his failure to rescue any of the girls, whose kidnapping quickly drew international attention. (Jonathan’s tendency to rig elections didn’t endear him to the public, either.) [BBC / Damian Zane]
Jonathan started an overhaul of military tactics, but Buhari has pushed the military to take a far more aggressive approach with Boko Haram and has sought collaboration — including working with local hunters in Nigeria who know the forests better than Boko Haram, and using surveillance drones from the US. His efforts have been largely successful, and Boko Haram has withdrawn into smaller and smaller territory deep in the Sambisa Forest. [Wall Street Journal / Drew Hinshaw, Gbenga Akingbule]
Many see Buhari as personally responsible for Nigeria’s success in fighting Boko Haram, and rumors that he is in poor health have many Nigerians concerned. Buhari was one of the first to receive the girls yesterday, meeting with them personally before leaving for London to visit with his doctors. Late in the day, an unofficial list of the 82 girls began to circulate, though some families from Chibok left on Sunday as soon as news of the exchange reached them — without knowing if their daughters were among those freed. [New York Times / Dionne Searcey]

Miscellaneous

Hey, so deer. What’s up with deer these days? They’re eating human flesh, that’s what’s up. [Popular Science / Sarah Fecht]
Could Dinesh on Silicon Valley really have racked up $21 billion in fines by being a terrible CEO? Fines that he, and not the company, would have to pay? Alas, no. [Forbes / Zara Stone]
Nicholas Green, a 7-year-old American boy, was shot and killed in Italy in 1994, apparently at random. He's left an impressive legacy: Seven different people received his organs, and his story has been credited with dramatically expanding organ donation in the country. [BBC / Harry Low]
How the ACLU, known more for litigation than grassroots organizing, became the institutional center of anti-Trump activism. [Fast Company / Kathleen Davis]
You, lame and boring: listen to music on Spotify. Me, sophisticated and urbane: only listen to new music released on "cassettes covered in shards of actual broken glass." [Vice / Miles Rayner]

Verbatim

“A man killed a squirrel with a bow and arrow that was outside his window after the animal gave him ‘a look,’ prosecutors said.” [DNAinfo New York / Nicholas Rizzi]
“Asked why reporters were asked to leave, a PR person [for Jared Kushner's family business] who declined to identify herself said simply, ‘This is not the story we want.’” [Washington Post / Emily Rauhala and William Wan]
“Head-mating is a common theme with Sirocco. He has tried to mate with heads so often that scientists once fashioned an ‘ejaculation helmet’ for volunteers to don. The rubber headgear features an array of dimples to collect semen — essentially, a hat of condoms. It never worked, as kākāpō are intense at intercourse, doing it for close to an hour while most birds require just a few seconds." [Smithsonian / Claire Voon]
“After the anonymous internet user called on others on 4Chan, an online message board favored by the alt-right, to start a ‘Total Meme War’ to help Ms. Le Pen, he warned against mimicking American-style attacks. Yet international supporters repeatedly used Pepe the Frog, a cartoon tied to anti-Semitism and racism that has become an unofficial mascot of the alt-right movement. Many did so without realizing the amphibian is often used as a slur against French people.” [NYT / Mark Scott]
“LARSEN: 'Kevin, what happened on that Gobert kerfuffle?' CURRY: 'That is a word right there.' DURANT: 'What’d you say?' LARSEN: 'Kerfuffle.' DURANT: 'Good job, bro.' CURRY: 'That is STRONG.'“ [Andy Larsen, Steph Curry, Kevin Durant via SB Nation / Kristian Winfield]

Watch this: Where in the world should we send Vox's Johnny Harris?

We’re launching a new documentary series called “Borders,” six films about human stories that emerge from lines on the map. The goal is to humanize the arbitrary lines drawn on a map, and we’re looking for your ideas on where to go. Learn more and submit your idea here.

How an elephant tranquilizer became the latest deadly drug in the opioid epidemic

Why Democrats should support radically simpler taxes

Minnesota is fighting its largest measles outbreak in nearly 30 years. Blame vaccine deniers.

Every Marvel movie from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 to Iron Man, definitively ranked

I’m facing jail time after laughing at Jeff Sessions. I regret nothing.

Vox Sentences: Oui on peut

2017-05-05T20:00:04-04:00

The bankruptcy of Puerto Rico; the French presidential election; the future of the House’s health care bill.

Puerto Rico is officially bankrupt — now comes the hard part

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On Wednesday, Puerto Rico filed for what’s pretty much bankruptcy (it can’t file under Chapter 9 of the federal bankruptcy code like local government can, but a federal law passed last year allows bankruptcy in everything but name).
With bond debt reaching nearly $74 billion and pension obligations of roughly $49 billion, the territory’s level of debt, and subsequent move, is without historical precedent — even compared with Detroit’s $18 billion bankruptcy in 2013. [New York Times / Mary Williams Walsh]
The day before, Puerto Rico was sued by several of its major creditors when a moratorium on lawsuits against the commonwealth created by last year’s congressional rescue law (called the Promesa law) officially expired. [Reuters / Nick Brown]
The government of Puerto Rico has floated a plan to balance its budget over three years, but the level of austerity that would require is extreme — and protesters have already hit the streets over the proposed changes. Many others are voting with their feet and moving to the US mainland; Puerto Ricans are US citizens. This exodus is already happening — the Economist reports that the island’s population is 8 percent smaller than it was in 2010. [Economist]
This situation is truly unprecedented, so it’s hard to say what will happen next, but most expect the general outline to go like this: Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts will select a judge, probably a US district court judge, to oversee bankruptcy proceedings; an oversight board will get to work negotiating debt cuts and proposing a plan of adjustment — which the judge will have to approve and which could yield further debt reduction; Puerto Rico will try to stanch its bleeding through austerity measures, like scaling back health care coverage or introducing pension cuts, but it may face pressure to sell assets, like beachfront property, to raise money to pay off its debt. [USA Today / Nathan Bomey]
If this sounds bad for pensioners, it’s going to enrage Wall Street too. Reuters analyzed data from Moody’s Investors Service and found that “[i]n five of six recent public bankruptcies in which the debtor defaulted on bonds, pensioners walked away with full recovery, while bondholders took haircuts.” [Reuters / Nick Brown]
And it will be terrible for just about anyone relying on public services. One of the first hit? Students. It was reported this morning that the island is closing 184 public schools, which educate roughly 27,000 students, and an alternate plan for their education has not yet been announced. [Wall Street Journal / Associated Press]
It’s a very bad situation that’s been a very long time coming. Puerto Rico has essentially been in a recession since 2006, and recent estimations put 40 percent of its population in poverty. Meanwhile, in 2014 it saw a massive influx of money lent by hedge funds expecting to earn a 20 percent return on the loans. But the island’s economy never improved, and decades of such borrowing eventually caught up with it. Bankruptcy actually might have happened even sooner — if wealthy lenders hadn’t ruthlessly campaigned against it. [New York Times / Jonathan Mahler, Nicholas Confessore]

Bataille de France

The French presidential election comes to an end this Sunday, with centrist Emmanuel Macron facing far-right Marine Le Pen in the second round. This is the first presidential election in the history of France’s Fifth Republic (which began in 1958) in which neither the leading Socialist Party nor the leading center-right party made it to the second round. [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]
The stakes could hardly be higher, with Le Pen issuing threats to leave the euro and NATO and promising a full moratorium on all immigration, and Macron serving as a defender of the European project and promising to support migrants. [Reuters / Mathieu Rosemain, Andrew Callus]
Macron is often likened to Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, because of his pro-Europe and pro-immigrant stances. He started his own political party called “En Marche” — which some read as an attempt to avoid association with the establishment, despite having a similar platform to the incumbent, unpopular Socialist government (in which he formerly served as finance minister). [Washington Post / Rick Noack]
Le Pen represents the National Front, a racist and anti-Semitic fringe party founded by her Holocaust-denying father. Le Pen has fought to reclaim its image, even as she runs on an openly xenophobic platform. Her appeal comes from populist messaging and promises of increasing protections and the safety net for France’s working class. [CNN / Melissa Bell]
Of course, there is a third option too. A French advocacy group called Citizens of the White Ballot is pushing for people to leave their ballots blank to signal dissatisfaction with the political moment and the choices before them. They are not messing around: In the first round of voting, there were 660,000 white ballot votes, which is a higher share of the vote than five out of the 11 candidates received. [Wall Street Journal / Max Colchester, David Gauthier-Villars]
However, Macron heads into the final weekend far ahead in the polls. A survey this afternoon found that he is on track to receive 63 percent of the vote, and Le Pen only 37 percent. At one point last week, Macron dipped to 59 percent in polling and Le Pen rose to 41 percent — sparking fears that the election could be an upset Le Pen win — but it appears he has regained his healthy lead. [CNBC / Karen Gilchrist]
One last curveball, though: Hacked emails (most likely obtained by Russian hackers, just like in the US election) from Macron’s campaign were leaked late on Friday. It’s unclear how incriminating, if at all, they are. Then again, there was nothing incriminating in Hillary Clinton’s emails either. [Reuters / Eric Auchard and Bate Felix]

