Vox Sentences: A brief intro to Jonathan Pollard, the Israeli spy the US might release

"Exceeded only by Edward Snowden"

A pro-Pollard demonstration on November 16, 2003 in Jerusalem. (Gali Tibbon/AFP/Getty Images)

• The federal government will reportedly release Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• Pollard was sentenced to life in prison in 1987 after sharing secrets obtained through his job as a civilian intelligence analyst in the Navy with Aviem Sella, his Israeli handler.

  [Reuters / Eric Beech]

• Pollard has claimed that he was motivated by sincere desire to help Israel. But he also got $10,000 in cash and a $10,000 diamond and sapphire ring for his then-fiancée as part of the first deal, and then another $1,500 a month thereafter.

  [NOVA]

• Pollard also took sensitive documents about China to help his now-wife get a job with a public relations firm that was pursuing a contract with the Chinese embassy.

  [Ronald Olive]

• Pollard admitted to investigators that he gave classified material to apartheid South Africa, and reportedly tried to work as a spy for Australia too.

  [Ynetnews]

• According to former FBI agent Ronald Olive, who worked on his case, Pollard also conceded that he offered classified material to Pakistan, hoping they'd take him on as a spy, but was rebuffed.

  [Jerusalem Post / Ronald Olive]

• In response to Olive, Pollard's lawyers rejected the Pakistan claim but were curiously silent about Australia, South Africa, and the documents stolen for Pollard's wife.

  [Jerusalem Post / Eliot Lauer and Jacques Semmelman]

• Retired Adm. Thomas Brooks, for whom Pollard worked and who later became director of naval intelligence, claims that he didn't primarily take information about Israel, and that most of it was about US collection methods against the Soviet Union.

  [Foreign Policy / Shane Harris]

• Brooks continues: "I think what he did is exceeded only by Edward Snowden."

  [The Wire / Philip Bump]

• Pollard became an Israeli citizen in 1995, and Israel has pushed for his release for years, but the FBI and the US intelligence community have forcefully fought back at the suggestion.

  [NYT / Mark Landler and Michael Gordon]

• In 1998, Bill Clinton considering pardoning Pollard as part of a peace deal after a request from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but his CIA director George Tenet reportedly threatened to resign in protest if the pardon went through.

  [Washington Post / Jonathan Finer]

• Pollard is up for parole in November, so it's possible he'd be released through a routine process rather than due to Obama administration foreign policy decisions. Some administration officials are denying that a release is meant to patch up relations with Israel after the Iran nuclear deal.

  [WSJ / Devlin Barrett]

• Andrea Mitchell: "If Jonathan Pollard is paroled in November after serving 30 yrs I'm told he'll have strict restrictions placed on his movements."

  [Andrea Mitchell]

• For more on Pollard, see Zack Beauchamp's comprehensive explainer.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

Shooting in Louisiana

Lafayette police stand outside of the Grand Theater, the site of the shooting. (Stacy Revere/Getty Images)

• A gunman killed two people and himself and injured nine at a showing of the movie Trainwreck in Lafayette, Louisiana Thursday night.

  [The Daily Advertiser]

• The shooter, 59-year-old John Russell Houser, had been denied a concealed carry permit in 2006, due to an arson arrest. He praised the Westboro Baptist Church, Timothy McVeigh, and Adolf Hitler on anti-government online forums.

  [NYT / Campbell Robertson, Richard Pérez-Peña, and Alan Blinder]

• In 2008, he was accused of domestic violence, and his wife was reportedly "so concerned about his mental state she had removed all guns and weapons from their home."

  [CNN / Michael Pearson and Ed Payne]

• The two women killed were 33-year-old Jillian Johnson, an artist and musician, and 21-year-old Mayci Breaux, who was in her first year studying for an associate's degree for medical radiology technicians.

  [CBS / AP]

• According to a database maintained by the Stanford Geospatial Center, and updated by Vox, this is the 75th mass shooting since Sandy Hook in December 2012.

  [Vox / Soo Oh]

• The US has nearly six times as many gun homicides per capita as Canada and over 21 times as many as Australia.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• But America's gun problem isn't mostly about homicide. Two thirds of gun deaths are suicides.

