Vox Sentences: The politics behind the "knife shower of justice"

1. "Knife shower of justice"

Ambassador Lippert following the attack. (Handout / Getty Images)

• Mark Lippert, the US ambassador to South Korea, was attacked by knife in Seoul on Wednesday night.

  [Vox / Katy Lee and Amanda Taub]

• Lippert underwent two and a half hours of surgery, including 80 stitches to his faces, following the incident.

  [Reuters / James Pearson and Ju-Min Park]

• But he tweeted that he was "doing well and in great spirits … will be back ASAP to advance US-ROK alliance."

  [Mark Lippert]

• Lippert is personally very close to President Obama, for whom he was a Senate aide.

  [Newsweek / Richard Wolffe]

• The assailant, Kim Ki-jong, told reporters the attack was in protest of joint military exercises between the US and Korea this week.

  [NYT / Choe Sang-Hun and Michael Shear]

• Kim is a member of a faction of leftist South Koreans who think the presence of US troops in South Korea, and military cooperation between the two countries in general, is preventing the Korean peninsula from reunifying.

  [CBS News / AP]

• That faction faced a setback in December when a small pro-North Korean, anti-American party was banned and stripped of its seats in parliament; it was the first time a party had been banned since 1958, when South Korea was a dictatorship.

  [NYT / Choe Sang-Hun]

• Kim has a long track record of provocative and/or violent protests, including throwing a concrete block at the Japanese ambassador to South Korea in 2010, setting himself on fire in front of the presidential building in 2007, burning an American flag at the US embassy in 1985, and setting up a memorial for Kim Jung-Il in Seoul upon his death in 2011.

  [BBC]

• True to form, the North Korean government praised the attack, calling it a "knife shower of justice" and "deserved punishment for warmonger United States."

  [Vox / Katy Lee]

2. Wrongful death

Sybrina Fulton, the mother of Trayvon Martin; Samaira Rice, the mother of Tamir Rice; and Lesley McSpadden, the mother of Michael Brown Jr. on December 13, 2014 in Washington, DC. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

• The parents of Michael Brown will file a wrongful death lawsuit against the city of Ferguson and Officer Darren Wilson.

  [Vox / Jenée Desmond-Harris]

• The decision comes a day after the Department of Justice announced it would not prosecute Wilson on civil rights charges.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• A civil suit has a lower burden of proof — there must be a "preponderance of evidence" that Wilson acted wrongly, but it need not be proven "beyond a reasonable doubt."

  [St. Louis Public Radio / Rachel Lippman]

• The most famous precedent for a civil judgment without a criminal conviction is the OJ Simpson case, wherein Simpson was ordered to pay millions in a wrongful death suit despite being found innocent in a murder trial.

  [NYT / B. Drummond Ayres, Jr.]

• The lawsuit comes as the Ferguson police department faces renewed scrutiny following a Justice Department report finding persuasive racial bias. Here are some steps it needs to take to restore public trust.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

3. Hillary update

Hillary Clinton looks off mournfully into the distance. (Kris Connor/Getty Images)

• Hillary Clinton has finally commented on her email scandal: "I want the public to see my email. I asked State to release them. They said they will review them for release as soon as possible."

  [Hillary Clinton]

• The State Department's response: "We will undertake this review as quickly as possible; given the sheer volume of the document set, this review will take some time to complete."

  [ABC News / Jonathan Karl, Dan Good, Liz Kreutz, and Shushannah Walshe]

• But State only has the emails that Clinton herself chose to give them. She could've left sensitive ones out.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• A Clinton aide stated that "9 out of 10" of her emails were turned over.

  [The Daily Beast / Shane Harris]

• The State Department has had a regulation since 2005 advising officials against using private email for work; this was one reason that the US Ambassador to Kenya, Scott Gration, resigned in 2012.

  [Politico / Josh Gerstein]

4. Misc.

• Before every MLB game, all the baseballs about to be used are rubbed in mud — a proprietary kind of mud with a secret recipe sourced from a single supplier.

  [Now I Know / Dan Lewis]

• Giancarlo Esposito (Gus Fring from Breaking Bad) is directing a John Brown biopic called Patriotic Treason; Ed Harris will play Brown, and Esposito will play Frederick Douglass.

  [Deadline / Jen Yamato]

• Meet nootropics, the over-the-counter cognitive enhancement drugs that are "all the rage in Silicon Valley these days."

  [Fusion / Kevin Roose]

• Why cell service via Wi-Fi could make your wireless bill cheaper.

  [Slate / Will Oremus]

• In a brave act of civil disobedience, children are disregarding federal law and sledding on Capitol Hill.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

5. Verbatim

• "Getting naked in an Uber has occurred to me about as often as I’ve considered doing a striptease in public, which is never."

  [Twanna A. Hines to NYT / Alex Williams]

• "It is a gruesome, mangled masterpiece of rambling illogic and venomous vitriol. It is the judicial version of a nervous breakdown, and it deserves to be read in full."

  [Slate / Mark Joseph Stern]

• "Think of it as S&M for your wallet."

  [The Daily Dot / Aaron Sankin]

• "Maybe if you weren’t clinging to my back like an octopus squeezing its prey I wouldn’t be laughing into your mouth."

  [The Toast / Mallory Ortberg]

• "It's hard to fault Judge Harold Kahn for cutting off a former Kleiner partner's testimony to ask what exactly she meant by 'thought leadership.' The confusion didn't end there: The next day, a juror raised his hand and asked another former partner the same question."

  [Mother Jones / Rebecca Cohen]

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