The House health care bill faces an uncertain Senate fate

Yesterday, the House narrowly passed the American Health Care Act — a bill aimed at repealing Obamacare and replacing it with a health care plan that pays for massive tax cuts for the wealthy by denying coverage to at least 24 million people. [Vox / Sarah Kliff]
How could this possibly happen? The House couldn’t pass a health care bill in March, and that proposal was more moderate and had a Congressional Budget Office score that made its effects look unacceptable even to many Republicans.
Essentially, the Freedom Caucus in the House pushed for a more extreme bill — and managed to pass it before it could be scored by the CBO — by hanging vulnerable moderate Republicans out to dry. Once the Freedom Caucus was on board, moderate Republicans who could make or break the bill decided they’d rather vote for it than risk a primary challenge or other blowback. [Vox / Matt Yglesias]
Now the wildly unpopular bill heads to the Senate, where it is certain to face many obstacles before it has a chance at passing even on a totally partisan basis — which will take 51 votes. But the way the bill is written might make portions of it (in particular the insurance regulation changes) filibusterable, meaning that Republicans would need 60 votes, including eight Democrats, to include them. [Vox / Sarah Kliff]
Republicans in the Senate seem utterly unimpressed by the House’s bill. Many have come out against both its substantive provisions and the reckless speed with which it was passed. [Politico / Burgess Everett, Jennifer Haberkorn]
All eyes are on the Senate’s 13-member working group that is drafting their own bill. It’s a group composed entirely of Republican men, unsurprisingly. But it is also a group that includes hardliners such as Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz but also more mainstream senators like Lamar Alexander and Rob Portman, so it will be interesting to see if what they craft is nearly as extreme as the House’s bill. [Vox / Sarah Kliff]
Meanwhile, the uncertainty that this whole process is creating for insurers was evident even before the bill passed. On Wednesday, Iowa’s largest remaining Affordable Care Act insurer threatened to leave the state marketplace. The same day, Aetna said it plans to leave Virginia’s individual marketplace. [Washington Post / Carolyn Y. Johnson]
And Kentucky is already trying to roll back portions of its Medicaid expansion, even before Congress acts. [Reuters / Yasmeen Abutaleb, Robin Respaut]

Miscellaneous

You may think you have complicated feelings about Donald Trump, but I guarantee you that those of Amanda Knox — whose defense Trump helped fund and whose innocence he defended publicly — are way, way more complicated. [LA Times / Amanda Knox]
A Brooklyn school principal is being investigated … for being a member of the Progressive Labor Party, the ’60s-vintage Maoist communist group. The story is somehow even more absurd than that sounds. [NYT / Nikole Hannah-Jones]
The melting of permafrost due to climate change is unleashing viruses and bacteria that humanity hasn't encountered in thousands of years, if ever. A 12-year-old boy has already died due to a 75-year-old frozen reindeer with anthrax unfreezing. [BBC / Jasmin Fox-Skelly]
As many as 11 percent of Venezuelan children are suffering from severe acute malnutrition — a condition that can end in death. [WSJ / Juan Forero]
Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced ex-doctor who fabricated data in an attempt to show vaccines cause autism, went out of his way to sow fear about vaccines in Minneapolis's Somali community. The extremely predictable result was Minnesota's worst outbreak of measles in decades. [Washington Post / Lena Sun]

Verbatim

“Smith isn't the kind of Democratic Socialist who spouts off at Brooklyn parties about the ‘means of production.’ He's the kind of Socialist who has actually worked in a factory.” [Vice / Michael Bible]
“Suppose your boss promotes your coworker and doubles his salary even though his work performance was no different than yours. When you ask her why, your boss replies that her partiality toward your co-worker is justified because their offices are on the same side of the hall. My guess is you’d raise hell.” [Niskanen Center / Christopher Freiman]
“Imagine photos you’ve seen of people camping. Sort of dreary outside, it’s grey, the campers have a bunch of waterproof clothing on. A bunch of cumbersome camping gear around them. A big stick in their hand. ‘My camping stick.’ Mud on the ground. They’re cold. What … the fuck? What are they doing? They can go inside and yet they do not. It’s very insane.” [The Hairpin / Kelly Conaboy]
“Variants on Nelly Furtado’s 'I’m Like A Bird' that have run endlessly through my head over the years, in moments serious, frightening, sorrowful, and, occasionally, intimate: 'I’m like a bird, I only fly away.' (The original.) 'I’m like a verb, I describe actions you can do.' 'I’m like a berg, I’m made of floating ice.' 'I’m like the verge, I’m a thing people stand upon.' 'I’m like a blurb, I briefly describe the book.' 'I’m like the Serge, hero of the Chrono Cross.' 'I’m like a word, I endlessly repeat.'" [A.V. Club / William Hughes]
“The odds were long, but a couple of University of Kentucky students decided it was worth the risk to climb through the ceiling ducts to a teacher’s office to steal a statistics exam. Unfortunately for them, the teacher is a night owl.” [Lexington Herald-Leader / Linda Blackford]

Watch this: What happens when you bring meditation into public schools

Classrooms all over the country are trying something new: sitting and breathing. [Vox / Liz Scheltens]

Obamacare repeal is class warfare

Russia has a plan for winding down Syria’s war. Too bad both sides want to keep fighting.

Why silly summer movies matter

The secret Uber program that prompted a federal criminal investigation, explained

America is in the middle of its deadliest drug crisis. Trump wants to gut the agency that can help.

Vox Sentences: Trump is pretty sure he’s got this whole Middle East peace thing in the bag

2017-05-03T20:30:04-04:00

The GOP and its latest slapdash health care bill; President Trump’s meeting with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas; James B. Comey’s testimony.

GOP: If at first you don’t succeed, do exactly the same thing again

This will sound familiar, per Vox’s Sarah Kliff: “House Republicans are hurtling toward a vote on a bill that is disliked by most Americans, opposed by nearly every major health care group, and not yet scored by the Congressional Budget Office.” [Vox / Sarah Kliff]
No, that is not news from March, when House Republicans introduced a health care bill called the American Health Care Act, planned to vote on it under similar circumstances, but then pulled it from the floor without a vote less than three weeks later. [Vox / Sarah Kliff]
It’s news from today — Wednesday, May 3 — because House Republicans are hurriedly planning a vote on a revamped version of the AHCA for Thursday (that’s tomorrow). [Vox / Dylan Scott]
They can only afford to lose 23 Republican votes, and right now roughly 18 centrist Republicans are looking like a definite “no.” [Huffington Post / Matt Fuller]
Why rush into a vote under such inauspicious circumstances? Budget reconciliation. Budget rules determine whether a vote needs a simple majority of 51 votes to pass the Senate, or whether it needs 60 votes. Republicans will never get 60 votes to repeal Obamacare as long as they have fewer than 60 Republican senators (they currently have 52), so the best they can hope for is to pass a bill through the Senate on only 51 votes. But certain interpretations of those rules suggest that if they want to qualify for a 51-vote health care bill, they have to pass it before moving on to tax reform and passing a new budget (both of which they’d like to do this year). [Vox / Andrew Prokop]
It’s clearly a … risky … strategy. Even last week, when Republicans considered bringing the bill to the floor to squeak through a vote within President Trump’s first 100 days, they abandoned the effort because they didn’t have the votes they’d need for it to pass. [New York Times / Thomas Kaplan, Robert Pear]
So here we are, with Republican lawmakers attempting to make desperate last-minute concessions to win over undecided colleagues. The latest: throwing an additional $8 billion at a program to fund “high-risk pools” (bringing funding for that to almost $115 billion). The idea here is to (essentially) subsidize health insurance for the most expensive patients, while taking them out of the pools of healthy individuals — which would, in turn, bring down the cost of insurance for those healthy people in the low-risk pools. [Vox / Sarah Kliff]
As of Wednesday evening, Trump has reportedly been “furiously working the phones” to try to get Republicans to unite behind this new bill. And it appears to be working — whip counts suggest they’re closer than they were in the past. The question is whether they’re close enough. [Vox / Dylan Scott]

Another day, another vague peacemaking promise from Trump

Today President Trump met with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, one of the negotiators present for the 1993 signing of the Oslo Accords, which built the foundation for seeking lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians. During a joint press conference, Trump promised to bring peace to the region, what he called “the toughest deal,” and Abbas expressed optimism — but no concrete set of goals or an agreement of any kind was presented. [New York Times / Peter Baker]
Trump did, however, make it sound like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was looped in on the conversations. “We've spoken to Netanyahu and to many Israeli leaders; we'll start a process which hopefully will lead to peace,” he said. [Haaretz / Amir Tibon]
The point person in the Trump administration to solve the famously intractable problem of peace in the Middle East: Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner. And while the conflict does center on, ahem, real estate, there is absolutely no reason to think Kushner will have a better shot at resolving it than the Obama administration’s point people (all of whom had much more foreign policy experience) did. Kushner is not only shockingly inexperienced but also has a relationship with Israel’s prime minister that dates back to his high school days, when Netanyahu was a friend of his parents’ and even stayed at Kushner’s home in New Jersey. [New York Times / Jodi Kantor]
But it’s not even clear that a more qualified version of Kushner could negotiate peace in 2017. As Aaron David Miller argues for CNN, “timing is everything,” and neither party, Israeli or Palestinians, seems inclined to make a deal right now. [CNN / Aaron David Miller]
As Washington Institute for Near East Policy counselor Dennis A. Ross told the Washington Post, “You can’t solve the conflict right now. The gaps between the Israelis and Palestinians are too wide. We are at the lowest ebb in Israeli-Palestinian perceptions of each other since I’ve been working on this.” [Washington Post / John Wagner, Ashley Parker]
There are plenty of fine disagreements, but for starters: The two countries don’t agree on what, in a two-state solution, the borders of each state would be. On Wednesday, Abbas restated his commitment to the borders that were in place before the 1967 Arab-Israeli War (which is not exactly a principle Netanyahu’s government has ever come anywhere near embracing). [New York Times / Peter Baker]
In the meantime, Israelis and Palestinians continue with a violent coexistence. As Vox’s Zack Beauchamp writes succinctly: “Israel has put the Palestinians under suffocating military occupation, and Palestinian militant groups terrorize Israelis.” [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]
Making matters worse for conflict-weary Israelis and their neighbors, Israel’s ongoing struggle with Hezbollah, a terrorist organization based in Lebanon, seems to be pulling in Syria as of late. Israel is suspected of carrying out a strike last week on warehouses near Damascus’s airport — which was reportedly intended to wipe out weapons bound for Hezbollah. [New York Times / Ian Fisher]

