Vox Sentences: Russia’s bombing someone in Syria, but it’s not ISIS

Russia bombs Syria to help out Assad; the head of the Palestinian Authority is very frustrated; and Oklahoma just delayed an execution, again.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

The skies over Syria are getting crowded

Andrew Burton/Getty Images

• Russia has started bombing targets in Syria, continuing a military escalation to aid Bashar al-Assad in the country's civil war.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• Russia says it's bombing ISIS. It isn't. As these maps from the Institute for the Study of War show, the places Russia's bombing are held by other rebel groups.

  [Institute for the Study of War]

• But Russia isn't going to singlehandedly return Syria to Bashar al-Assad, either. The mission is more a strike against things Putin's afraid of — like popular uprisings — than a move toward a goal.

  [Vox / Amanda Taub]

• The US, which is still leading its own bombing missions against ISIS, isn't a fan of other powers intervening and bombing non-ISIS rebels. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said Russia was "pouring gasoline on the fire."

  [Financial Times / Kathrin Hille, Geoff Dyer, Demetri Sevastopulo and Erika Solomon]

• In fact, the US is continuing its own bombing missions even while the Russians are doing theirs — which goes against standard practice of "deconflicting" (this is a word) the airspace.

  [Reuters / Michelle Nichols and Arshad Mohammed]

• However, in a joint press conference with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, Secretary of State John Kerry said discussions would begin very soon about resolving the simultaneous airstrike issue.

  [WSJ / Laurence Norman]

• Russia requested that the US clear the airspace before today's strikes. But NATO argues they didn't do so far enough in advance — and don't appear too concerned with the fact that there are now 12 different countries flying missions over Syria.

  [The Guardian]

• If Putin's doing something this unpopular abroad, it must be popular domestically, right? Nope. The Russian public really, really does not want to get involved in Syria. That could be very bad for Putin indeed.

  [Vox / Amanda Taub]

Palestine's bombshell that wasn't

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

• Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority — the body responsible for governing Palestine while it's under Israeli control — told the UN General Assembly today that "We cannot continue to be bound by these agreements and [...] Israel must assume all of its responsibilities as an occupying power."

  [UN General Assembly]

• To some, that sounded like Abbas was renouncing the Oslo Accords — which have governed Palestine since 1993, and set up Israeli, Palestinian and joint areas of control.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• But as Zack Beauchamp explains, Abbas didn't actually point to any parts of Oslo he was interested in dismantling.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• This isn't even the first time he's threatened to dissolve the Palestinian Authority. He did that in April 2014, and then again in November 2014.

  [Jerusalem Post ]

• Abbas can't even credibly threaten to resign in protest of Israeli actions. Two-thirds of Palestinians say they want him to do it anyway.

  [Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research]

• That's one effect of Palestinians' loss of faith in the peace process more generally.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• And when, on the same day as Abbas' speech, Israel authorized 5 new settlements — right next to where an 18-month-old Palestinian toddler was burned to death in his home last year — it's easy to see why Palestinians might have given up.

  [Haaretz / Chaim Levinson]

Another death-penalty mistake in Oklahoma

Per-Anders Pettersson / Hulton Archive via Getty Images

• An hour after Richard Glossip was scheduled to be executed today, Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin granted him a stay until November 6.

  [State of Oklahoma]

• Fallin's decision came after the Supreme Court rejected Glossip's lawyers' final stay request. So Glossip is out of options for convincing the courts to reconsider his guilt — despite persistent uncertainties about it.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• Instead, Oklahoma is giving itself a chance to fix a mistake with its execution drugs. Its protocols call for potassium chloride to be used in executions. The government, for reasons that aren't clear, prepared potassium acetate for the execution today.

  [AP / Sean Murphy]

• So it now has 37 days either to figure out how to get potassium chloride, or to decide whether potassium acetate is an OK substitute.

  [State of Oklahoma]

• This is a particularly awkward position for Oklahoma to be in after the botched execution of Clayton Lockett last year, which took over half an hour and clearly caused Lockett to suffer excruciating pain.

  [The Guardian / Katie Fretland]

• The Lockett execution caused Oklahoma prisoners (including Glossip) to ask the Supreme Court about the drugs Oklahoma was using (which included the untested-for-executions drug midazolam). The Court ruled that what Oklahoma was doing was safe enough to be constitutional.

  [Vox / Dara Lind and German Lopez]

• Oklahoma did make some reforms to execution procedures after the Lockett execution — like limiting press access and muting the prisoner's microphone after the drugs are injected.

  [Phil Cross via Twitter]

MISCELLANEOUS

What if Sheldon from the Big Bang Theory were a Nietzsche-inspired serial killer and Leonard and Penny were hiding out in Guatemala? Like, what if? [AV Club / Kyle Daly]

• There have been a lot of nutty nuclear ideas over the past 70 years, but Project Plowshare, a mid-1950s plan to do large-scale exacavation of canals, road cuts, etc. with hydrogen bombs, takes the cake.

  [Slate / Ed Regis]

• Playing Monopoly with Michael Shannon sounds approximately as intense as doing anything else with Michael Shannon.

  [LA Weekly / Amy Nicholson]

• Yelp, but for rating actual human beings.

  [Washington Post / Caitlin Dewey]

• Meet Teddy Gray's, the most charming candy facotry in the entire West Midlands.

  [Martin Parr]

VERBATIM

"It's the largest piece of glass in a car ever, I believe. At least, that's what the glass manufacturers tell us." [Elon Musk to The Verge / Chris Ziegler]

• " If the Tesla wore pants, they’d be Dockers. Pleated ones, smelling of Tide, flanked by a dangling convention lanyard."

  [The Atlantic / Ian Bogost]

• "We’re treating him like an animal, like someone who should be quarantined and put away. Just because he was created on top of a mountain by Vincent Price, incomplete with scissors for hand and no heart."

  [Jon Hendren via Gawker / Taylor Berman]

• "How many open doors does it take to dispel the notion that a city does not belong to you?"

  [Slate / Henry Grabar]

• "Digital’s return on investment was around 2 to 1, a $2 increase in revenue for every $1 of ad spending, compared with at least 6 to 1 for TV. The most startling finding: Only 20 percent of the campaign’s 'ad impressions'—ads that appear on a computer or smartphone screen—were even seen by actual people."

  [Bloomberg / Ben Elgin, Michael Riley, David Kocieniewski, and Joshua Brustein]

WATCH THIS

The better way to board an airplane [YouTube / Joss Fong, Joe Posner, Joseph Stromberg]

Vox / Joss Fong, Joe Posner

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