Vox Sentences: Burundi's near-coup, explained

Tumult in Burundi

President of Burundi Pierre Nkurunziza and Secretary of State John Kerry. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

• The army chief in Burundi has declared that a coup attempt against President Pierre Nkurunziza failed.

  [Reuters / Patrick Nduwimana and Goran Tomasevic]

• Nkurunziza had been in neighboring Tanzania when the coup started yesterday, but has since returned to Burundi.

  [BBC]

• One of the coup's leaders has confirmed it failed, hopefully reducing odds of violence to come.

  [AFP / Esdras Ndikumana]

• The coup followed weeks of anti-Nkurunziza protests following his announcement that he would seek a third term, which opponents argue is illegal and violates the peace deal that ended the country's civil war in 2005.

  [BBC]

• Like its neighbor Rwanda, Burundi is majority Hutu and minority Tutsi, but its political divide crosses ethnic lines and "reflects civil war–era splits between rebel groups that evolved into parties, as well as patronage networks."

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• Freedom House, a group which tracks how close foreign governments come to liberal democracy, downgraded Burundi this year from "partly free" to "not free," citing "coordinated government crackdown on opposition party members and critics."

  [Freedom House]

• Obviously, though, the military generals who tried to oust Nkurunziza aren't exactly democratic paragons either.

Fast track speeds up

Mitch McConnell, earlier today, feelin' good. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

• Following a deal reached yesterday, the "fast track" trade bill the Senate's considering advanced, clearing a filibuster.

  [Politico / Doug Palmer]

• The vote was 65-33, with a united Republican caucus joined by 13 Democrats.

• As part of the deal, the Senate voted on, and passed, a bill that would crack down on currency manipulation, in which foreign countries try to drive down their currencies' values to boost exports.

  [FT / Shawn Donnan]

• The White House is expected to veto the currency bill if it makes it through the House.

  [NYT / Jonathan Weisman]

• Here's a good explainer on how currency manipulation works, and how much it matters.

  [Vox / Timothy B. Lee]

• The Senate also voted, 97 to 1, to extend trade preferences for poor countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

  [CBS News / Rebecca Kaplan]

Deflategate reinflated again

Tom Brady with a (underinflated?) ball while playing the Indianapolis Colts in the 2015 AFC Championship Game on January 18, 2015. (Elsa/Getty Images)

• The New England Patriots have responded to the NFL's report concluding they probably underinflated footballs during the AFC Championship earlier this year with a comprehensive site aiming to debunk the claim.

  [LA Times / Matt Wilhalme]

• "The conclusions of the Wells Report are, at best, incomplete, incorrect and lack context," the site concludes.

  [Wells Report Context]

• The team even produced a Nobel Prize-winning chemist Roderick MacKinnon to dispute the conclusion that weather or other environmental factors could have caused the underinflation.

  [Wells Report Context / Roderick MacKinnon]

• Some of the claims in the rebuttal are more credible than others; for one thing, the claim that texts between team employees about "deflation" refer to weight loss is pretty dubious.

  [Slate / Ben Mathis-Lilley]

• Tom Brady, the Pats' quarterback who was suspended for four games for his alleged involvement in the deflation, is appealing his suspension.

  [NYT / David Waldstein]

Misc.

• Policymakers often attack the poor for lacking motivation. Now scientists are figuring out what's killing their focus: poverty.

  [Harvard Magazine / Cara Feinberg]

• Stealing entire bridges for scrap metal: it's a thing.

  [Now I Know / Dan Lewis]

• Nestlé Waters North America CEO Tim Brown, when asked if he'd consider moving water bottling operations out of California due to its drought: "Absolutely not. In fact, if I could increase it, I would."

  [KPCC / Matt Dangelantonio]

• Alumni of Archbishop Keough High School in Baltimore claim that Father Joseph Maskell repeatedly raped and abused them in the late 1960s. Now they suspect him in another crime: the murder of English teacher Sister Cathy Cesnik.

  [Huffington Post / Laura Bassett]

Verbatim

• "[Hersh picks up other phone]: Yeah. Yeah. Oh no, fuck no … I don’t want to do it there! Go fuck—"

  [Seymour Hersh to Slate / Isaac Chotiner]

• "'I want to pass my hand through my hair, to feel my hand on my face, to take a shower,' she said. She recently got a tattoo on her arm: a person in a wheelchair standing up and gradually walking away."

  [NYT / Sarah Lyall]

• "Andreessen reminded me—in his formidable achievements and manner, his thickly armored sensitivities and yearnings—of Rilke’s remark 'Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.' When I told him so, he stared back in absolute horror."

  [New Yorker / Tad Friend]

• "My name is William. No one has ever called me 'Willie.' I didn't succumb to the name of 'Willie Horton' because that wasn't me. That wasn't even my name."

  [William Horton to Marshall Project / Beth Schwartzapfel and Bill Keller]

• "Another shade-throwing tactic is to annotate a social-media outburst with stage directions like '*sips tea*' or '*side-eye*,' as if to say: 'I’ll just sit back and demurely drink this beverage while I watch you act a fool and debase yourself.'"

  [NYT / Anna Holmes]

Correction: Yesterday's Sentences stated the Amtrak train that derailed was going from New York to DC. It was going from DC to New York.

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