No one man should have all that power

On Wednesday, FBI Director James B. Comey testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on his announcement, days before the 2016 presidential election, that the FBI was reopening an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. The investigation ultimately did not turn up anything of note — and many say it cost Clinton the election. [New York Times / Adam Goldman]
On Wednesday, Comey justified his decision: “Having repeatedly told this Congress we're done and there's nothing there, there's no case there, there's no case there, to restart in a hugely significant way, potentially finding the emails that would reflect on her intent from the beginning and not speak about it would require an act of concealment in my view.” [CNN / Tom LoBianco, Manu Raju, Mary Kay Mallonee]
The bottom line: Even if his decision swayed the election, he’d do it again. “It makes me mildly nauseous to think that we might have had some impact on the election. But honestly, it wouldn't change the decision.” [NPR / Brian Naylor]
Comey has been justifying his decision for months. What’s interesting here is his apparent nonchalance — or at least less-chalance than one might expect from someone weighing the possibility that he singlehandedly caused the election of Donald J. Trump. [New York Times / Matt Apuzzo, Michael S. Schmidt, Adam Goldman, Eric Lichtblau]
Comey’s decision definitely impacted the election; the question is how much. One example: Looking at absentee votes versus Election Day votes for both Clinton and Obama suggest that leading up the election, Clinton was performing nearly as well as Obama did. Then on Election Day, following Comey’s actions, her support plummeted, a phenomenon that could help explain why she lost Florida, for instance, where she had won the early vote with 56.3 percent. [Vox / Sean McElwee, Matt McDermott, Will Jordan]
As absurd as it might seem to relitigate a past election, Democrats have to grapple with the question of Comey’s influence to decide how much responsibility they bear for their own defeat. As Democrats conduct an autopsy on the election and grasp for a way forward, they need to understand how they managed to lose so badly and so surprisingly — and what role years of party stagnation might have played in creating the circumstances that led to Clinton’s defeat. [Politico Magazine / Edward-Isaac Dovere]
Hillary Clinton, for her part, says she takes responsibility … but seems to blame Comey more than anyone. Just yesterday, she spoke at a Women for Women International event in New York and told moderator Christiane Amanpour, “If the election had been on October 27, I would be your president.” [Washington Post / Philip Rucker]
But as Vox’s Jeff Stein points out (in his review of Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed 2016 Campaign), there are two theories of how Clinton lost that aren’t so simple as “James B. Comey.” The first is that her campaign failed her; the second is that she failed as a candidate. Stein writes of the latter argument, “It is in uncovering proof of this second thesis where the book is both most persuasive and most arresting — and where its lessons for the Democratic Party are the most salient.” [Vox / Jeff Stein]
A fourth theory emerged this week after leading Democratic pollsters shared new post-election findings with the Washington Post. As Greg Sargent writes, “A shockingly large percentage of these Obama-Trump voters said Democrats’ economic policies will favor the wealthy — twice the percentage that said the same about Trump.” So a broader messaging failure on the part of Democrats does seem to be at play. [Washington Post / Greg Sargent]
Realistically, the answer lies somewhere in the center of these poles. A stronger candidate who did a better job selling the Democratic Party’s vision might have weathered the last-minute Comey revelation better. We’ll never know definitively. To get a big-picture understanding of the election, you can’t dismiss any of these factors — including the role Comey played. [New York Times / Amy Chozick]

Miscellaneous

St. Louis is the chess capital of America. But, like, why? [The Economist]
How Bing definitively beat Google — at least when it comes to looking for porn. [Daily Dot / E.J. Dickson]
High school is different these days. The teens now celebrate Meme Day. [NY Mag / Madison Malone Kircher]
The mayor of Boston and governor of Massachusetts condemned racist taunts at a Red Sox game, saying they do "not reflect the city, who we are as Boston." The problem is that they do. They reflect what Boston is, very deeply. [Boston Globe / Renée Graham]
Last year, 11,717 people in Mississippi applied for cash welfare benefits under TANF, which in that state provide a maximum of $2,040 a year for a family of three. Only 167 were accepted, for an acceptance rate of 1.42 percent. For all intents and purposes, the state has abolished welfare. [ThinkProgress / Bryce Covert and Josh Israel]

Verbatim

“I do not approve of shooting people in the scrotum, but even I must admit this story is kind of rad.” [The Atlantic / Graeme Wood]
"Greg Gutfeld … delivers every rant as if the maid who spun straw into gold just guessed his true name. … The Five often feels like the last hour of an office holiday party that will yield a chagrined memo from human resources." [NYT / James Poniewozik]
“Without knocking the absolute value of a free and courageous press, there is reason to wonder if fact-checking the President will ever be as useful as we think it should be.” [New Yorker / Jia Tolentino]
“‘What’s the biggest financial mistake you’ve made?’ ‘Signing a publishing deal years ago and asking them to throw in a piano. I thought they were gifting me a piano, when in fact I was just paying for the piano.’” [Rufus Wainwright to Bloomberg / Jada Yuan]
“Harmony is a prototype, a robotic version of the company’s hyper-realistic silicone sex toy, the RealDoll. … Harmony smiles, blinks and frowns. She can hold a conversation, tell jokes and quote Shakespeare. She’ll remember your birthday, McMullen told me, what you like to eat, and the names of your brothers and sisters. She can hold a conversation about music, movies and books. And of course, Harmony will have sex with you whenever you want." [The Guardian / Jenny Kleeman]

Watch this: Why your old phones collect in a junk drawer of sadness

Smartphones shouldn’t be so disposable. Could fixing the way we make our phones help solve climate change? [University of California, Vox]

Trump’s administration is a horrifying success — at terrorizing immigrants

Ezra Klein, Vox’s editor-in-chief, explains his self-described “terrible” pop culture tastes

Facebook is hiring 3,000 people to stop users from broadcasting murder and rape

God Loves, Man Kills: the creators of the legendary X-Men story reflect on its 35-year legacy

Fidget spinners, the latest distraction craze, explained

Vox Sentences: Trump’s budget cuts sleep with the fishes

2017-05-01T20:00:05-04:00

The government may just get funded after all; Trump and North Korea’s rising provocations; Puerto Rico’s precarious debt situation.

Government funding agreement reached

Late Sunday night, congressional leaders reached a deal to fund the government through September. The bill still needs to be passed in the House and Senate, but as of now it looks like a bigger win for Democrats than for the congressional GOP or the White House… [New York Times / Thomas Kaplan, Matt Flegenheimer]
…which is perhaps surprising given that Republicans control both houses of Congress and the presidency. But with no funding cuts for Planned Parenthood and increased funding for the National Institutes of Health, for example, and no funding at all for the border wall, there’s a lot for Democrats to like. Senate Democrats could’ve blocked the legislation through filibustering, so their buy-in was crucial. [Vox / Jeff Stein, Tara Golshan]
Some other things the bill included: a permanent extension to coal miners’ health benefits; only a 1 percent cut to the Environmental Protection Agency; $1.5 billion to update US-Mexico border fencing and technology (none of which can go to a wall); a small bump to the National Park Service; a cut to the Justice Department but not to its main agencies like the FBI, which saw increases, as did some of its grant programs, like the Violence Against Women grants; funding to help combat the opioid crisis; and no cuts to public broadcasting. [Washington Post / Kelsey Snell, Ed O’Keefe]
In an interview with Bloomberg News, President Trump said he plans to sign the bill. Despite the fact that it “rejects most of his wish list,” as Bloomberg puts it, Trump said, “We’re very happy with it.” [Bloomberg / Billy House, Erik Wasson, Laura Litvan]
But before it gets to Trump’s desk, the bill will have to pass through Congress. The House Rules Committee will consider it at 3 pm Tuesday, per a committee spokesperson, and it could head to the House floor Wednesday. Senate consideration could then happen before the end of the week, which would avoid a potential government shutdown, as current appropriations will expire Friday at midnight. [Roll Call / Ryan McCrimmon]
How did the bill turn into such a win for Democrats? “A spending bill needs 60 votes,” in the Senate, Vox’s Tara Golshan notes. “Because Republicans needed Democratic votes to fund the government, the result was a spending package that was a tough sell for conservatives. The more Republicans lost votes on the right flank, though, the more Democrats they needed to avoid a shutdown — so the spending bill kept moving ever further left.” [Vox / Tara Golshan]

