Vox Sentences: What little we know about the attack in Tunisia

1. 19 dead in Tunisia

A group of Tunisians conduct a protest against the terrorist attack at the Bardo Museum on March 18, 2015 in front of the Tunisian National Theater in Tunis, Tunisia. (Yassine Gaidi/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

• Gunmen in the Tunisian capital of Tunis entered an art museum and killed 19 people, injuring at least 20 others.

  [NYT / David Kirkpatrick]

• Two of the attackers were killed, while another three escaped.

  [WSJ / Tamer El-Ghobashy and Radhouane Addala]

• Reports of the exact death toll vary; the AP puts the number at 20, and the New York Times says 19.

  [AP / Paul Schemm]

• No group has claimed responsibility for the attacks yet.

  [The Daily Beast / Jamie Dettmer]

• EU foreign-policy chief Federica Mogherini issued a statement blaming the attack on ISIS before correcting it to just blame "terrorist organizations."

  [Newsweek / Jack Moore]

• Ever since Tunisia's dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali was ousted following mostly nonviolent protests in 2011 — an event that kicked off the broader Arab Spring — the country has had to deal with low-level violence, much of it from Islamist groups.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• And thousands of Tunisians have gone to Syria or Iraq to fight for ISIS, though its operations in Tunisia itself have been quite limited.

  [NYT / David Kirkpatrick]

• Tunisia's parliament is currently governed by a coalition including both a secular party and a moderate Islamist one; the government formed after elections is generally regarded as free and fair; the president is also a secularist.

  [AFP]

• All told, it's been the one country that made it out of the Arab Spring more or less okay and with the beginnings of a stable democracy.

  [Time / Vivienne Walt]

• Most of those killed in the attack were tourists, dealing a major setback to the country's efforts to revive tourism, one of its biggest industries.

  [CNN / Barry Neild]

2. Come back, Bibi

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declares victory at his campaign headquarters. (Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images)

• While the outcome looked murky last night, it has become clear that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will stay in office.

  [NYT / Isabel Kershner]

• With 99 percent of the vote in, his conservative Likud party looked set to get around 30 seats, six more than its nearest rival, the center-left Zionist Union.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp and Katy Lee]

Vox / Joe Posner

• Netanyahu is likely to create a coalition of right-wing parties, with the centrist Kulanu to put them over the 61-seat threshold for a majority in Israel's parliament.

  [The Guardian / Peter Beaumont]

• That's bad news for the peace process; while Netanyahu's former coalition included centrist parties supportive of a peace deal, he'll now face no domestic pressure to negotiate with the Palestinian leadership.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• Also worrying was Netanyahu's hawkish turn at the end of the campaign, when he came out against a Palestinian state and engaged in some ugly race-baiting about Arab-Israeli voters.

  [The Atlantic / Jeffrey Goldberg]

• Noah Feldman notes that Netanyahu's victory also came at the expense of further-right parties; that's encouraging, as far-right parties overtaking Likud is a recipe for total disaster.

  [Bloomberg View / Noah Feldman]

• Polls before the election showed a tie between Likud and Zionist Union, if not a slight edge for the latter; they obviously turned out to be quite wrong.

  [FiveThirtyEight / Carl Bialik]

3. Obama edges closer to going full Bulworth

President Obama with Australian prime minister Tony Abbott, whose mandatory voting system the president finds intriguing. Also they're holding animals of some kind. (Andrew Taylor/G20 Australia via Getty Images)

• President Obama floated the idea of making voting mandatory in a town-hall event in Cleveland.

  [AP]

• Obama: "It would be transformative if everybody voted. … That would counteract [campaign] money more than anything. If everybody voted, then it would completely change the political map in this country."

  [Washington Times / Dave Boyer]

• The closest he came to outright endorsing the idea was saying that compulsory voting "may end up being a better strategy in the short term" than limiting campaign donations.

• Compulsory voting works exactly as advertised; while it's unclear if voting by mail or voting on weekends increases turnout, the threat of a fine definitely does.

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

• Given that the US electorate is whiter, older, richer, and better-educated than the country as a whole, you might expect Democrats to gain from compulsory voting.

  [Vox / Ezra Klein]

• Sure enough, that's what happened in Australia: one recent study found that the left-leaning Australian Labor Party gains 7 to 10 percentage points in elections because of the policy.

  [Anthony Fowler]

• But a 2001 paper concluded that in the US, no party would gain from the change: "Analyses of survey data show that no objectively achieved increase in turnout — including compulsory voting — would be a boon to progressive causes or Democratic candidates … Simply put, voters differ minimally from all citizens; outcomes would not change if everyone voted."

  [British Journal of Political Science / Benjamin Highton and Raymond Wolfinger]

• The case for mandatory voting: "The probability that any individual voter can alter the outcome of an election is effectively zero … The problem is that if each person were to reach such a rational conclusion no one would vote, and the system would collapse. Mandatory voting solves that collective action problem."

  [Bloomberg / Peter Orszag]

• The case against: "The median voter is incompetent at politics. The citizens who abstain are, on average, even more incompetent. If we force everyone to vote, the electorate will become even more irrational and misinformed."

  [NYT / Jason Brennan]

4. Misc.

• Paul Ryan should force Republican presidential candidates to talk about poverty.

  [Slate / John Dickerson]

• White nationalists are using Amazon and Paypal to fund their organizations; why aren't the companies stopping them?

  [Washington Post / Caitlin Dewey]

• President Obama's budget would stop cities from issuing tax-exempt bonds to pay for sports stadiums. But are teams just going to find another way to gouge cities for cash?

  [Slate / Henry Grabar]

• Do you have $34 million and bad taste in '80s gangster movies? Then you may be interested to learn that the mansion from Scarface is for sale.

  [Kottke / Susannah Breslin]

• A treatment known as "cold caps" is showing promise in helping cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy keep their hair.

  [NYT / Tara Parker-Pope]

5. Verbatim

• "'We should be proud that there are more minorities in the Knesset,' said Jonathan, a young activist clad in a royal blue Labor Party t-shirt featuring a Shepard Fairey-style portrait of Herzog gazing thoughtfully into the distance."

  [New Republic / Matthew Duss]

• "Russian police say they're looking for the intellectually minded miscreants who graffitied 'Kant is a moron' — along with a flower and heart — on the philosopher's home outside Kaliningrad."

  [The Atlantic / David Graham]

• "Abu Azrael — Father of the Angel of Death — is the black-bearded, blade-wielding embodiment of the retribution many Iraqis want against brutal jihadists who seized swathes of their country."

  [AFP / WG Dunlop]

• "The premise of the book could easily play as straight farce: two self-involved and argumentative men argue with each other about … themselves."

  [The Atlantic / Leslie Jamison]

• "That guy was a sex addict, I found out, and that’s always really fun at first, when you don’t know yet and you’re like, 'Oh my God, I’m the prettiest girl in the world,' and you’re like, 'No, he would fuck this table.'"

  [Amy Schumer via NY Mag / Maggie Lange]

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