Vox Sentences: US drones have killed hundreds of civilians. One of the latest is American.

1. The drone war hits home

President Obama announces that US drone strikes killed Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto. (Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)

• The US accidentally killed two hostages — an American, Warren Weinstein, and an Italian, Giovanni Lo Porto — in a drone strike against al-Qaeda on the Afghan-Pakistani border.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• President Obama said in a statement, "On behalf of the United States government, I offer our deepest apologies to the families" but said the strike was "fully consistent" with the guidelines the government uses for drone strikes.

  [White House]

• That would be more reassuring if the process for approving strikes weren't cloaked in secrecy.

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

• And what we know about the process isn't exactly comforting; for example, the US has undertaken "signature strikes" in which it bombs people without even knowing their identities.

  [The Atlantic / Danya Greenfield]

• The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has estimated that between 423 and 962 civilians have been killed in drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004.

  [Bureau of Investigative Journalism]

• Weinstein, 73, was a development consultant from Rockville, Maryland, who lived for years in Lahore, Pakistan, while consulting for USAID there. He was kidnapped from his home in Lahore on August 13, 2011.

  [Politico / Michael Kruse]

• His family's statement: "We do understand that the U.S. government will be conducting an independent investigation of the circumstances … but those who took Warren captive over three years ago bear ultimate responsibility."

  [Washington Post]

• Lo Porto, 39, was also an aid worker, who went to Pakistan to work with a German NGO on rebuilding an area that had endured severe flooding. He was abducted on January 19, 2012.

  [NPR / Krishnadev Calamur]

• Here's an old piece from me laying out the case against the drone program, which has caused significant humanitarian harm for little to no appreciable benefit.

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

2. Trust: busted

Looks like this Comcast van hit a speed bump, huh? Get it? Metaphors. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

• Comcast, the biggest cable company in the US, is abandoning its plan to buy Time Warner Cable, the second-largest.

  [Bloomberg / Alex Sherman]

• The deal faced considerable regulatory opposition from both the Federal Communications Commission and the Justice Department.

  [Bloomberg / Alex Sherman, David McLaughlin, Gerry Smith, and Todd Shields]

• Though the merger might not have reduced consumer competition — Comcast and TWC cover different geographic regions — it would have given Comcast a lot more power in negotiations with network owners and websites on the back end.

  [Vox / Timothy B. Lee]

• For example, Comcast has already, by allowing Netflix speeds to slow down considerably, convinced Netflix to pay for its own private "fast lane" with the broadband provider. A combined Comcast-TWC could do that kind of thing in even more markets.

  [Vox / Timothy B. Lee]

• While the merger was never formally blocked, this is a big victory for the Obama administration's antitrust enforcement efforts, which some observers credit as tougher than the Bush administration's.

  [US News / David Balto]

• Others, by contrast, argue that Obama has mostly continued Bush's approach.

  [Stanford Law Review / Daniel Crane]

• Even without the merger, local broadband monopolies like Comcast and TWC are a big problem. Fighting them requires either a) a public option for broadband or b) price controls.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• Disclosure: Comcast Ventures is an investor in Vox Media, the parent company of Vox.com.

3. What's the Holder-up?

Lynch arrives for her confirmation hearing at the Senate Judiciary Committee on January 28, 2015. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

• The Senate finally confirmed President Obama's attorney general nominee, Loretta Lynch, who will be the first black woman to ever hold the position.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• The final vote was 56 to 43, with 10 Republicans — including, notably — Majority Leader Mitch McConnell — joining a united Democratic caucus.

  [US Senate]

• Lynch's confirmation came 166 days after her initial nomination; only two other attorneys general (Edwin Meese and Mitchell Palmer) have had longer waits.

  [ABC News / Arlette Saenz]

• Senate Republicans' refusal to take up her nomination earlier is somewhat ironic, in that it kept current Attorney General Eric Holder — whom they loathe — in office.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• Lynch, a veteran prosecutor who's been the US Attorney for Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and Long Island since 2010, has mostly done white-collar crime cases, but also worked on the war crimes tribunal in Rwanda, prosecuted NYPD officers who raped and beat a man in their precinct office, and oversaw the case against disgraced Rep. Michael Grimm (R-NY).

  [Vox / Jenée Desmond-Harris and Dara Lind]

• Jeffrey Toobin, who worked as an assistant US attorney with Lynch, says she will "almost certainly" continue Holder's work on voting rights.

  [CNN / Jeffrey Toobin]

• In her confirmation hearings, Lynch said she thought marijuana is more dangerous than alcohol, which is pretty clearly false.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• Interesting 2013 comments from Lynch on mass incarceration, via Liliana Segura: "Arresting more people or building more jails is not the ultimate solution to crime in our society … I see these young men, who are predominantly black, I see not only the lives that they take, but the lives of these young men."

  [The Crime Report / Graham Kates]

• Lynch's first move in office will be to tour police departments in an attempt to rebuild morale, and emphasize that the Justice Department is on their side, in the wake of the DOJ's investigation of the Ferguson police force and other inquiries into local police wrongdoing.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

4. Misc.

• Door-to-door magazine-selling companies aren't just annoying. They also exploit workers who are "essentially indentured servants."

  [The Atlantic / Darlena Cunha]

• This transcript of John Kerry talking to children about sports and why he hates suits is surprisingly hilarious.

  [Secretary of State John Kerry]

• In third grade, for a Rube Goldberg machine contest, I made a Pokémon card dispenser out of K'NEX. At the college Rube Goldberg machine contest, things get a lot more intricate.

  [The Verge / Brendan O'Connor]

• German Lopez talks to nine transgender people about how they knew, coming out to their families and the world, and more.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• A study in Liberia found that offering young men — many with criminal records — cash and therapy reduced crime dramatically.

  [Washington Post / Chris Blattman]

5. Verbatim

• "Growing up means hopping off the track the Mail Robot technicians laid out for you and forging your own path."

  [AV Club / Erik Adams]

• "As a gay man, he enjoyed looking at male bodies."

  [Washington Post / Monica Hesse]

• "Martin Squires, a surf instructor who lives in a van in a Venice Beach parking lot, said of the proposal, 'It's time that America grew up.'"

  [LA Times / Martha Groves]

• "People love self-deprecating humor. Say things like 'Maybe we can just use the lawyers from my divorce,' or 'God I wish I was dead.'"

  [The Cooper Review]

• "Autassassinophilia, or the sexual fetish of wanting to be killed, is quite rare."

  [Matter / Rachel Monroe]

• "The most famous myth in the world is the dietary fall from grace. Adam and Eve go into the garden, eat the wrong food, and become mortal. So it makes sense to us intuitively that everything that’s wrong with us can be traced to a mistake we make with that we eat."

  [Alan Jay Levinovitz to Vox / Julia Belluz]

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