News on North Korea

Last Thursday, in an interview with Reuters that ran on Friday, President Trump said, “There's a chance that we could end up having a major, major, conflict with North Korea, absolutely.” What’s happened since? A lot. [Reuters / Phil Stewart]
Saturday, North Korea tested a ballistic, non-nuclear, short-range missile that failed. Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called it “a grave threat to our country” that came “despite strong warnings by the international community.” Trump tweeted about it (of course): “North Korea disrespected the wishes of China & its highly respected President when it launched, though unsuccessfully, a missile today. Bad!” [CNBC / Christine Wang]
Then yesterday, in an interview with CBS taped the day before, Trump suggested that the possibly of taking military action against North Korea was still on the table, and that if the country staged another nuclear test, he would not be happy. (He also praised Kim Jong Un, calling the North Korean leader “a pretty smart cookie.”) [Wall Street Journal / Josh Mitchell, Eric Morath]
That brings us to today. In an interview with Bloomberg News, Trump said he would “be honored” to meet with Kim Jong Un. “If it would be appropriate for me to meet with him, I would absolutely.” [Bloomberg / Margaret Talev, Jennifer Jacobs]
And as part of a larger effort to cohere international regional cooperation around isolating North Korea, Trump extended invitations to the leaders of Singapore and Thailand — and also to the president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte. [Wall Street Journal / Jake Maxwell Watts]
Duterte has boasted about killing criminals himself, and has been accused of myriad other human rights violations like ordering the extrajudicial killings of drug suspects. He once called then-President Barack Obama a “son of a whore.” Responding to the invitation, the Asia advocacy director of Human Rights Watch told the New York Times, “Although the traits of his personality likely make it impossible, Trump should be ashamed of himself.” [New York Times / Mark Landler]
(It really cannot be overstated how despicable Duterte is. He once joked about raping a woman who was held hostage and assaulted before being murdered while doing mission work in a Philippine prison.) [Time / Kate Samuelson]
This afternoon, seeking to clarify Trump’s statement on meeting with Kim Jong Un, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said North Korea would need to scale back its provocations before a meeting could take place. “Clear conditions are not there right now,” he said. As always, the president didn’t actually mean what he said. [Reuters / Steve Holland]
And if he gives up on diplomacy, it’s not clear that Trump could legally take military action against the country. He’d need congressional authorization. On the other hand, the dubious legal standing of airstrikes against Syria didn’t exactly stop him then. [The Nation / John Nichols]

Puerto Rico finds itself in debt, in protest

Thousands of protesters hit the streets in Puerto Rico today to protest austerity measures aimed at tackling its years-long economic crisis and $70 billion public debt — measures that include benefit cuts for public employees, hikes to water rates, higher taxes, and some privatization measures. [Star Tribune / Associated Press / Danica Coto]
The territory was granted protection last year by the US government so that it could not be sued by creditors who carry its debt — and that respite ends today. As many as a dozen lawsuits or more are expected tomorrow, both against the commonwealth itself and against Gov. Ricardo Rosselló. [Financial Times / Eric Platt]
Financial Times’s John Dizard writes that Puerto Rico is arguably in worse shape than Argentina was when it went into default in 2001: “That came at the end of many years of debt financing and capital inflows, a significant amount of which actually went to build power systems, roads, telecommunications and other real assets. In contrast, Puerto Rico enters insolvency with a creaky, expensive power grid, a water system in need of big improvements, a rundown tourism industry and a declining manufacturing base that had been built to take advantage of now-defunct federal tax breaks.” [Financial Times / John Dizard]
This is only the latest in a long string of austerity measures meant to address the crisis, and discontent has been rising for some time. Many protesting don’t believe all of the debt is legitimate in the first place. They also resent that a fiscal control board appointed by the US has been overseeing the process, a setup that for many recalls the island’s colonial history. [teleSUR]
Many Puerto Ricans are voting with their feet and leaving. The territory lost 2 percent of its population in the year 2014, with an average of 230 people (two full flights) leaving every single day. [CNN / Jeff Acevedo]
Meanwhile, President Trump seems opposed to helping Puerto Rico. Last week he tweeted angrily at the prospect of helping the territory cover Medicaid costs, writing: “The Democrats want to shut government if we don't bail out Puerto Rico and give billions to their insurance companies for OCare failure. NO!” [Twitter / Donald Trump]
But help for Puerto Rico made it into the US government funding bill — as of now, pending any changes as the bill moves through Congress, there is $295 million in Medicaid funding for Puerto Rico. [Reuters / Robin Respaut, Nick Brown]

Miscellaneous

The case for making Beauty and the Beast 2 all about Belle getting guillotined during the French Revolution. [io9 / Beth Elderkin]
The New Orleans district attorney has attempted to prosecute at least six public defender and defense investigators, basically for doing their jobs. [The Guardian / Aviva Shen]
Remembering Donald Trump’s untelevised 2004 Friars Club roast, which featured Richard Belzer (a.k.a. Det. John Munch) referring to Trump as “the grifter wrapped in a fraud perpetuated on society.” [Washington Post / Elahe Izadi]
Anti-abortion activists like to say that when abortion is illegal, women won't be prosecuted; only doctors will go to prison. But with misoprostol (a drug that's 90 percent effective at terminating early-term pregnancies) available over the counter in Mexico and sold by online pharmacies, doctors probably won't be involved in many post-criminalization abortions. And it's clear that in those cases, it's the woman who'd be on the hook. [Washington Post / Irin Carmon]
Trump and Republicans in Congress want a $5 trillion tax cut for corporations and the wealthy. Freshman Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna has a plan to spend trillions cutting taxes for workers, by dramatically expanding the earned income tax credit so families could get as much as $12,000 a year. [The Atlantic / Annie Lowrey]

Verbatim

“He spent the next 11 months in the hospital, immobilized in bed, with an open wound down the front of him that had the circumference of a basketball. It got to the point where it was a normal thing for him to look down and think, oh, those are my intestines, there they are.” [Huffington Post / Jason Fagone]
“Feinstein describes her mother, Betty Goldman, in glowing terms. … But Feinstein's middle sister, Yvonne Banks, told me their mother was given to unpredictable moods. … Betty would occasionally lock Dianne out of the house, forcing her to sleep in the family car.” [Mother Jones / Gail Sheehy]
“When I was on it, the finale of our series had more views than the final of the World Cup. The fact that it’s just people baking cake, it’s a bit crazy that it has gathered such a following.” [Martha Collison to A.V. Club / Kevin Pang]
“Phone calls were too expensive, plus, my mom, siblings and I kept moving. He was wasting money he didn’t have calling numbers we had left behind.” [Refinery29 / Ashley C. Ford]
“In the lead-up to the episode, Green read an article in The New York Times that called the idea of a woman only realizing she was gay at the age of 35 ‘bordering on unbelievable.’ But Green, who was 35 herself, didn’t think so. As the Ellen cast and crew were filming ‘The Puppy Episode,’ she had met a woman she was interested in and realized that she was gay. ‘I completely understood,’ she said. ‘Because that was true for me.’” [Huffington Post / Maxwell Strachan]

Watch this: How a melancholy egg yolk conquered Japan

Gudetama, explained. [Vox / Dion Lee, Alex Abad-Santos]

Trump’s love for brutal leaders like the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, explained

This is how Obamacare explodes

The New York Times should not have hired climate change bullshitter Bret Stephens

Donald Trump is taking on Michelle Obama’s healthy food legacy

Condé Nast is enabling Gwyneth Paltrow’s health bullshit with a new magazine

Vox Sentences: It’s been almost 100 days. But who’s counting?

2017-04-28T20:00:06-04:00

Worker strikes across Brazil; a CRISPR trial on a cancer patient in China; Trump’s first 100 days.

Brazil’s nationwide anti-austerity strikes

YASUYOSHI CHIBA / Staff" />

For the first time in more than 20 years, a general strike throughout Brazil disrupted cities around the country Friday. Brazilian unions led workers to organize against austerity measures spearheaded by President Michel Temer — and closed schools, factories, banks, and businesses, and disrupted public transportation in the process. [Reuters / Brad Brooks, Anthony Boadle]
The austerity measures target Brazil’s pension program in particular, which enables many Brazilians to retire in their 50s, and its labor laws.
Some economists have argued that labor laws in Brazil are unnecessarily complicated and reduce competitiveness and hiring. The country’s unemployment rate is at 13.7 percent, and nearly half the population makes minimum wage — roughly $4,000 per year. [New York Times / Simon Romero]
But the legislation to change them is not popular —and the man selling that legislation austerity measures might be even less so. Temer was not elected; he took power in 2016 after his predecessor Dilma Rousseff was ousted, and to say his administration is scandal-ridden is an understatement. This month, a Brazilian supreme court judge authorized corruption investigations that involve dozens of politicians, including eight ministers in Temer’s cabinet. [New York Times / Simon Romero]
As Ella Mahony writes for Jacobin: “In an effort to bring Brazil’s labor standards in line with the priorities of multinational corporations, Temer is also championing a bill that would allow companies to outsource any job; extend the maximum duration of temporary work contracts from three months to nine months; and end the eight-hour workday. If these reforms pass, young Brazilians would face a grim future of more precarious work, fewer benefits, longer hours, and dwindling hopes for retirement.” [Jacobin / Ella Mahony]
Earlier this month, Temer tried to soften his pension reform bill, only to have it met with protests that turned violent. [Reuters / Maria Carolina Marcello, Ueslei Marcelino]
Friday’s strikes were paired with protests that took place in at least 26 Brazilian states — and some turned ugly. The Guardian reports that protesters used barricades of burning tires to block roads, and that riot police clashed with crowds, using tear gas and percussion grenades. [Guardian / Jonathan Watts]
Earlier this week, protests by indigenous people in Brazil turned violent as well. The protesters were organized on Tuesday against farmers’ and ranchers’ encroachment on reservations. When police would not let the protesters climb a ramp leading into the congressional building in Brasilia, “officers fired rubber bullets and tear gas while tribe members shot arrows in return,” reported Reuters. [Reuters / Ueslei Marcelino, Anthony Boadle]

