Vox Sentences: You won't have Sepp Blatter to kick around anymore

Burst Blatter

Sepp Blatter vogues at a press conference on May 30. (Alessandro Della Bella/Getty Images)

• FIFA president Sepp Blatter has resigned in the wake of the soccer league's corruption scandal.

  [Vox / Joseph Stromberg]

• Blatter had won reelection to a fifth term just this past Friday.

  [Vox / Joseph Stromberg]

• Blatter: "Although the members of FIFA have given me the new mandate, this mandate does not seem to be supported by everybody in the world of football."

  [NYT / Sam Borden, Michael Schmidt, and Matt Apuzzo]

• Blatter has a long history of alleged corruption; he was accused of buying votes when he first won the presidency in 1998.

  [AP / Graham Dunbar]

• Not up to date on the FIFA scandal? Here's an explainer to catch you up.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias and Joseph Stromberg]

• And here's a rundown of the many individual cases of corruption in FIFA's history.

  [Vox / Libby Nelson]

• One recent development: it appears that Blatter's top lieutenant, FIFA secretary general Jérôme Valcke, made $10 million in bank transactions as part of the bribery scheme that got nine soccer officials indicted last week.

  [NYT / William Rashbaum and Matt Apuzzo]

Freedom! '15

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) (left) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) after the passage of the USA Freedom Act, which they sponsored. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

• The USA Freedom Act has passed the Senate, 67 to 32, and is headed to President Obama's desk.

  [Vox / Timothy B. Lee]

• President Obama on Twitter: "Glad the Senate finally passed the USA Freedom Act. It protects civil liberties and our national security. I'll sign it as soon as I get it."

  [POTUS]

• You can see the roll call here; 23 Republicans, 43 Democrats, and one Democrat-aligned independent voted yes; 30 Republicans, Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) voted no.

  [Senate]

• The act extends Patriot Act provisions that expired Sunday night, but limits the government's ability to collect phone records and other metadata in bulk. It also attempts to make national security court proceedings more transparent.

  [Vox / Timothy B. Lee]

• The House passed the bill last month in a big, bipartisan 338 to 88 vote.

  [Clerk of the House]

• Senate supporters of the bill from both parties defeated attempts by critics to pass amendments watering the legislation down.

  [Politico / Seung Min Kim and Burgess Everett]

• Republican presidential candidates split; Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) opposed the bill for not going far enough, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) supported it, and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) opposed it, preferring to extend the Patriot Act as is.

  [The Guardian / Sabrina Siddiqui]

• Baldwin and Sanders opposed the bill on the same grounds as Paul. Here's Baldwin: "I voted against this bill because it doesn’t take action on the warrantless search loophole and still allows for government overreach, abuses and infringement on the freedoms guaranteed by our constitution."

  [Tammy Baldwin]

Shipwrecked

Relatives of passengers on the capsized ship Dongfangzhixing wait for news at Shijiyuan Hotel on June 2, 2015 in Nanjing, China. (ChinaFotoPress/Getty Images)

• Upwards of 400 people are missing after a cruise ship capsized on the Yangtze River in central China.

  [NYT / Edward Wong and Michael Forsythe]

• Reports on the number of confirmed survivors vary (around 15 is the most common number I've seen); at least five are confirmed dead.

  [LA Times / Jonathan Kaiman and Julie Makinen]

• Most of those on board were Chinese tourists between the ages of 50 and 80.

  [BBC]

• The boat appears to have been struck by a freak tornado.

  [Reuters / Megha Rajagopalan and John Ruwitch]

• Tornado's aren't as common in China as in the US, but this one appears to have been hurricane strength.

  [NYT / Edward Wong and Michael Forsythe]

• Yangtze cruises have gotten safer due to the controversial Three Gorges Dam project, which makes the water less choppy, but it's also flooded major cultural sites and hurt tourism by making the river's gorges look less spectacular.

  [NYT / Ian Johnson and Keith Bradsher]

Misc.

• Subway's sales are falling faster than any other top restaurant chain. Why?

  [Washington Post / Drew Harwell]

• Merriam-Webster once accidentally invented the word "dord."

  [Wikipedia]

• The racial politics of Cameron Crowe's Aloha are … weird.

  [Slate / Nate Chinen]

• A photo of a man proposing to his girlfriend at someone else's wedding went viral. But the proposal didn't actually overshadow the wedding; the viral backlash did.

  [Washington Post / Caitlin Dewey]

• Alan Dershowitz is suing TD Garden for not stocking enough paper towels in its bathrooms. It's just a very good lawsuit.

  [Boston Globe / Callum Borchers]

Verbatim

• "The publication, reception, and cultural re-fashioning of Lolita over the past 60 years is the story of how a twelve-year-old rape victim named Dolores became a dominant archetype for seductive female sexuality in contemporary America: It is the story of how a girl became a noun."

  [New Republic / Ira Wells]

• "Girls would use prayer requests as a mode of gossip, saying things like, 'I have a prayer request for Hannah because I heard she had sex with Tanner.'"

  [NYT / Arla Knudsen]

• "Not much later, and in all seriousness, he said that on the basis of his recent research he thought it wasn’t impossible that his iPhone might have feelings."

  [The Guardian / Oliver Burkeman]

• "In 2009, a Massachusetts bill sought to amend the state’s child pornography law to include the disabled and people over sixty among those statutorily unable to consent to posing nude or performing sexually before a camera."

  [Boston Review / Judith Levine]

• "Once when I was coming home from the mosque with my sister and my neighbor these two guys walked out of their car and they called me a terrorist. It got to me. This is bad, but I told them, ‘Yeah, I’m coming after you!'"

  [Sumaiya Mahee to PRI / Jeb Sharp]

Song of the Day

• Amanda Palmer, "Leeds United"

  [YouTube]

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