Vox Sentences: Did ISIS bomb a Russian passenger plane?

Lots of rumors & few facts on the Russian plane crash; a not-great election night for Democrats; and a historic China-Taiwan meeting.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Speculation

(Anadolu Agency via Getty News Images)

• A Russian plane crashed in Egypt over the weekend, and 224 people were killed.

  [Vox / Sarah Kliff and Zack Beauchamp]

• Today, speculation started bubbling up about the plane's demise. First, the British government declared that the plane "may well have been brought down" by a bomb.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• Britain has totally halted flights into and out of the airport that the Russian plane left from, citing safety concerns.

  [New York Times / Stephen Castle]

• Unnamed US officials appeared to endorse the British theory and then some: intelligence sources told reporters that they had reason to believe ISIS's affiliate in the region brought down the plane.

  [AP / Ken Dilanian]

• Right now, all of this is speculative. No one's seen forensic testing of the crash yet — the rumors are based on "sketchy" intercepted communications, in the words of the New York Times's Matt Apuzzo.

  [Matt Apuzzo via Twitter]

• And some people who might have more information — like Congressman Adam Schiff — are warning people to be "cautious" with the rumors, implying they have reason to believe they're untrue.

  [Rep. Adam Schiff via Twitter]

• ISIS, for what it's worth, have been claiming since the plane went down that it was their doing, but few people believed them.

  [Reuters / Lin Noueihed and Omar Fahmy]

• In part, this is because it's uncharacteristic for the group. Up until this point, they've focused on getting and holding territory — not flashy, resource-intensive acts of international terrorism.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

A small red tide

(Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)

• Republican and Tea Party favorite Matt Bevin won the governorship of Kentucky.

  [Louisville Courier-Journal / Joseph Gerth]

• Bevin ran on a promise to dismantle the state health care exchange and Medicaid expansion his Democratic predecessor, Steve Beshear, had set up in the state — though even before the ballots were counted, he was already soft-pedaling that promise.

  [Politico / Rachana Pradhan and Paul Demko]

• Bevin is Kentucky's second Republican governor in four decades. His election underlines just how dismally hollowed out the Democratic Party has become at the state level during the Obama years.

  [Vox / Ezra Klein]

• Progressive ballot initiatives didn't fare so well last night: Legal pot in Ohio failed (though at least in part because of the weird way the plan would have worked...)

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• ...and the Houston anti-discrimination ordinance known to conservative critics as the "bathroom ordinance" was struck down by a 2-1 margin, which should probably prompt some soul searching among the national organizations that poured money into the campaign.

  [Huffington Post / Amanda Terkel]

• It's tempting to tie this all together — as many pundits did — and conclude the 2015 election showed that social liberals are pushing too hard for change.

  [The Atlantic / Molly Ball]

• But it's important to remember these are only a few data points — and that it's not all that surprising that Kentucky, in particular, elected a governor whose party aligns with its presidential votes.

  [Dave Weigel via Twitter]

China and Taiwan are getting dinner — and splitting the check

(Max Fisher with Getty)

• The heads of government for China and Taiwan will meet over the weekend for the first time since 1945 — when the country was still in the middle of the civil war between Communists and Nationalists that eventually forced the Nationalists (a.k.a. the Kuomintang) to flee to Taiwan in 1949.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• Ever since then, China and Taiwan have been independent in all but name. Each claims to own the entire Chinese mainland and the island of Taiwan. This has certain awkward diplomatic consequences.

  [The Economist]

• That ontological awkwardness is the main reason the two leaders haven't met in so long. And their dinner over the weekend is carefully managed: They're being referred to as leaders rather than presidents, and they have agreed in advance to split the check.

  [The Diplomat / Shannon Tiezzi]

• The meeting isn't likely to resolve much. It's more of a show of support for the outgoing Taiwanese president, who has helped lead the Kuomintang and Taiwan to a friendlier stance toward China.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• (One side effect of this: Taiwanese are beginning to uncover and reckon with some of the atrocities the Kuomintang committed in the civil war.)

  [New York Times / Michael Forsythe]

• Unfortunately for China, though, next month's Taiwanese elections are likely to replace the Kuomintang-led government with a new one, led by a party that is much less friendly to China — and stops just short of calling for outright independence (something China has promised to go to war over).

  [Washington Post / Timothy S. Rich]

MISCELLANEOUS

A selection of jaded New York Times headlines, all using the phrases "Yeah, right," "Get over it," "Hardly," and "Not so much." There are many! [Harper's Magazine]

• The share of Americans who make good money but barely save it is sizable — and growing.

  [Quartz / Allison Schrager]

• A new study showing mortality rates spiking for a large group of middle-aged white Americans has caused a massive stir. So why did leading medical journals reject it?

  [Washington Post / Joel Achenbach and Lenny Bernstein]

• The Cleveland Torso murders were a sensational story in the 1930s. They were also a preventable result of the region's extreme Depression-era poverty.

  [Vice / Clare Malone]

• Bad news for Ben Carson and Ted Cruz: Republican primary voters in blue states count more.

  [FiveThirtyEight / David Wasserman]

VERBATIM

"He was asked about Silicon Valley’s lack of gender diversity by Andrew Ross Sorkin, the male head of DealBook, the finance section of the New York Times, which is edited by a man, whose business is run by a man and whose publisher is a man who will likely appoint one of his three male relatives to be his successor." [BuzzFeed / Matt Zeitlin]

• "The Bible didn’t say you couldn’t smoke weed."

  [Mia Williams to NY Mag / Reeves Wiedeman]

• "Standing in a paddock under a silver maple tree and flanked by 10 of his donkeys—Romper, Stomper, Cocoa and the rest—Mr. Stiert somberly told his students, for instance, that in popular culture, a weak poker player is derided as 'a donkey.' Such terms 'reinforce the donkey as a low-class animal,' he cautioned."

  [WSJ / Jennifer Levitz]

• "You want your suffering to be weirder, more dramatic, more terrible. But lots of people who are reading this understand exactly what you're going through."

  [NY Mag / Heather Havrilesky]

• "Some of the impact philosophy has had, though, has clearly been negative. Marx’s ideas were referenced in the rise of Communism, which was a Bad Thing; Nietzsche has been cited as an influence on National Socialism which was a Very Bad Thing; Ayn Rand gave rise to Objectivists who are, like, really annoying."

  [80,000 Hours / William MacAskill]

WATCH THIS

Vladimir Putin's topless photos, explained [YouTube / Johnny Harris and Amanda Taub]

(Alexey Druzhinin/AFP/Getty Images)

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