What we talk about when we talk about CRISPR

How often do you think about the fact that humans now have access to easy gene editing technology? Let’s go with “not often enough.” It’s a BFD.
CRISPR is widely considered the easiest gene editing technology to use, and in particular, a technique called CRISPR/Cas9 (which, in the broadest sense, uses a system that already occurs in bacteria to edit the genes of other organisms) seems to be the most promising for creating new medical therapies and treatments. [Vox / Brad Plumer, Javier Zarracina]
CRISPR is often discussed practically in the context of eradicating disease, or insects that carry deadly diseases, like certain breeds of mosquitos. Talk of using CRISPR on humans, though, has remained largely theoretical. [Smithsonian / Jerry Adler]
But here’s the little-discussed truth: We already are. At least, researchers in China are. On Friday, the Clinical Cancer Institute at Nanjing University injected modified human genes into a patient with late-stage throat cancer. It was the second time the gene editing technology was tested on a human. [Wall Street Journal / Preetika Rana]
The first test took place in November of last year, at Sichuan University in Chengdu, China. That test was also aimed at helping a patient with an aggressive form of cancer. Other trials are expected to follow soon, including one at the University of Pennsylvania that was approved last summer by the National Institutes of Health. [Nature / David Cyranoski]
CRISPR/Cas9 also shows promise in eradicating genetic diseases because it enables researchers to basically edit, remove, and replace genes in an organism. That’s where things get very theoretical very quickly. There was some uproar in 2015 when Chinese scientists used CRISPR on human embryos to try to eliminate a certain type of anemia — but the embryos were not viable. The real potential for CRISPR, most immediately at least, seems to be in the medical therapy application. [Wired / Nick Stockton]
There is concern about the ethical implications of using CRISPR to, say, edit the genes of embryos in order to create “designer babies.” We may be faced with this choice someday, though it’s still far off. (Last year, the UK gave approval to scientists to edit human embryos, but they had to destroy the embryos after seven days, and engineering babies remains illegal in the UK as well as the US and most countries.) [Vox / Julia Belluz]

99 days down; 1,362 to go

Photo by Olivier Douliery-Pool/Getty Images" />

For better or worse, observers of American politics often see the first 100 days of a presidency as a critical window — the best chance for the newly elected president to enact his agenda, and a testing ground for whether he’ll be consequential for the rest of his term. (Case in point: Franklin D. Roosevelt; case against: Abraham Lincoln.) [Vox / Nicole Hemmer]
President Donald Trump, for his part, has insisted that the end of the “first 100 days” of his presidency means nothing. But knowing Trump, that means it matters very much to him. [New York Times / Peter Baker]
For one thing, he’s the one who put out a 100-day plan before Election Day, stuffed with promises to Make America Great Again in 30 different ways. (Spoiler alert: He hasn’t accomplished all 30. To put it mildly.) [Vox / Vox Staff]
Trump is historically unpopular for a president so early in his first term — he essentially had no honeymoon period, which is how the first 100 days typically gets characterized. Understanding these dynamics is crucial to understanding how he has flubbed his best chance to push his agenda. [Vox / Andrew Prokop]
Several of Trump’s proposals and promises were sweeping legislative initiatives — laws that would each have be proposed, drafted as a bill, and passed by Congress before Trump could sign them into law. He’s made little process on those kinds of policy goals. Meanwhile, of his signature executive orders, some have proven to be toothless, and others have been blocked by the courts. [New York Times / Josh Keller, Adam Pearce]
Where Trump has been able to make progress, however, is in rolling back regulations and revamping the focus of federal agents. So while some things he targeted (like Obamacare) have become de facto winners of his presidency because they’ve avoided legislative threats, the environment and immigrants are already weathering serious and sustained attack. [Vox / Dylan Matthews]
Trump himself seems to be having a terrible time of the presidency. In an interview with Reuters Thursday, he lamented: “I loved my previous life. I had so many things going.” He also says, unbelievably: “This is more work than in my previous life. I thought it would be easier.” (He also provided 2016 election maps of the US to the reporters, perhaps in an effort to make himself feel better.) [Reuters / Stephen J. Adler, Jeff Mason, Steve Holland]
His supporters don’t seem much happier. Reuters interviewed voters in “swing” counties — places that went for Obama in 2008 and 2012 but for Trump in 2016. “What reporters found this time in more than two dozen interviews is that Trump voters are largely standing with their man but with signs of restlessness, mainly over foreign policy, concerns over getting legislation through Congress and some skepticism that he won’t be able to follow through with promises. …” [Reuters / James Oliphant]
The self-styled “resistance,” meanwhile, has been mobilized and energized to an extent most presidents don’t inspire at any time, much less at the beginning of their term — which raises the question of how long it will be sustainable. [NPR / Scott Detrow]
Another group that’s flourished even as the administration has labeled them the “enemy of the people” and “the opposition party”? The media. [Washington Post / Margaret Sullivan]

Miscellaneous

Some first-person article pitches are better than others, and "Why I Hate My Uncle" by William P. Hitler is one of the all-time best. [Boing Boing / Mark Frauenfelder]
Ja Rule planned a music festival in the Bahamas, and like everything Ja Rule touches, it turned into a Lord of the Flies–like struggle for survival with an island full of rich American tourists forming a tent city and struggling to find food and water. [Washington Post / Abby Ohlheiser]
Obamacare was supposed to require chain restaurants to list their calorie content. The rules still haven't taken effect. What's going on? [AP / Mary Clare Jalonick]
The Handmaid's Tale guide to Cambridge, Massachusetts. [Rachel Greenhaus]
Keri and Royce Young learned that the daughter Keri was carrying had anencephaly, meaning she would almost certainly die shortly after birth. They still carried her to full term — so her organs could be donated to other babies. [Medium / Royce Young]

Verbatim

“This is frustrating. Labor is being paid first … again. Shareholders get leftovers.” [Citi analyst Kevin Crissey via AP]
“Soon, tributes to Tril's group began to pop up: Harvard's Harvard Memes for Elitist 1% Tweens, Dartmouth's Dartmouth Memes for Cold AF Teens, UCLA's UCLA Memes for Sick AF Tweens, University of Southern California's USC Memes for Spoiled Pre-teens, University of Chicago's UChicago Memes for Theoretical Midwest Teens, Duke's Duke Memes for Gothicc Teens, Yale's Yale Memes for Special Snowflake Teens, Brown's Brown Dank Stash of Memes for Unproductive Teens and more.” [Mic / Taylor Lorenz]
“There I sat, feet from O’Reilly and his world view: everyone should have a gun to defend himself, and the right to use it, even if a four-year-old is involved; and a vigilante’s right to life supersedes that of an innocent black teen’s.” [New Yorker / Rich Benjamin]
“It’s not like tomorrow someone’s going to have a fully integrated, one-pot pathway to go from sugar to morphine. But it’s coming.” [Kenneth Oye to BuzzFeed / Azeen Ghorayshi]
“What is distinctive about Yates in Revolutionary Road — and throughout his work — is not merely the bleakness of his vision, but how that vision adheres not to war or some other horror but to the aspirations of everyday Americans.” [Boston Review / Stewart O’Nan]

Watch this: 100 days of Trump’s flailing presidency

Governing is not a reality tv show. [Vox / Ezra Klein, Mike Cades, Hosu Lee]

What the White House Correspondents’ Dinner will do in Trump’s absence

1.2 million children in the US have lead poisoning. We’re only treating half of them.

How President Trump forced late-night TV to evolve

Google is super secretive about its anti-aging research. No one knows why.

Reddit’s TheRedPill, notorious for its misogyny, was founded by a New Hampshire state legislator

Vox Sentences: Mike Flynn has 99 problems, and Russia is at least 4 of them

2017-04-27T20:30:04-04:00

Pentagon investigation into Flynn; French election hacking; NAFTA renegotiations.

…And now the Pentagon is investigating Michael Flynn

Earlier this week, the House Oversight Committee announced that Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn might have broken federal law by failing to disclose payments from Russian entities in White House paperwork. [CNN / Tom LoBianco, Manu Raju]
Now he’s under investigation by the Pentagon. The two causes for concern: the payment he received from Russia’s RT TV in 2015 for a speech, and belatedly filing paperwork declaring himself a “foreign agent” (due to his lobbying work on behalf of Turkish interests here in the US). [New York Times / Emmarie Huetteman]
The crux of the issue, from the Pentagon’s perspective, is that Flynn is a retired officer of the military — and as such, he was required to obtain approval from the Pentagon to accept money from foreign groups. Because he could hypothetically be recalled to the military at any time, he is subject to the emoluments clause of the Constitution, which bars top officials from getting money or favors from foreign governments. [Washington Post / Dan Lamothe, Ed O’Keefe, Sean Sullivan]
(As it turns out, the Defense Intelligence Agency actually warned Flynn about this in 2014, as he was retiring.) [CNN / Manu Raju, Jim Sciutto, Tom LoBianco]
Flynn’s lawyer maintains that Flynn did brief the DIA “extensively” about his RT speech in particular. But in a letter released today, the DIA indicated that it found no records “referring or relating” to Flynn receiving payment from a foreign source. [Politico / Austin Wright]
It might feel like Flynn’s got about 99 Russia-related legal problems at this point. Not quite. He has committed a lot of shady conduct (some of which involved lying to the vice president), but legally speaking, Vox’s Zack Beauchamp identifies four issues related to Russia and Turkey combined: the possibility that Flynn lied about his status as a foreign agent; that he took office while being a foreign agent; that he lied on his security clearance paperwork in January 2016; and that he took foreign money as a retired officer without permission. [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

Remember when Putin promised not to meddle in the French election?

