Vox Sentences: Why the US is sending troops to Cameroon

The US puts boots on the ground in Cameroon to fight Boko Haram; either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders won the debate in a landslide; and a harsh winter for European refugees.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

300 troops to Cameroon

Reinnier Kaze/AFP/Getty Images

• President Obama announced today that he's deploying 300 troops to Cameroon, to assist in the fight against Islamist insurgents Boko Haram.

  [ABC News / Justin Fishel]

• Obama formally notified Congress of the deployment under the War Powers Act.

  [White House / Barack Obama]

• In theory, he now has to get approval from Congress within 60-90 days; in practice, Obama (like his predecessors) has not accepted the constitutionality of the Act, and has not always followed it to a T.

  [Foreign Policy / Elias Groll and Siobhan O'Grady]

• You may remember Boko Haram as the group that kidnapped hundreds of Nigerian girls last summer; they've been engaged in an insurgency against Nigeria since 2009. This year, the Nigerian military's failure to contain them has become painfully apparent.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• (It will not surprise you to learn that Nigeria's governance problems stem in part from the legacy of colonialism, and the nonsensical carving-up of territory by European powers.)

  [Vox / Max Fisher and G. Pascal Zachary]

• The other reason Boko Haram is arguably more of a threat than ever: earlier this year, they affiliated themselves with ISIS. (And they're trying to get al-Shabaab in Somalia to come too.)

  [BBC]

• The US has already boosted foreign aid to Nigeria to fight Boko Haram, though it was reluctant to entrust serious equipment (like drones) to the Nigerian government.

  [Foreign Policy / Dan De Luce and Siobhan O'Grady]

• Boko Haram recently began launching attacks in Nigeria's neighbor of Cameroon. And the US appears to trust Cameroon enough to base ground troops there.

  [CNN / Ngala Killian Chintom and Greg Botelho]

One of these two people definitely won the debate

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

• The Democratic presidential candidates debated last night! Political pundits seemed to think that Hillary Clinton won the debate handily, performing very well while none of her opponents — including Bernie Sanders — looked very good at all.

  [Washington Post / James Hohmann and Elise Viebeck]

• Of course, most pundits also thought Donald Trump was toast in August. By most objective measures, it appears that Bernie Sanders won.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop ]

• The high point for both candidates came when Sanders stepped in to defend Clinton from attacks over her "damn emails." He looked like he was taking the high road; she reminded Democrats just how natural it is to defend her against Republican attacks.

  [Mischiefs of Faction / Jonathan Ladd]

• With the emails question dismissed, the bulk of the debate was a battle of ideas — including two legitimately different visions of when capitalism is a good thing.

  [Vox / Ezra Klein]

• Credit for this goes partly to Anderson Cooper, whose questions were for the most part very strong (though CNN received well-deserved criticism for having its anchors of color ask the questions about "ethnic" issues).

  [Slate / Justin Peters]

• But while Dems pat themselves on the back over the debate's high-mindedness, it's worth noting that the TV networks' focus groups (who all said Sanders won) made their decisions entirely on style.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• As for the other guys: Martin O'Malley did a solid job. But solid wasn't enough to break into the top tier. And now, he's running out of reasons to stay in the race.

  [National Journal / S. V. Date]

• Lincoln Chafee (in the words of Jonathan Chait) "looked like he wandered into the building as if his yacht had been lost at sea for weeks."

  [NY Mag / Jonathan Chait]

• And Jim Webb bragged about killing a man in Vietnam — a line that was met with awkward silence among the Democratic audience, despite the apparent expectation at Fox News studios that people would stand up and cheer an act of war heroism.

  [Dan Riffle via Twitter]

The refugee backlash

Sean Gallup/Getty Images

• Remember the European refugee crisis? It's still going on — even though, as winter approaches, it's going to get even more deadly to cross into Europe.

  [BuzzFeed / David Mack]

• And it doesn't appear that European governments have figured out a permanent solution, either.

• Angela Merkel, the German chancellor who tried to take the lead on welcoming refugees, has been rewarded for her generosity by a precipitous decline in her poll numbers.

  [Business Insider / Mike Bird]

• Worse, as of last week, the German government estimated there had been 500 attacks on migrants' homes in Germany since the beginning of 2015.

  [BBC ]

• Disputes between migrants are also occurring. The town of Calden in Germany, which is now hosting a tent city of 1400 refugees, saw a fight between an Albanian and a Pakistani last week escalate into a riot that put 3 people into the hospital.

  [Washington Post / Anthony Faiola and Souad Mekhennet]

• This sounds horrific, and it is.Tent cities, and other forms of refugee camps, are incredibly difficult and dehumanizing places to live.

  [Boston Review / Elizabeth Dunn]

MISCELLANEOUS

Al Gore thinks socially responsible companies aren't just better for the world, but more profitable too. So he started a hedge fund to prove it. [The Atlantic / James Fallows]

• Politicians are getting more polarized. But regular Americans aren't.

  [Washington Post / Seth Hill and Chris Tausanovitch]

• The case for prosecuting parents who leave their guns unlocked — and their children vulnerable.

  [Slate / Dahlia Lithwick]

• Have astronomers found a super-advanced alien civilization on a planet 1,500 lightyears away? Well, uh, maybe.

  [Slate / Phil Plait]

• The cast of Hamilton rapping in a cypher, accompanied by the Roots, is exactly as great as you'd expect it to be.

  [Entertainment Weekly / Isabella Biedenharn]

VERBATIM

"A former meerkat expert at London Zoo has been ordered to pay compensation to a monkey handler she attacked with a wine glass in a love spat over a llama-keeper." [AP]

• "Looking back through art history, it’s clear that thinking Renoir sucks is a popular and well-established sentiment."

  [The Atlantic / Kriston Capps]

• "'The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.' Woman in a Meeting: 'I have to say — I’m sorry — I have to say this. I don’t think we should be as scared of non-fear things as maybe we are? If that makes sense? Sorry, I feel like I’m rambling.'"

  [Washington Post / Alexandra Petri]

• "He'd make me sit at the kitchen table while he smoked with the timer on and he'd say the same thing over and over to me: 'I don't see myself in you, and I want you to tell me why that is.' What do you say to that when you're 6 years old?"

  [Ryan Murphy to Hollywood Reporter / Lacey Rose]

• "If a sprawling Pulitzer Prize-nominated feature in one of the nation’s oldest newspapers can disappear from the web, anything can."

  [The Atlantic / Adrienne LaFrance]

WATCH THIS

Syria's war: Who is fighting and why [YouTube / Max Fisher and Johnny Harris]

Vox / Johnny Harris

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