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

Worm wars

Two kids in Kenya show they've swallowed their deworming pills. (Good Ventures / Innovations for Poverty Action)

• A controversy has broken out in the global health world over whether "deworming" programs are effective.

  [Vox / Julia Belluz]

• Two economists, Berkeley's Edward Miguel and Harvard's Michael Kremer, published a randomized controlled trial in 2004 suggesting that giving entire schools in poor countries deworming pills (which kill parasitic gut worms) was a cost-effective way to boost health, school performance, and attendance.

  [Econometrica / Edward Miguel and Michael Kremer]

• The paper sparked more research into the area and encouraged the development of deworming charities, including the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative and the Deworm the World Initiative, which the influential charity evaluator GiveWell rates as top charities.

  [GiveWell]

• Miguel and Kremer opened their data up so replicators could look at it, and those replicators argued that the results didn't hold up to further analysis, and the effects of mass deworming were minimal.

  [BuzzFeed / Ben Goldacre]

• That led to an immediate backlash from other development experts, who savaged the replication for being poorly done. Columbia economist Chris Blattman: "you have throw so much crazy shit at Miguel-Kremer to make the result go away that I believe the result even more than when I started."

  [Chris Blattman]

• GiveWell argued that the replications didn't do much to undermine the overall case for deworming, which rests more on findings about its effects on earnings, which the replications didn't challenge.

  [GiveWell / Alexander Berger]

• Long story short: the Miguel-Kremer was not totally free of errors, and it's good that it's being reexamined, but deworming is still a good idea, as is giving cash and anti-malarial bednets, as GiveWell also recommends.

  [GiveWell]

Misc.

• This video is a great look at what made Looney Tunes so compelling, and how it avoided becoming repetitive or formulaic.

  [Slate / Aisha Harris]

• On that note, there's never a bad time to rewatch "The Big Snooze," the greatest of all Looney Tunes shorts and the one most likely to inspire a gender studies dissertation.

  [Daily Motion]

• Two months ago, I mentioned that a small town in Kazakhstan was falling ill to a mysterious illness causing residents to fall asleep at random, sometimes for days. The mystery has been solved: it's the fault of uranium mines.

  [The Guardian / Alec Luhn]

• For sixteen years, people singing along to Dr. Dre's "The Next Episode" have tried and failed to nail Nate Dogg's "smoke weed every day" line in the outro. Rob Whisman finally did it. Vice's Dan Ozzi "caught up with Whisman about this milestone, and what it’s like to bask in the kingdom of glory."

  [Vice / Dan Ozzi]

Verbatim

• "The One Bad Man broke God's heart when he invented murder."

  [Clickhole]

• "Judy Greer, the long suffering mom from Jurassic World who can currently be seen as the long-suffering wife on FX’s Married, will be appearing on Showtime’s Masters Of Sex this fall. Greer will guest star as Alice Logan, a recovering alcoholic and long-suffering spouse."

  [AV Club / Mike Vanderbilt]

• "The obvious application is people who are currently dying with a terminal diagnosis. But being born is a terminal diagnosis. And people's lives might be better if they live out of the shadow of the valley of death."

  [Mark Kleiman to Vox / German Lopez]

• "I hate how much I love to grill. It’s not that I’m inclined to vegetarianism or that I otherwise object to the practice itself. But I’m uncomfortable with the pleasure I take in something so conventionally masculine."

  [Slate / Jacob Brogan]

• "Trump also said McCain was a war hero, and it is so typical of the press, when Trump says two completely opposite things, to report the bad thing he said and ignore the other, contradictory, non-bad statement."

  [The Atlantic / Molly Ball]

• "We will develop crushes on each other, and then we’ll fall in love and have three kids, but we’ll both still want to work, so there won’t be enough parental attention to go around, and the house will grow full of tension, and years later one of the kids will murder one of the other kids, and I’ll be overcome by grief and guilt and drown myself in the lake at our summer home."

  [New Yorker / Hallie Cantor]

Video of the day

• It's not just you. Claw machines are rigged. Here's how.

  [YouTube / Vox / Estelle Caswell, Joss Fong, Phil Edwards]