A new report from the Tokyo-based cybersecurity firm Trend Micro says that Russian hackers — possibly the same group infamous for interfering in the US election — are targeting the presidential campaign of centrist Emmanuel Macron as he heads to a runoff with far-right candidate Marine Le Pen. [Washington Post / Rick Noack]
It’s too early to definitively pin recent cyberattacks against Macron on the Russian group known as (among other aliases) “Pawn Storm” and “Fancy Bear.” The perpetrator here could be a mere imitator. But targeting Macron would be consistent with “Pawn Storm’s” methodology: The Trend Micro report, reviewing two years of the group’s attacks, concludes that “the group has become more adept at manipulating events and public opinion through the gathering and controlled release of information.” [Trend Micro / Feike Hacquebord]
And as Vox’s Zeeshan Aleem writes, “It’s clear that the attacks converge with Russian interests. If Macron were to face damaging leaks the way Hillary Clinton did during the campaign, it would hurt the chances of a candidate who supports the EU and France’s traditional stance toward Russia.” [Vox / Zeeshan Aleem]
Macron supports European Union sanctions on Russia, while Le Pen wants to leave the EU and develop a better relationship with Moscow. Vladimir Putin, for his part, has been generally warm toward nationalist movements outside his desired “sphere of influence” (especially when they rise up in NATO countries) and particularly friendly toward the far right in France, and toward Le Pen. [Vice / Alec Luhn]
It was during a Le Pen visit to the Kremlin in March, in fact, that Putin assured her, “We do not want to influence events in any way” — which was taken at the time as an assurance that Russia wouldn’t meddle in the French campaign. The release of the Trend Micro report makes that assurance, already sketchy, seem downright suspect. [The Guardian / Shaun Walker and Kim Willsher]
In the wake of the report, the Macron campaign has banned both the Russian state-funded news agency Sputnik and RT TV from campaign events; a spokesperson for Macron called them a propaganda-spewing “two-headed entity.” [Reuters / Andrew Osborn, Richard Balmforth]
The Kremlin has denied the hacking allegations, and the editor-in-chief of RT tweeted of Macron’s actions, “So this is how gracelessly freedom of speech ends in a country which prides itself on its freedoms almost more than it prides itself on its Camembert and brie.” [Guardian / Reuters]
Here’s why this matters: This week, Macron dipped below 60 percent in voting intention polls for the first time since March 17. Le Pen saw a boost from 40 percent to 41 percent. [Independent / Andrew Callus]
Which is to say that while Macron is still likely to beat Le Pen, the populist underdog’s best hope would be something drastic — something like, say, a massive and embarrassing leak of hacked information.

NAFTA lives another day

Early Wednesday, it was leaked that the Trump administration was considering a draft of an order to withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement, which has been in effect since 1994. [New York Times / Mark Landler, Binyamin Appelbaum]
By Wednesday night, however, Trump had been persuaded to attempt to renegotiate the deal instead — thanks to calls from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (twice!) and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. [Reuters / Ayesha Rascoe, David Lawder]
The urgency was real. The Mexican peso plummeted overnight on the mere rumor that Trump might pull out of the agreement. [NPR / Morning Edition]
Trudeau apparently had to explain NAFTA’s importance to Trump. The Canadian Press reports, “The prime minister said he pointed out that a lot of jobs and industries were developed under NAFTA — if the deal were cancelled, it would create too much disruption.” [Huffington Post Canada / The Canadian Press]
Indeed, NPR reports that “NAFTA covers nearly 500 million consumers,” and yet “When NAFTA hit its 20th anniversary in 2014, a number of economists assessed its impact. Most concluded that NAFTA had a relatively small impact on the economy.” Trump’s rhetoric that NAFTA is the “worst trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere” seems to be, predictably, totally overblown. [NPR / Marilyn Geewax]
And analyses of NAFTA’s economic impact have been, for the most part, positive. A report from the Wharton School reads, “Supporters of NAFTA estimate that some 14 million jobs rely on trade with Canada and Mexico combined, and the nearly 200,000 export-related jobs created annually by NAFTA pay an average salary of 15% to 20% more than the jobs that were lost, according to a PIIE study. Furthermore, the study found that only about 15,000 jobs on net are lost each year due to NAFTA.” [University of Pennsylvania / Knowledge@Wharton]
A Wilson Center paper found that in the US, roughly 5 million jobs are dependent on trade with Mexico. “This means that one out of every 29 U.S. workers has a job supported by U.S.-Mexico trade,” writes the paper’s author, Christopher Wilson. [Wilson Center / Christopher Wilson]
Even the industries that often get pegged as losers in trade deals, like manufacturing, haven’t suffered due to NAFTA, despite decades of predictions and complaints that they have. [Vox / J. Bradford DeLong]
As with any deal, though, there are winners and losers. Mexico is still struggling to grow a middle class — and the maquiladoras (factories) that cluster near the US border to make goods for export certainly haven’t helped. [McClatchy / Tim Johnson]
In the US, meanwhile, one analysis estimated that high school dropouts in industries that benefited from pre-NAFTA tariffs (like textile manufacturing) saw their wages grow 17 percent less than they would have if NAFTA hadn’t been put in place. (Of course, it’s always hard to speculate about counterfactuals.) [UVA / John McLaren]
It’s on behalf of workers like those that Trump appears committed to renegotiating NAFTA. Today he said withdrawing “would be a pretty big shock to the system.” But he also said, “If I'm unable to make a fair deal … for the United States, meaning a fair deal for our workers and our companies, I will terminate NAFTA. But we're going to give renegotiation a good strong show.” [Reuters / Ayesha Rascoe, David Lawder]
In Mexico, too, there’s pressure to reconsider NAFTA — in the hopes of improving what’s seen as a deal that’s too favorable to the United States. Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray actually threatened to withdraw from NAFTA on Tuesday, a day before Trump did (though no one noticed) — although Videgaray doesn’t seem committed to seeing that threat through, and stresses that his country won’t accept “just any” renegotiation. [Vox / Alexia Fernández Campbell]

Miscellaneous

The Trump administration has set up a hotline where people can report "crimes committed by illegal aliens," so naturally people are calling in and reporting on the evil things that space aliens like ET or Superman are doing in their neighborhoods. [BuzzFeed / Brianna Sacks]
Five sweatshops in Ethiopia with far more job applicants than job openings let researchers decide whom to hire at random. That let them see what the actual effects of landing a sweatshop job are — and they're surprising. [NYT / Chris Blattman and Stefan Dercon]
Bill Nye has become the face of climate change to many Americans. Maybe that was a mistake? [New Republic / Emily Atkin]
The Pro-Life Committee bills itself as an anti-abortion PAC, and it raised more than $7 million in the 2016 cycle. Ninety-eight percent of that money went to two vendors. Those vendors don't appear to have any other clients. In fact, the whole thing looks like a massive, massive scam exploiting grassroots donors. [American Spectator / Paul Jossey]
Against “prestige TV.” (This piece is too harsh on Fargo but still makes a good point.) [Esquire / Eric Thurm]

Verbatim

“For most of my life I dreaded going to JFK. Now I’ll remember it as where I came to finally feel American.” [Slate / Aymann Ismail]
“Where do you send a fax from? Please tell me Aretha moseyed down to the local Staples with her strongly worded missive, tossed her fur coat on the floor and told the cashier, ‘I'm here to send Dionne Warwick a message. You know what to do.’” [Elle / R. Eric Thomas]
“Mr. Ahmed likes to tell the cautionary tale of a pushcart vendor who made the best food — so good he once netted $3,000 in one day. That vendor worked alone, and worked himself so hard, Mr. Ahmed says, that he got sick. Now he can’t take care of anyone and has no one to take care of him.” [NYT / Tejal Rao]
"There was a record company that stole my albums and didn't pay me. And they came to Switzerland, and I said, 'Where's my money?' And they said, ‘we’re not going to give you any money.’ I said, ‘oh yes, you are.’ I got a gun ― it was a gun, it wasn’t a knife ― and I followed him to a restaurant and I tried to kill him. I missed him and I went back to America." [Nina Simone to BBC / Tim Sebastian]
“The glaring mistake they all make, however, is thinking that there is any way to disentangle reproductive rights from economic issues.” [NYT / Bryce Covert]

Watch this: Firing Bill O’Reilly doesn’t fix Fox News

Sexual harassment allegations aren’t an anomaly at Fox News — they reflect a deeper problem inside Fox headquarters. [Vox / Carlos Maza, Coleman Lowndes]

Trump’s environmental agenda at 100 days: lazy and plutocratic

Child poverty in the US is a disgrace. Experts are embracing this simple plan to cut it.

Why Neil Gaiman’s American Gods is so iconic

Photos: what Cassini saw as it dived in between Saturn and its rings

Marine Le Pen’s party is facing allegations of Holocaust denial … again

Vox Sentences: More like NaahhFTA, amirite?

2017-04-26T20:00:06-04:00

A flurry of Trump administration activity ahead of the 100-day benchmark.

