Vox Sentences: Did the US commit a war crime by bombing a Doctors Without Borders hospital?

The US kills 22 in the bombing of a humanitarian hospital in Afghanistan; the TPP trade deal is finalized; and South Carolina's flooding, explained.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

The United States bombed a hospital

MSF/Pool/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

• On Saturday, the US bombed a hospital operated by Doctors Without Borders (internationally known as Medicins Sans Frontieres, or MSF) in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing 22 innocent people.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• The US was bombing Kunduz after it was retaken by the Taliban last week, marking a major setback for Afghanistan.

  [CNN / Jethro Mullen]

• But that doesn't explain why it hit the MSF hospital — especially because the strike appears to have targeted the hospital specifically. (The other buildings in the compound weren't damaged.)

  [Medecins Sans Frontieres]

• Initially, the US said that it dropped the bombs because US forces were threatened at the hospital (even though the Afghan president claimed that an American general had called him to apologize for the strikes).

  [New York Times / Alissa J. Rubin]

• Today, the US changed its story and said Afghan soldiers had called in the airstrike — and the US will now investigate what happened.

  [AP / Robert Burns]

• That's not enough for MSF, which is calling for an independent investigation — and pointing out that the US could very well have committed a war crime by bombing the hospital.

  [AFP / Anuj Chopra]

• Bombing a hospital counts as a war crime if it's being deliberately targeted as a hospital — or if the country bombing it hasn't taken enough care to avoid collateral deaths and injuries in pursuing its military objectives.

  [Think Progress / Beenish Ahmed]

• Even if hitting the hospital was just a tragic mistake, it's a mistake that comes with the territory when one conducts wars by bombing.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

12 Pacific nations: we're down with TPP

Phil Walter/Getty Images

• Trade negotiators in Atlanta announced that they've finally reached an agreement on the Trans-Pacific Partnership — a trade deal between the US and 11 countries around the Pacific.

  [Wall Street Journal / William Mauldin]

• Next, the deal has to be approved by Congress within 90 days of formal notice from the president — something that might be tricky in the current political climate.

  [Politico / Victoria Guida and Adam Behsudi]

• For one thing, the populist outsider candidates popular in both parties' presidential campaigns (Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump) both fiercely oppose the deal on protectionist grounds.

  [Vox / Timothy Lee]

• Then there are particular frustrations from particular industries (and politicians): Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), for example, wanted much longer intellectual property protections for a new type of drugs called biologics.

  [Reuters / Krista Hughes and Kevin Krolicki]

• On the other side, global health groups are deeply concerned that the protections the TPP does give to biologics will hike up the cost of expensive but important drugs beyond what developing countries can afford.

  [Vox / Julia Belluz]

• If all of this seems beyond the scope of what you might consider a "trade deal" to be about, you'd be right. TPP does go far beyond conventional trade to address intellectual-property rights, labor rights and currency manipulation. But that's par for the course for trade deals.

  [Vox / Timothy Lee]

A 1,000-year flood?

Sean Rayford/Getty Images

• At least 9 people have died in floods in South Carolina, after extreme rainfall Sunday and continued (decreased) rainfall Monday.

  [CNN / Michael Pearson, Holly Yan and Joe Sutton]

• On Monday afternoon, a dam broke near Columbia, SC — forcing evacuation of some areas.

  [WYFF]

• The rains that caused the flooding weren't part of Hurricane Joaquin, which moved up the Atlantic over the weekend — they happened because of the interaction of Joaquin with a low-pressure storm system to the west, as the Capital Weather Gang explains.

  [Washington Post / Jeff Halverson]

• South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley and others have called this a "1,000-year flood." But events like this are likely to happen more often than once a millennium.

  [NPR / Scott Neuman]

• That phrase is based on the current flooding projection maps for South Carolina, which are tremendously outdated — FEMA has been trying to update them since 1997.

  [R Street Institute / R. J. Lehmann]

• (The obstacle facing FEMA: once residents are told they're at higher risk of flooding, they're mandated to buy flood insurance, and they don't like spending that money.)

• Since sea levels off the South Carolina coast have risen about 6 centimeters since 1997, those flooding projections don't reflect the current risk of flood.

  [NOAA ]

• We can't say that climate change "caused" the flooding. But as Chris Mooney explains, climate change certainly makes this sort of event more common.

  [Washington Post / Chris Mooney]

MISCELLANEOUS

Kids are drinking less and less soda every year — and obesity rates are leveling off too. [NYT / Margot Sanger-Katz]

• This term, the Supreme Court could cripple public-sector unions and force states to give fewer representatives to nonwhite voters.

  [Slate / Dahlia LIthwick and Mark Joseph Stern]

• In other SCOTUS news, the Court won't let lawyers pay professional line-standers to hold spots for them before hearings anymore.

  [Supreme Court of the United States]

• An exceptional profile of "neoreactionaries," a fascinating/terrifying movement that you can think of as the theoretical backbone behind GamerGate and other backlashes-of-the-privileged.

  [The Awl / Park MacDougald]

• Jonathan Ferrell's case sounds too familiar: a young unarmed black man killed by a cop. But then prosecutors actually tried to hold his killer accountable.

  [Slate / Leon Neyfakh]

VERBATIM

"Uh, I don’t know." [Ben Carson on how he'd handle Hurricane Joaquin via Huffington Post / Scott Conroy]

• "Florida Senate candidate admits to sacrificing goat, drinking its blood"

  [AP / Brendan Farrington]

• "Each of the children had a puppy, the sheriff said. The 11-year-old 'wanted to see the 8-year-old’s, and she said no, and then he went and retrieved a gun,' McCoig said."

  [Washington Post / Elahe Izadi]

• "Fewer than 5 percent of the 120,000 gun-related killings in the United States between 2001 and 2010 were perpetrated by people diagnosed with mental illness."

  [Jonathan Metzl and Kenneth MacLeish via Vanderbilt / Amy Wolf]

• "There are strong arguments against setting a gun-free society as the goal, but there are 100,000 arguments in favor — that’s how many of us get shot every year."

  [Washington Post / Fred Hiatt]

WATCH THIS

Cuba’s really terrible internet, explained [YouTube / Johnny Harris]

Vox / Johnny Harris

Will you join us?

Our biggest supporters are our readers — and we’re so grateful to everyone who has made a contribution during our September campaign. We’re less than 1,000 contributions away from reaching our goal for the month, which in turn will allow us to say yes more often when our incredible journalists come to us with questions they want to answer and projects they want to pursue. Will you make a contribution before the month ends and support our policy coverage through 2024 and beyond?

One-Time Monthly Annual

$5/month

$10/month

$25/month

$50/month

Other

$

Yes, I'll give $5/month

Yes, I'll give $5/month

We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. You can also contribute via