Vox Sentences: Ayatollah Khamenei's nuclear demands won't be met. So why's he making them?

1. Supreme leaders gonna supreme lead

Supreme Leader of Iran Ayatollah Ali Khamenei gives a speech in Tehran, Iran, on July 8, 2014. (Leader.ir - Pool/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

• Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei stated today that any nuclear deal with the US must lift all sanctions the day it's signed, and bar inspectors from military sites.

  [NYT / Thomas Erdbrink and David Sanger]

• Khamenei: "The White House published a factsheet which was wrong on most of the issues. It distorted reality."

  [The Guardian / Saeed Kamali Dehghan]

• Kahmenei also took to Twitter to express his concerns. Here are all the tweets he sent on the nuclear deal.

  [Washington Post]

• Secretary of State John Kerry has insisted the sanctions will be lifted in phases, and it's doubtful the US will agree to an all-at-once lifting like the one Khamenei demands.

  [CNN / Elise Labott, Mariano Castillo, and Catherine Shoichet]

• There are several plausible explanations for what Khamenei's doing. One view is that he's trying to appease hard-liners to give President Hasan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Javad Zarif room to negotiate a deal.

  [WSJ / Asa Fitch]

• It's also possible this is just an attempt to strengthen Rouhani and Zarif's negotiating position. Rand Corporation's Alireza Nader: Khamenei "knows very well that sanctions won’t be lifted immediately … There’s a middle ground here and he’s trying to push the negotiations toward it."

  [LA Times / Ramin Mostaghim]

• Khamenei also attacked Saudi Arabia's US-backed intervention in Yemen's civil war, calling the Saudis' actions "genocide"; Kerry said on PBS's NewsHour that the US knows Iran is backing the opposing side in the conflict, and warned that "the United States is not going to stand by while the region is destabilized."

  [NYT / David Kirkpatrick]

• The deadline for a final nuclear deal is June 30.

  [NYT / Thomas Erdbrink and David Sanger]

2. Slowly emerging

IMF managing director Christine Lagarde. (Adam Berry/Getty Images)

• Emerging-market countries are growing at their slowest pace since the 2009 recession, according to data from three market-research companies.

  [FT / James Kynge]

• The International Monetary Fund is also downgrading its growth projections for emerging-market countries, a category that includes middle-income nations like Brazil and Russia.

  [WSJ / Ian Talley]

• One major factor is that the dollar has appreciated in value recently, burdening emerging market companies with debt denominated in dollars.

  [Bloomberg / Andrew Mayeda]

• But in the longer run, IMF projections blame aging populations in countries like China and Brazil, as well as slower productivity growth as these countries run out of rich-country technology to adopt.

  [WSJ / Ian Talley]

• Economists are increasingly concerned about a similar long-term slowdown in rich countries, which former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers has termed "secular stagnation," but the humanitarian costs of a big slowdown in poorer countries would be much graver.

  [Vox / Matthew Yglesias]

3. "Therapy"

White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett. (Jewel Samad/AFP via Getty Images)

• The White House has come out in support of state efforts to ban LGBT "conversion therapy."

  [NPR / Eyder Peralta]

• The practices in question are already banned in New Jersey, California, and DC; top medical organizations have universally rejected conversion therapy as futile and harmful.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• However, President Obama has not explicitly endorsed a federal ban; while White House officials say he'd be open to discussing the idea, so far he's focusing on backing state efforts.

  [NYT / Michael Shear]

• The White House statement on the matter came in response to a WhiteHouse.gov petition launched after the suicide of Leelah Alcorn, a trans teenager who was subject to conversion attempts.

  [White House / Valerie Jarrett]

• Mere hours before the White House endorsement, a Colorado Senate committee rejected a bill banning conversion therapy, in a sign of the uphill battle advocates of a ban face.

  [AP / David Crary]

4. Misc.

• I always thought Lincoln Chafee was an underrated senator, so his 2016 run for the Democratic presidential nomination should be interesting, albeit doomed.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• It seems like Iceland is going to abolish banking as we know it.

  [FT / Matthew Klein]

• Robbie Mook wasn't even out of college when Bill Clinton was president, but now he's slated to run Hillary's campaign.

  [Mother Jones / Pat Caldwell and Andy Kroll]

• Turning Republican presidential candidates into The Sims characters and making them live in the White House together is one of those ideas that you alternate between admiring and being jealous you didn't think of.

  [IJReview / Dave Jorgensen]

5. Verbatim

• "The toll from major depressive disorder is estimated to be 20 percent worse than that from stroke."

  [NYT / Jeremy Smith]

• "'What do you do?' you ask a baby. 'Policy,' it says in a grown man’s deep voice."

  [Sashayed]

• "Russia is the motherland of elephants (big-eared, improved cross-country capability, see Mammoth)."

  [Second-ever edit on Russia Wikipedia via Now I Know / Dan Lewis]

• "Liberals are willing to negotiate a verification treaty with Iran, but the only policy they will consider with regard to Indiana is a bombing campaign."

  [NY Mag / Jonathan Chait]

• "The ageing societies of the rich world want rapid income growth and low inflation and a decent return on safe investments and limited redistribution and low levels of immigration. Well you can’t have all of that. And what they have decided is that what they’re prepared to sacrifice is the rapid income growth."

  [The Economist / Ryan Avent]

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