Really stretching the definition of “plan” here

Today the Trump administration released its “tax plan.” By “plan,” we mean a single-page, double-spaced document that leaves out crucial details like which tax rates apply to whom. [Washington Post / Damian Paletta]
What’s in the quasi-plan? Some highlights: a reduction of the current seven tax brackets to just three (10, 25, and 35 percent); a doubling of the standard deduction; repeal of the Obamacare 3.8 percent surtax on investment income; a cut of both the corporate tax rate and the tax rate paid by pass-through companies to 15 percent (the latter of which would personally help Trump a lot). [Vox / Dylan Matthews]
The administration is also working through how to increase the value of the current child and dependent care credit and possibly make it refundable, which would benefit lower-income families who pay little to no federal income tax. [Washington Post / Danielle Paquette, Damian Paletta]
Refundability would be good, but Trump’s previous child care plans, which weren’t refundable, would have done next to nothing for poor people. [Tax Policy Center / Lily Batchelder, Elaine Maag, Chye-Ching Huang, Emily Horton]
One of the big new proposals in the “plan” is eliminating the federal deduction for state and local taxes, a big subsidy to blue states with high income and sales tax rates. [NJ.com / Jonathan D. Salant]
Despite tweaks like that, the outline is very similar to the plan Trump released on the campaign trail. The Tax Policy Center projected that plan would cut federal revenue by $7.2 trillion over 10 years, and would give rich people the largest tax cuts. [Tax Policy Center / James R. Nunns, Leonard E. Burman, Jeffrey Rohaly, Joseph Rosenberg]
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget projects that the just-released plan would be a little cheaper, but at $5.5 trillion over 10 years, the cost is still astronomical. [Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget]
If the ultimate bill that comes out of this scores as increasing the deficit, that could complicate passage for procedural reasons. If a bill increases the deficit outside of a 10-year budget window, then it cannot be passed as a reconciliation bill, and would need 60 votes to pass the Senate. With only 52 Republicans in the Senate, that means either eight Democrats would have to get on board or else Republicans would have to part with the legislative filibuster. [The Hill / Naomi Jagoda]

Revenge of the sanctuary cities

Last week, the Department of Justice threatened to cut off funding for law enforcement to several jurisdictions with “sanctuary city” laws protecting undocumented immigrants. [Vox / Dara Lind]
Trump has long promised to crack down on sanctuary cities to force their compliance with White House immigration policies, particularly the administration’s efforts to ramp up deportations. [The Atlantic / Garret Epps]
Yesterday, a judge in San Francisco temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s sanctuary city crackdown, arguing that Trump’s executive order on the subject is, in fact, executive overreach because only Congress has the authority to place conditions of that nature on spending. [New York Times / Vivian Yee]
Conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin writes of the White House’s counterargument: “The government employed what can only be described as a ridiculous defense. In this case, the government claimed that the executive order had no real meaning and was only an exercise of the ‘bully pulpit.’ President Trump, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the plain language of the order say otherwise.” She describes it overall as a “a humiliating loss for the administration” and “a sweeping defeat,” as “[o]nce again, a horribly and sloppily drafted executive order came back to haunt the White House.” [Washington Post / Jennifer Rubin]
Trump, true to form, lashed out over the decision, and vowed on Twitter that he’d fight all the way to the Supreme Court. [New York Times / Peter Baker]
But that’s Twitter. In an official statement, the administration was more calm and collected, writing that sanctuary city leaders “have the blood of dead Americans on their hands.” [Politico / Cristiano Lima]
If you’re wondering, by the way, what exactly a sanctuary city is, there’s no clear definition (which is part of why the executive order was struck down). But in practice, they are cities and counties that limit their cooperation with immigration enforcement. In Washington, DC, for example, there’s a law barring police officers from asking about a person’s residency or immigration status unless they are investigating a crime involving immigration status. [Vox / Liz Scheltens, Dara Lind]

Trump may withdraw from NAFTA afta all

The Trump administration is reportedly drafting a plan for the US to withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement, which has been in effect since 1994 and which phased out many tariffs as part of a massive redefinition of the trade relationships between the US, Mexico, and Canada. [New York Times / Mark Landler]
Trump campaigned on renegotiating trade deals, including NAFTA, but has quickly demonstrated how little he actually knows about them. He’s shown remarkably little interest in the details of trade agreements, focusing instead on the bare fact of whether we’re running a trade deficit/surplus. [New Yorker / Jeffrey Rothfeder]
That’s especially worrying since trade policy doesn’t actually have much to do with the trade balance. [Peterson Institute / Joseph Gagnon]
On NAFTA specifically, Trump has waffled. On the campaign trail he called it “the worst trade deal” the US had ever signed, but seemed to be shifting his stance last month when he signaled that he might seek to renegotiate aspects of NAFTA rather than pull out of it entirely. [New York Times / Julie Hirschfeld Davis, Alan Rappeport]
But he’s also engaged in escalating trade provocations with Mexico. Early on, the administration floated the idea of a border tax on Mexico to help fund the wall Trump wants to build across the US-Mexico border. Mexico’s foreign minister suggested the country might respond with levies on certain US imports, which could be intentionally aimed at hurting regions of the United States that rely on exports to Mexico. [Newsweek / Reuters]
And this week, Trump slapped new tariffs on Canadian softwood lumber and threatened that Canadian dairy could be next. The lumber tariff in particular has been called a “wrinkle to Nafta talks.” [New York Times / Ian Austen, Peter Baker]
If Trump ultimately signs an executive action notifying Canada and Mexico that the US has begun the withdrawal process, it will trigger a six-month leaving process. Some speculate that Trump may sign both an intent to withdraw and an order notifying Congress of his intent to renegotiate NAFTA. He is not obligated to leave simply by giving Canada and Mexico notice, so he could attempt to leverage having both options. [Washington Post / Damian Paletta]

Miscellaneous

An Oregon engineer has been fined $500 by the state for writing "I am an engineer" in an email. [Vice / Jason Koebler]
Stephen Bright and his group the Southern Center for Human Rights don't have the name recognition of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Bright, now age 68, made only $38,000 in 2015. But he's also won three Supreme Court cases and is one of the South's most effective lawyers at combating racial injustice. [Atlanta Journal-Constitution / Bill Rankin]
Why are Netflix and Rashida Jones outing sex workers to their families and the whole world without their consent? [Reason / Elizabeth Nolan Brown]
Walmart has a new approach for getting its customers to save money. It treats every dollar saved in the “MoneyCard Vault” — a savings feature on its prepaid debit cards —as an entry into a lottery. The more you save, the higher your odds of winning. [The Atlantic / Rob Walker]
Icelandic has barely 300,000 native speakers. It doesn't make sense for Apple or Amazon to make products like Siri and Alexa recognize it. Could that kill the language altogether? [AP / Egill Bjarnason]

Verbatim

“There’s just no question people would die from this.” [Tom Kenyon to Foreign Policy / Bryant Harris, Robbie Gramer, and Emily Tamkin]
“EXEC #1: How will kids feel when they watch this show? THE ANIMATOR: Disconcerted. Unmoored. Hyper-stimulated. Amused to the point of terror.” [The Toast / Abbey Fenbert]
“Reproduction in space travel is a really bad idea. So gay people are the way to go.” [Stephin Merritt to LA Review of Books / Scott Timberg]
“cant have my phone until we get to Odessa and maybe not then, in the event I get tied up and tortured when we stop in Abilene or I get taken out in the desert and killed in Odessa…” [Carol Blevins via Dallas Morning News / Scott Farwell]
“The Democratic Party’s longstanding insistence on using euphemisms instead of direct language about a very common medical procedure has created a baseline level of incoherence underlying all of its conversations and messaging about abortion.” [Fusion / Katie McDonough]

Watch this: The North Korean nuclear threat, explained

Why experts are urging Trump to act now while he still can. [Vox / Sam Ellis]

Normal presidents downplay the 100 days cliché. Trump is letting it control him.

A cybersecurity group thinks Russia is trying to hack the French election

The Cassini spacecraft’s dive in between Saturn’s rings, explained

Margaret Atwood’s warning for the Trump era: “There’s no such thing as inevitable progress”

9 radical changes that are coming to transportation

Vox Sentences: The first double execution in the US since 2000

2017-04-26T10:59:18-04:00

Vox Sentences is your daily digest for what’s happening in the world, curated by Dara Lind and Dylan Matthews. Sign up for the Vox Sentences newsletter, delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday, or view the Vox Sentences archive for past editions.

Trump’s tariffs add to tension with Canada; Michael Flynn may have broken the law; Arkansas executed two men last night.

