Vox Sentences: How did Texas Presbyterian screw up this badly?

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1. Another American with Ebola

A hazmat worker with Protect Envinronmental gestures to a co-worker at The Village Bend East apartment complex where a second health care worker who has tested positive for the Ebola virus resides on October 15, 2014 in Dallas, Texas. (Mike Stone / Getty Images)

• Another nurse in Dallas has tested positive for Ebola; she was recently on a flight, but her fellow passengers would have needed to make direct contact with her to catch the virus.

• Nurses at Texas Presbyterian, the Dallas hospital at the epicenter of the US Ebola cases, say they were made to treat Thomas Eric Duncan, the first US Ebola patient, without proper protective gear.

• The largest US nurse's union might picket hospitals with inadequate Ebola training.

• The Ebola-fighting effort in West Africa is woefully undersupplied.

• The CDC plans to contain it by tracking anyone who's been exposed to by contact with current patients. This video explains what exactly that means.

• But while the situation appears to be worsening, the worst thing we could do is panic.

• Someone had to clean that airplane cabin the Ebola patient flew in. Here's what that's like.

• Suffice it to say, you do not need to be wearing a hazmat suit to the airport.

2. The Iraq chemical weapons debacle

Army Chief of Staff Gen. Raymond Odierno; according to a report by C. J. Chivers in the New York Times, the Army and both the Bush and Obama administrations covered up the existence of chemical weapons endangering US troops in Iraq. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

• ICYMI, last night the New York Times dropped a blockbuster story showing that US troops found pre-Gulf War chemical weapons in Iraq, were injured by them, and were denied treatment because the Bush and Obama administrations wanted to keep it secret.

• At least some researchers are arguing that ISIS already has some of these weapons and used them on Kurds over the summer.

• "If you're not defecating on yourself or foaming at the mouth, there's nothing we can do for you": veterans exposed to sarin and mustard gas explain what happened and how the military bungled their care.

• When Saddam Hussein was using these weapons against Iran, the US fed him intelligence about Iranian troop positions, knowing full well those troops would be gassed.

• Here's how the Iraq Study Group described Iraq's Al Muthanna facility, formerly the center of its chemical weapons program and presumed source of the leftover weapons, after the US invasion: "a stockpile of old, damaged, and contaminated chemical munitions (sealed in bunkers), a wasteland full of destroyed chemical munitions, razed structures, and unusable war-ravaged facilities."

• State Dept. spokesperson Jen Psaki commented in July on the usability of the weapons: it "would be very difficult, if not impossible, to safely use this for military purposes or, frankly, to move it."

• No, this does not vindicate the Bush administration's case for war. The US didn't invade a country over decades old chemical weapons its own companies made.

3. Get ready to fly nuclear planes

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• Lockheed Martin has announced it could have a nuclear fusion power generator ready in 10 years.

• Regular nuclear power works by splitting atoms apart ("fission"); fusion generates energy by fusing atoms together, just like the Sun does.

• Note that this is NOT the same thing as cold fusion: Lockheed's plan requires getting things very very hot, whereas cold fusion purports to work at room temperature (I mean, it's in the name).

• In theory, fusion reactors should be much safer than normal reactors; indeed, they should be safe enough to power airplanes, dramatically reducing gasoline requirements.

• The big reason to be skeptical: for fusion to work you need to create a very strong magnetic field, which could require more energy than fusion winds up generating.

• And it might not be ready in time to stop catastrophic climate change.

4. The rise of the planet of the legally protected apes

• New York's highest court is considering a habeas corpus petition hoping to free a chimp named Tommy.

• Tommy's owners are a couple who house 11 chimps they say they "rescued from abusive or neglectful homes" and insist that Tommy's cage "exceeds federal and state standards and is inspected every year."

• But that's not good enough for Steven Wise, the animal rights lawyer bringing the suit, who is inspired in part by the 1772 case of the slave James Somerset, in which a British court ruled he was a person rather than property; Wise wrote a whole book about Somerset, if you're interested.

• Wise's suit is fairly unprecedented in the practical legal world, but in legal academia it's not that foreign an idea.

• There's a pretty strong scientific reason to think the line between humans and Great Apes isn't as significant as we might imagine.

• Peter Singer explains what personhood would mean in practice: not chimps running loose in the streets, but a modicum of legal protection for creatures that can think and feel.

• Not radical enough for you? Check out Gary Francione, an animal rights "abolitionist," who makes the case that the movement to protect Great Apes promotes discrimination between animals based on intellect.

5. Misc.

• According to the New York Times, the odds Democrats keep the Senate are roughly the same as the odds a blackjack dealer at a casino busts.

• Places where parents are stricter tend to have more inequality. Interesting? Totally. Causal? No idea.

• Obama's picked the head of the ACLU's anti-mass incarceration campaign to run the civil rights division of the Justice Department; she's also a huge opponent of the drug war and wants to decriminalize marijuana.

• A documentarian went around and asked people what it's like to have the last name Hitler.

• Some would ask "why would you create a futures market in human eggs?" but Robin Hanson asks "why would you not?"

• Run the Jewels, one of the finest rap acts currently working, is rerecording their second album using only cat sounds.

6. Verbatim

• "One man with a goatee and a glass of wine, who identifies as an atheist, says he wishes people would stick to the big issues like stopping overwhelming non-white immigration before getting into the topics like theocracy, deeper cultural identity, or conspiracy theories about Jews."

• "The drug deal that led to Jesse Webster's arrest was abandoned before it could be carried out, and no cocaine was ever seized to substantiate the kilos attributed to him — enough to compel life in prison."

• "Like pollution, inequality without bound is inconsistent with the efficient functioning of free markets."

• "In a 2006 Florida case, a girl testified she wasn't financially or emotionally equipped to raise a child — a claim, the judge ruled, that proved she wasn't mature enough to choose abortion."

• "Though massive donations to Harvard or the Central Park Conservancy may make the world a nicer place, their impact on the quality of nutrition enjoyed by people in poverty is likely to be marginal at best."

• "The notion that there is an established connection between mental illness and creativity is far from undisputed."

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