Vox Sentences: Puerto Rico had a $58 million debt payment due. It paid $628,000.

President Obama unveils finalized power-plant regulations; Puerto Rico is officially in default; and the plan to train Syrian rebels to fight ISIS has a 50% casualty rate weeks after it started.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Incumplidos

Washington Post / Matt McClain

• As of this moment, the commonwealth of Puerto Rico is officially in default on its $72 billion in debt.

  [Commonwealth of Puerto Rico / Melba Acosta]

• The island had a payment of $58 million due today. It paid...$628,000.

  [WSJ / Aaron Kuriloff]

• It's not like we didn't know this was coming. Puerto Rico announced about 6 weeks ago that it wasn't going to be able to keep borrowing money to pay off its debts.

  [New York Times / Michael Corkery and Mary Williams Walsh]

• (If you're wondering how Puerto Rico was able to borrow money for as long as it was, despite mounting debt, the answer is that US tax policy incentivized retirees and hedge funds to buy Puerto Rican bonds.)

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• This is where things might get ugly. In a worst-case scenario, Puerto Rico's creditors could pull an Argentina: getting a judge to rule that the government needs to pay its debts before it pays its employees or other expenses.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• Congress could make life a little easier on Puerto Rico — and harder on the Americans who own Puerto Rican debt — by letting its utilities declare bankruptcy, like municipalities and utilities in the states can do. But lawmakers appear to be meh on the idea.

  [Politico / Seung Min Kim]

Obama is down with CPP

Getty / Jeff Swensen

• President Obama unveiled the final version of an EPA regulation that could substantially cut power plants' carbon emissions by 2030.

  [EPA]

• The plan sets a goal of a 32 percent reduction in power-plant emissions from 2005 to 2030.

  [Vox / Brad Plumer]

• That's not as ambitious as it sounds; power plant emissions fell a lot from 2005 to 2015 as natural gas overtook coal. So we're talking more of a 20 percent drop from 2015 to 2030.

  [Wonkblog / Brad Plumer]

• The political logic here is that, going into a round of international talks in Paris in November, the plan will signal the US is serious about cutting its own emissions, and inspire other countries to do the same.

  [New York Magazine / Jonathan Chait]

• The Council on Foreign Relations's Michael Levi says that if — big if — states take advantage of the incentives for them to meet their targets, the administration will be "in the neighborhood" of meeting its emissions-reduction goals for 2020.

  [CFR / Michael Levi]

• Of course, that's assuming the plan isn't struck down as a result of one of the several pending court challenges against it.

  [Vox / David Roberts]

• Here's the full Vox explainer on the Clean Power Plan.

  [Vox / Brad Plumer]

An inauspicious beginning for the US-trained anti-ISIS force

AFP / Abd Doumany

• The small group of Syrian rebels trained by the US to fight ISIS is basically moribund. Within weeks of starting to fight, 30 of the 60 trainees — including the group's leader — have been killed, injured, or kidnapped by an al-Qaeda group.

  [The Guardian / Kareem Shaheem]

• This is the end result of the plan the US announced last year to train 5,000 Syrian fighters. That plan has, it has now clear, been a colossal failure.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• 6000 fighters originally volunteered. But between failing background checks due to extremist ties and refusing to fight only ISIS (instead of the forces of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad), reportedly only 54 completed training.

  [Telegraph / Nabih Bulos]

• Despite these setbacks, the US still hoped that regional al-Qaeda affiliate al-Nusra would greet the US-trained rebels as allies. What happened was the opposite of that: al-Nusra launched successive attacks on Thursday and Friday.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• It probably doesn't help that the majority of US-trained fighters are Turkmen, who are an ethnic minority in Syria.

  [Telegraph / Nabih Bulos]

• Anyway, the US agreed Sunday to provide air support for the fighters it trained — after the Nusra attack.

  [WSJ / Adam Entous]

MISCELLANEOUS

This is a very persuasive argument that Viktor Zhdanov, a Ukrainian virologist who died in 1987, is the greatest human to ever live. [Boing Boing / William MacAskill]

• It's taken 50 years, but the Voting Rights Act's opponents may be near a complete victory. Here's how it happened.

  [NYT / Jim Rutenberg]

• The case for letting New York be overrun by feral coyotes.

  [Slate / Lance Richardson]

• The average American has three dollar bills in their pocket at any given time, according to Boston Fed research. And as I'm writing this, my wallet has … three singles. Duh nuh nuh nuh duh nuh nuh nuh.

  [WSJ / Michael S. Derby]

• RiteAid and Hannaford are covering up issues of Cosmopolitan in their stores because it's "pornographic."

  [Slate / Laura Bradley]

VERBATIM

"I liked the black community. I had fun there … There’s people who will just crack you up." [Darren Wilson, shooter of Michael Brown to New Yorker / Jake Halpern]

• "Plastic surgeons say they are fielding a growing number of requests from those who want to surgically correct their 'permafrowns' (again, primarily from women)."

  [NYT / Jessica Bennett]

• "According to a source close to the Trump campaign, Trump’s friend Rudy Giuliani called the Fox chief the other day and asked Ailes to make sure Megyn Kelly doesn’t go after Trump in her questioning."

  [NY Mag / Gabriel Sherman]

• "The primary moral goal for today’s bioethics can be summarized in a single sentence: Get out of the way."

  [Boston Globe / Steven Pinker]

• "[Ronda] Rousey has finished every single fighter she has faced; only one of her opponents has made it out of the first round; and only four have made it out of the first minute of the first round."

  [Deadspin / Greg Howard]

WATCH THIS

Vox / Joss Fong

• The Planned Parenthood controversy, explained in 4 minutes.

  [Youtube]

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