The US slaps new tariffs on Canadian lumber

Last Thursday, President Trump signaled he was ready to take action against Canada on trade, declaring, “We can’t let Canada or anybody else take advantage and do what they did to our workers and to our farmers.” [New York Times / Mark Landler]
Then yesterday, he took action: The administration announced new tariffs on Canadian softwood lumber imports that will range from 3 percent to 24 percent. [New York Times / Peter Baker, Ian Austen]
The administration and the Commerce Department allege that the Canadian government subsidizes lumber companies, and that the tariffs are commensurate with the help Canadian lumber companies get from their government. (The Canadian government has denied such claims multiple times over the years, and in 2004 the World Trade Organization took Canada’s side.) [CNN / Patrick Gillespie]
This dispute over lumber pricing is decades old (George W. Bush also imposed lumber tariffs), but Trump is far more anti-trade than previous presidents who’ve acted on this, and has promised to renegotiate NAFTA. [NPR / Mark Katkov]
Not satisfied with a fight merely about lumber, Trump took to Twitter today to lash out at the Canadian dairy industry. “Canada has made business for our dairy farmers in Wisconsin and other border states very difficult. We will not stand for this. Watch!” [Huffington Post Canada / Canadian Press / Alexander Panetta]
(Wisconsin, of course, is not a border state.)
Canada’s natural resources minister says the country is weighing both NAFTA and WTO challenges to the new tariffs. [Reuters / David Ljunggren]
The National Association of Home Builders, a construction lobbying group in the US, is also fighting the tariffs on the grounds that they make homebuilding more expensive. [The Hill / Vicki Needham]

Michael Flynn may have broken federal law

Last month, former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn offered to testify in the ongoing House Intelligence Committee investigation into ties between Russia and Trump associates — in exchange for immunity from prosecution. [CNN / Tom LoBianco, Manu Raju, Shimon Prokupecz]
(In 2016, Flynn said himself that “[w]hen you are given immunity, that means you probably committed a crime.”) [Washington Post / Fred Barbash]
Shortly after, it came out that Flynn had failed to list speaking fees he had received from Russia-related organizations when he filed a personal financial disclosure form to federal ethics officials. [Washington Post / Matea Gold, Rosalind S. Helderman, Sari Horwitz]
Now House Oversight Committee Chair Jason Chaffetz is saying that Flynn’s actions possibly violated federal law. [Politico / Austin Wright]
Flynn is a former Army officer and, as such, is not allowed to accept payments from foreign governments, except under very specific circumstances. [Wall Street Journal / Byron Tau, Natalie Andrews]
The Oversight Committee reviewed classified documents on Flynn from the Defense Intelligence Agency (which Flynn ran for a few years in the Obama administration), and said that Flynn neither sought permission from nor informed the US government about receiving tens of thousands of dollars from Russian entities. The committee noted that this raised questions about payments Flynn received from a businessman tied to the Turkish government who hired Flynn’s company for consulting work. [Associated Press / Chad Day, Stephen Braun]
Chaffetz told reporters, ”I see no data to support the notion that Gen. Flynn complied with the law.” [CNN / Tom LoBianco, Manu Raju]
The senior Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Elijah Cummings, said that if Flynn indeed committed a felony of “knowingly falsifying or concealing a material fact,” it “may result in fines and/or up to five years imprisonment.” Chaffetz said that any improper payments should be recovered, at least. [New York Times / Emmarie Huetteman, Adam Goldman]
This afternoon, the White House blocked an Oversight Committee request for files on Flynn, including a request to see his application for security clearance. [BBC]

Arkansas’s double execution

The Washington Post / Contributor" />

As of last night, Arkansas has executed three death row inmates as part of a legally disputed plan to jam through eight executions before the state’s supply of lethal injection drugs expires. [Associated Press / Andrew DeMillo, Kelly P. Kissel]
Last Thursday, it carried out the first of the eight — and the first for the state since 2005. Ledell Lee was given a lethal injection that night after the US Supreme Court rejected requests to stay the execution at the last minute (Lee insisted to his death that he was innocent, and was denied DNA testing that could have exonerated him). He was pronounced dead at 11:56 pm; his execution warrant would have expired four minutes later. [Washington Post / Mark Berman]
Last night, Arkansas executed Marcel Williams and Jack Jones Jr., both of whom submitted last-minute appeals to the US Supreme Court that were rejected. It was the first double execution carried out in the US since 2000. [NPR / Camila Domonoske, Barbara Campbell]
The two men were executed on the same gurney roughly three hours apart. Williams’s execution was briefly delayed because officials botched Jones’s. Attorneys for Williams alleged that Jones “was moving his lips and gulping for air.” [ABC News / Associated Press / Andrew DeMillo, Kelly P. Kissel]
In Oklahoma in 2014, the last time a state tried to execute two inmates in one day, the first inmate writhed on the gurney before dying from a heart attack — causing the second scheduled execution to be stayed. The botched Oklahoma execution involved the same controversial sedative used in Arkansas this week, midazolam. [NPR / Camila Domonoske]
That sedative, and its presence in several botched executions, has been a key element in the protracted legal battles over Arkansas’s plan. [Mother Jones / Nathalie Baptiste]
Ultimately, those legal challenges resulted in staying four of the eight planned executions. Arkansas is scheduled to execute one more inmate on Thursday. [Associated Press / Andrew DeMillo, Kelly P. Kissel]

Miscellaneous

Basically every other person in New Hampshire is a state representative, and it appears the creator of Reddit's hyper-misogynistic Red Pill forum is an NH state rep too. [Daily Beast / Bonnie Bacarisse]
One big loser if Trump gets his wish and corporate taxes are cut to 15 percent: affordable housing, which depends heavily on corporate tax credits that a low rate would make much less valuable. [Stateline / Elaine Povich]
On the rise and fall of the saxophone in pop music. [The Outline / Kelsey McKinney]
Leaked news footage of a Brazilian pink dolphin being killed by fishermen sparked a huge uproar and caused a government crackdown. Which is exactly what the Brazilian TV host and wildlife advocate who set up and filmed the dolphin killing wanted. [Vice / Sarah Jeong]
Today I learned that Michigan gained the Upper Peninsula as part of the settlement of a border war it waged with Ohio over a slice of territory around Toledo. [Now I Know / Dan Lewis]

Verbatim

“Flutes are an incredibly wack instrument. Possibly the wackest.” [GQ / Miles Raymer]
“‘Last Resort’ is the anthem of the owned-but-owning it, the internet loser's performative cry of pain, the cuck's winking lament.” [BuzzFeed / Joseph Bernstein]
“I’m an adult, I have a brain.” [Ginelle V to the Atlantic / Tara García Mathewson]
“It was this spirit of enquiry that first led him to the South Pacific. But in the beginning, it wasn’t rare wild dogs that lured him there. It was pigs — specifically intersexual ones.” [Huffington Post / Dominique Mosbergen]
“Juicero’s Press is an incredibly complicated piece of engineering. Of the hundreds of consumer products I’ve taken apart over the years, this is easily among the top 5 percent on the complexity scale.” [Bolt / Ben Einstein]

Watch this: How sanctuary cities actually work

President Trump says he wants to strip funding from so-called “sanctuary cities,” but what exactly do these cities do? [Vox / Dara Lind, Liz Scheltens]

Is Singapore’s “miracle” health care system the answer for America?

What a federal government shutdown actually means

The vinyl resurgence is real, but it won’t save the record industry

North Korea’s growing nuclear threat, in one statistic

The dark allure of conspiracy theories, explained by a psychologist

Naomi Shavin | Vox

Vox Sentences: Taped, locked up, and held for ransom

Comey as you are, as you were, as a known enemy

Don't you dare mess with the NHS

There are some things Jeff Sessions will prosecute aggressively

Miscellaneous

Verbatim

Watch this: Why the world is worried about Turkey

Read more

Vox Sentences: So … that happened

Trump to Comey: You’re fired

South Korea elects Moon, and sunshine (policy) could be on its way

New H. naledi data changes what we know about our evolutionary tree

Miscellaneous

Verbatim

Watch this: Why the Myers-Briggs test is totally meaningless

Read more

Vox Sentences: Emmanuel Macron won the French election. Now comes the hard part.

France’s new President Macron has his work cut out for him

The new Texas law against sanctuary cities

82 more Chibok girls have been released by Boko Haram

Miscellaneous

Verbatim

Watch this: Where in the world should we send Vox's Johnny Harris?

Read more

Vox Sentences: Oui on peut

Puerto Rico is officially bankrupt — now comes the hard part

Bataille de France

The House health care bill faces an uncertain Senate fate

Miscellaneous

Verbatim

Watch this: What happens when you bring meditation into public schools

Read more

Vox Sentences: Trump is pretty sure he’s got this whole Middle East peace thing in the bag

GOP: If at first you don’t succeed, do exactly the same thing again

Another day, another vague peacemaking promise from Trump

No one man should have all that power

Miscellaneous

Verbatim

Watch this: Why your old phones collect in a junk drawer of sadness

Read more

Vox Sentences: Trump’s budget cuts sleep with the fishes

Government funding agreement reached

News on North Korea

Puerto Rico finds itself in debt, in protest

Miscellaneous

Verbatim

Watch this: How a melancholy egg yolk conquered Japan

Read more

Vox Sentences: It’s been almost 100 days. But who’s counting?

Brazil’s nationwide anti-austerity strikes

What we talk about when we talk about CRISPR

99 days down; 1,362 to go

Miscellaneous

Verbatim

Watch this: 100 days of Trump’s flailing presidency

Read more

Vox Sentences: Mike Flynn has 99 problems, and Russia is at least 4 of them

…And now the Pentagon is investigating Michael Flynn

Remember when Putin promised not to meddle in the French election?

NAFTA lives another day

Miscellaneous

Verbatim

Watch this: Firing Bill O’Reilly doesn’t fix Fox News

Read more

Vox Sentences: More like NaahhFTA, amirite?

Really stretching the definition of “plan” here

Revenge of the sanctuary cities

Trump may withdraw from NAFTA afta all

Miscellaneous

Verbatim

Watch this: The North Korean nuclear threat, explained

Read more

Vox Sentences: The first double execution in the US since 2000

The US slaps new tariffs on Canadian lumber

Michael Flynn may have broken federal law

Arkansas’s double execution

Miscellaneous

Verbatim

Watch this: How sanctuary cities actually work