Vox Sentences: From Bombshell to Busted, the sad, strange saga of the AP’s Iran-deal story

An AP story on Iran makes waves — but there's a twist; Jimmy Carter's cancer has spread to his brain; new Greek elections next month!

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

DON'T PANIC: Associated Press edition

Iran's envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Reza Najafi, in 2013. (Alexander Klein/AFP/Getty Images)

• If you have seen the headline "Iran permitted to inspect its own nuclear sites," and you are freaked out, you should not be.

  [AP / George Jahn]

• You should really just read Max Fisher's explainer on this, which explains how the Associated Press appears to have screwed up the story.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• Here's the short version: Yesterday, the Associated Press published a piece saying that the International Atomic Energy Agency would allow Iranian inspectors to do an unsupervised inspection at a former nuclear site, Parchin (it went dormant in 2002). A lot of people were shocked, and assumed that this would kill the US/Iran nuke deal in Congress.

• Then things started getting weird. The AP deleted the parts of its story that went into detail about what the inspections would, and wouldn't, entail. (They restored the cut sections this morning, saying they were cut "for space," which is weird since the AP deleted the sections online, which doesn't really have space constraints.)

  [Jeffrey Lewis via Twitter]

• And this afternoon, the AP released the text of the draft Iran/IAEA deal it had seen, which includes language about the IAEA "inspect[ing] the technical authenticity" of the evidence Iran submits.

  [Associated Press]

• That's a super-vague phrase, and it encompasses a lot of different ways that — even if the IAEA isn't physically at the site — it can make sure the soil samples collected are legit.

  [Nuclear Diner / Cheryl Rofer]

• In summary, the AP's hed was simply bigger than its story.

  [TPM / Josh Marshall]

• But this has not stopped Congressional opponents of the deal, like Sen. Tom Cotton, from using the AP story to claim that Iran will be inspecting "its own nuclear facilities" — implying all of them, which was way further than even the original AP story went.

  [Sen. Tom Cotton]

"I hope the last guinea worm dies before I do"

Jessica McGowan/Getty Images

• In a press conference today, Nobel Peace Prize winner Jimmy Carter announced that the melanoma he had surgery for earlier this month has spread to his brain, and he will begin to receive radiation therapy Monday.

  [Washington Post / Abby Phillip]

• Carter is also using an experimental drug, called Keytruda, that has been fast-tracked by the FDA for showing very promising results in some cases.

  [NBC News / Maggie Fox]

• As Vox's Julia Belluz explains, immunotherapy drugs like Keytruda — so called because they help stimulate the immune system to attack cancerous cells — work really well in some patients (maybe 15 to 20 percent), but don't work in others, and we don't know why yet.

  [Vox / Julia Belluz]

• If the immunotherapy doesn't work for Carter, the life expectancy for inoperable tumors is 11 months. That has not stopped one Carter loyalist from declaring, "We all thought — and we all continue to think — that Carter will live forever."

  [Los Angeles Times / Matt Pearce]

• President Carter's last wish: "I hope the last guinea worm dies before I do." Here's what he means.

  [Vox / Sarah Kliff and Dylan Matthews]

InTspirasional

Greek PM Alexis Tsipras. (Milos Bicanski/Getty Images)

• Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tspiras has formally dissolved the government, meaning there will be new elections in the Greek parliament on September 20th.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• Let's review: Tspiras came in as head of the left-wing Syriza party in January, on a platform of standing up to Greece's creditors in the EU. After several rounds of negotiations stalled, and voters had rejected a referendum on the reforms proposed by creditors, Tspiras agreed to a deal much like the one the people had rejected the week before.

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

• In short, the Syriza government did the opposite of what it set out to do.

  [Vox / Ezra Klein]

• Unsurprisingly, the left of Tspiras' party was not pleased with the capitulation. They're in open revolt. This is why Tspiras had to call an election: he couldn't rely on a majority in Parliament anymore.

  [Dow Jones / Marcus Walker and Gabriele Steinhauser]

• (One of the members in revolt is Tspiras' former finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, who is what they call a "colorful character" and was the subject of this quite good New Yorker profile.)

  [New Yorker / Ian Parker]

• So given all this, Tspiras is screwed in the elections, right? Wrong! He's expected to take back his party and consolidate a majority. Matt Yglesias explains why.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

MISCELLANEOUS

People have been misinterpreting Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" for as long as it's existed. [New York Observer / Matthew Kassel]

• A new literature review confirms it: Modafinil (aka Provigil) is the first safe smart drug.

  [The Guardian / Helen Thomson]

• The Hyperloop is starting to look pretty real: a startup is beginning construction on a working prototype next year.

  [Wired / Alex Davies]

• The most common words on successful Harvard admissions essays are "experience," "society," "world," "success," "opportunity." At Stanford, they're "research," "community," "knowledge," "future" and "skill."

  [Fast Company / Elizabeth Segran]

• It turns out there's a poll of Americans asking if they came the last time they had sex. Sadly if unsurprisingly, the numbers don't look great for women.

  [FiveThirtyEight / Mona Chalabi]

VERBATIM

"You weren't in Baltimore in 1999, but I was. It looked more like Mexico City than an American city, and the gutters quite literally ran with blood." [Martin O'Malley to GQ / Jason Zengerle]

• "if one is going to be featured in an article profiling one’s family with lines like 'the illusion is starting to unravel,' 'serious code violations,' 'abysmal graduation rates,' and 'a business model based on underperformers,' one has two options: make a lot of explanations and cavils and excuses, or thrust one’s chin up toward God, wrap oneself in a fur coat, and deny nothing."

  [The Toast / Mallory Ortberg]

• "I am actually one of these people who really likes watching those YouTube videos with titles like, 'Christopher Hitchens owns idiotic Texan religionist' or whatever."

  [James Wood to Slate / Isaac Chotiner]

• "The sensationalized press coverage of the period has left a permanent image of the late nineteen-sixties as a time when everyone was tripping or stoned. In 1967, when Didion’s article came out, only one per cent of college students reported having tried LSD. In 1969, only four per cent of adults said they had smoked marijuana."

  [New Yorker / Louis Menand]

• "The French scholar of Muslim apocalypticism, Jean-Pierre Filiu, has argued that most modern Sunni Muslims viewed apocalyptic thinking with suspicion before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. … The US invasion of Iraq and the stupendous violence that followed dramatically increased the Sunni public’s appetite for apocalyptic explanations of a world turned upside down."

  [Politico / William McCants]

WATCH THIS

Vox / Joe Posner

• The scariest chart in America

  [YouTube / Matt Yglesias and Joe Posner]

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