Vox Sentences: The same Marines who lowered the US flag in Havana in 1961 helped raise it in 2015

The US flag flies over the embassy in Havana again, and ISIS is using chemical weapons against the Kurds and mass rape against the Yazidi.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

John Kerry is our man in Havana

Secretary of State John Kerry in San Francisco Plaza, Havana, today. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

• This morning, in a diplomatic ceremony, the US lifted the flag over its embassy in Cuba for the first time in 54 years.

  [Reuters / Daniel Trotta and Lesley Wroughton]

• Technically, the embassy has been open for about a month. And the US has had some sort of diplomatic presence in Cuba since 1977 (known as the US "special interests section" of the Swiss embassy). So this is mostly symbolic.

  [Washington Post / Nick Miroff]

• The three Marines who took down the flag over the embassy when the US recalled its ambassador in 1961 assisted with the flag-raising ceremony this morning. (They remember Havana fondly.)

  [CNN / Laura Koran]

• Cuban dissidents were pointedly not invited to the flag-raising, and the US had a different ceremony for them in the afternoon.

  [Washington Post / Nick Miroff and Karen DeYoung]

• The US and Cuba will begin discussing "full normalization" of relations in November — which could include an agreement to end the Cuban embargo (though it will take an act of Congress to actually end the embargo).

  [AP]

• In the meantime, this New Yorker feature from earlier this year is as good a picture of Havana right now as any.

  [New Yorker / Jon Lee Anderson]

• Or you can drive yourself crazy with anticipation by reminding yourself how good Cuban cigars really are. (Research says they're better than the rest!)

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

ISIS: chemical weapons and weaponized rape

Syrian rebels linked to Damascus Front attack ISIS fighters in Aleppo, Syria on August 13, 2015. (Huseyin Nasr/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

• The US is looking into a report that ISIS attacked Kurdish militia fighters with mustard gas on Thursday.

  [Wall Street Journal / Adam Entous]

• Officials initially said the report was "credible," but have since walked it back: Air Force Col. Patrick Ryder said that ISIS is pursuing chemical weapons capabilities, but "in terms of the status of that capability, I don't have anything further to provide."

  [CBS News / Stephanie Condon]

• Mustard gas isn't usually lethal. It causes sickness and, in high concentrations, disfigurement. But it's still something almost every country has committed to never using.

  [Live Science / Elizabeth Palermo]

• This would be the first reported ISIS use of mustard gas, but they've used chemical weapons before. Earlier this year, a British think tank officer recovered an unexploded shell filled with a chemical (probably chlorine) that ISIS had made as a crude projectile weapon.

  [New York Times / CJ Chivers]

• It's terrifyingly likely that ISIS recovered some of Saddam Hussein's abandoned chemical weapons caches from the 1980s. If you didn't read this CJ Chivers report about Americans stumbling upon some of these caches during the Iraq war when it came out, you should definitely read it now.

  [New York Times / CJ Chivers]

• But remember that back when those weapons were developed, in the 1980s, the US was helping Hussein use sarin gas against Iran.

  [Foreign Policy / Shane Harris and Matthew M. Aid]

• We put this link in Verbatim yesterday, but since we're writing about ISIS we should make sure you've read the New York Times feature on the systematic rape of Yazidi girls and women.

  [New York Times / Rukmini Callimachi]

• Vox's Amanda Taub contextualizes ISIS' rape regime within its military subjugation of the Yazidis and its fight with other Sunni groups in Syria.

  [Vox / Amanda Taub]

MISCELLANEOUS

This piece includes the best short explanation of how money in politics works I've seen. [Slate / Eric Posner]

• A legitimate work of muckraking about the Library of Congress.

  [Washington Post / ]

• Tyrone Timlin bought a soda. A cop decided the straw was "drug paraphenalia." He faced $1,500 bail, which he couldn't pay, and wound up spending three weaks at Riker's, where he was brutally beaten. Welcome to the American criminal justice system.

  [NYT / Nick Pinto]

• Get excited for the premiere of Show Me a Hero, definitely the best TV miniseries on housing desegregation in Yonkers to ever star Oscar Isaac, this Sunday.

  [Slate / Willa Paskin]

• Rocketship's A Certain Smile, A Certain Sadness is one of our (Dylan's) favorite albums, but it went out of print shortly after its 1996 release. It's finally being reissued.

  [Exclaim / Cam Lindsay]

VERBATIM

"You cannot swing a dead cat in Iowa and not hit a Trump person." [Sam Clovis to Washington Post / Philip Rucker and Robert Costa]

• "[Richard Williams] moved his family to Compton, where Venus and Serena served to the sound of gunfire and his stepdaughter was later shot to death, because he thought it would 'make them tough, give them a fighter’s mentality.'"

  [NY Mag / Kerry Howley]

• "'Taylor Swift convinced my wife that I was cheating on her, and she left me,' Richard added. 'Then I think Taylor slept with her. Please, Taylor Swift, just let this end.'"

  [Clickhole]

• "Type in shopjeen.com, and a Japanese music video for a band called Ladybaby might automatically start blasting, while the home page quivers with GIFs of LED-lit high-tops and tank tops that say ASK YOUR BOYFRIEND HOW MY ASS TASTE."

  [NY Mag / Alexis Swerdloff]

• "The video camera mounted in Officer Scott’s cruiser seemed to offer an unfiltered lens on the core facts of the case. But it didn’t just record a high-speed chase; it recorded a chase from the perspective of the lead police officer involved in the pursuit."

  [Slate / Adam Benforado]

WATCH THIS

Vox / Christophe Haubursin

• The reason every meme uses that one font

  [YouTube / Phil Edwards and Christophe Haubursin]

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