Vox Sentences: Finally, you too can be down with TPP

Nation grinds to a halt as Americans pore over 600-page trade agreement.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

The TPP's coming-out party

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

• It's here! The countries involved in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement have finally released the text. It's 600 pages, but the Washington Post helpfully built a searchable version.

  [Washington Post / Philip Bump]

• The TPP is enormously complicated, and even the experts are still working through it. This early rundown for the Financial Times is the best out there so far.

  [Financial Times / Shawn Donnan]

• Many of the progressive groups that already opposed TPP — including Internet-rights groups, environmentalists, and unions — don't need time to review. They're coming out full-throatedly with a message best encapsulated by (of course) Bernie Sanders: "It's worse than I thought."

  [Bernie Sanders]

• The most broadly objected-to portion of the TPP is the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) process, which allows companies to sue national governments for laws that harm their "property." You'll be hearing a lot about the ISDS in the months to come.

  [Vox / Timothy Lee]

• There're also concerns about the intellectual-property protections — especially those dealing with medicine.

  [FiveThirtyEight / Anna Maria Barry-Jester]

• Largely, though, anti-corporate groups simply suspect corporations had too much influence over the deal — as graphics like this one, about TPP lobbying by industry groups years before the deal came out, insinuate.

  [Sunlight Foundation / Lee Drutman]

• The US also signed several side deals with Southeast Asian countries, including ones in Vietnam and Malaysia that require the countries to legalize unions.

  [New York Times / Jackie Calmes]

• That said, as this article about Guatemala points out, a trade deal can "legalize" unions but it can't necessarily protect them.

  [International Business Times / Cole Stangler and Maria Gallucci]

• Don't worry. You have several more months to figure all this out. Congress won't vote on the TPP until spring at the earliest.

  [Washington Post / Philip Bump]

We still don't know why the US bombed that hospital

MSF

• Medecins Sans Frontieres has released its preliminary investigation into the US bombing of a MSF hospital in Kabul last month.

  [Medicins Sans Frontieres]

• It includes a pair of wrenching aerial photographs showing the hospital before and after the bombing. You can see them above.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• The MSF report offers one clue as to why the US might have bombed the hospital: MSF was treating two men who they discovered were Taliban officials.

  [Emptywheel / Marcy Wheeler]

• That, of course, doesn't make it legal to bomb a hospital.

  [ThinkProgress / Beenish Ahmed]

• The report also contradicts earlier US claims about the circumstances surrounding the bombing, including the claim that there was fighting nearby.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• The Department of Defense was supposed to release its own report this week. It hasn't yet. This might be because it's brought in a general to conduct a fuller investigation.

  [New York Times / Mujib Mashal]

The trial of an alleged serial rapist cop

Sue Ogrocki/Associated Press

• The trial of Daniel Holtzclaw, who is accused of sexually assaulting 13 black women while on duty as an Oklahoma City police officer, began this week.

• If you haven't heard about Holtzclaw, you should read up on the case. This BuzzFeed article from last year is a good place to start.

  [BuzzFeed / Jessica Testa]

• Holtzclaw's trial is already drawing controversy: all 12 jurors selected are white, drawing the consternation of the local NAACP.

  [KOCO / Patty Santos]

• The research on how race influences jurors and defendants is surprisingly equivocal. But it's certainly not a good look for a trial of a white defendant whose victims were all black.

  [The Jury Expert / Samuel R. Sommers]

• Over the weekend, the AP published a massive investigation into police sexual assault. It leads with Holtzclaw, but includes details of some of the 1,000(!) other cases uncovered over the last six years.

  [AP / Matt Sedensky and Nomaan Merchant]

• Mind you, that is just the tippy-tip of the iceberg. The AP was only looking at police who got badges stripped — which only happens, by design, when the officer's behavior is too extreme to be protected by his department.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

MISCELLANEOUS

Punishments like time-outs don't actually reduce behavior problems in kids. Talking to kids about why they're lashing out, however, does. [Mother Jones / Katherine Reynolds Lewis]

• This legal brief from the Washington Redskins contains a wonderful litany of the most offensive registered trademarks currently in existence.

  [Washington Post / Ian Shapira]

• This is definitely the first case I've heard about of a missing child being found because he tried to apply to college.

  [Washington Post / Lindsey Bever]

• Here's a good statistical breakdown of which college students use Adderall. They tend to go to selective schools, but have low GPAs there.

  [FiveThirtyEight / Emma Pierson]

• Most American Christians now say that homosexuality should be accepted by society.

  [Washington Post / Niraj Chokshi]

VERBATIM

"In interviews with his biographer, [George H.W.] Bush said that Mr. Cheney had built 'his own empire' and asserted too much 'hard-line' influence within George W. Bush’s White House in pushing for the use of force around the world. Mr. Rumsfeld, the elder Mr. Bush said, was an 'arrogant fellow' who could not see how others thought and 'served the president badly.'" [NYT / Peter Baker]

• "Political accountability is not necessarily undermined by foreign aid: even illiterate and semi-literate folks in rural Bangladesh appear to be quite sophisticated about how they evaluate their leaders."

  [Yale Insights / Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak]

• "The company struggled with high real-estate costs and wasted inventory. Raw organic produce is highly perishable, and Organic Avenue’s garbage cans were known among Dumpster divers to be filled with juice and food that was still edible past the sell-by dates."

  [NYT / Katherine Rosman]

• "I’m aware that Radiohead have never had a fucking bad review. I reckon if Thom Yorke fucking shit into a light bulb and started blowing it like an empty beer bottle it’d probably get 9 out of 10 in fucking Mojo."

  [Noel Gallagher to Esquire / Alex Bilmes]

• "People who push back on this don't understand the reality that overweight kids almost certainly become obese adults. Whatever happens when kids are young is almost always irreversible."

  [Washington Post / Roberto Ferdman]

WATCH THIS

Guy Fawkes Day: explained [YouTube / Carlos Waters]

19th century wood engraving / Getty Images

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