Vox Sentences: What the hell is going on in Oregon, explained

A federal building in Oregon is under armed occupation, the Middle East's 2 regional superpowers are getting hostile, and, oh yeah, the biggest gun-control actions of the Obama presidency. Welcome back!

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

There can be only one regional hegemon

Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty

• The most powerful Sunni country in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, and the most powerful Shia country, Iran, are at odds following the former's execution of 47 people over the weekend.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• Those killed included the highly prominent Shia cleric Nimr al-Nimr.

  [BBC ]

• The executions were intended to send a message to Saudi Arabia's own citizens: the regime is worried about its stability and seeking to quash dissent.

  [Al-Monitor / Bruce Reidel]

• Unsurprisingly, though, Iran has responded badly. Iranian citizens set fire to the Saudi embassy over the weekend. The two countries have cut off diplomatic ties.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• And now, regional proxies like Bahrain (which supports Saudi Arabia) are getting in on the act.

  [Washington Post / Liz Sly]

• None of this is very good news for the developing Syrian peace talks, in which both Iran and Saudi Arabia are supposed to be playing a major role.

  [Foreign Policy / Dan De Luce]

• And since the collapse of the Syria peace talks would be great news for ISIS, they might be the big winners in the Iran/Saudi fight.

  [Slate / Joshua Keating]

The Bundy boys are at it again

YouTube / Jon Ritzheimer

• On Saturday night, a few dozen armed right-wing protesters took over the headquarters of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. As of Monday night, they are still there. Vox's Jennifer Williams explains what's going on.

  [Vox / Jennifer Williams]

• The protests are ostensibly on behalf of ranchers Dwight and Steven Hammond, who were convicted of arson on federal lands in 2012. In December, a judge ruled that they were subject to 5-year sentences and sent them back to prison to finish their terms.

• But the Hammonds weren't involved in the occupation. They turned themselves in Monday night.

  [LA Times / Nigel Duara and Richard Winton]

• Instead, the occupation's being led by Ammon Bundy — the son of Cliven Bundy, who you might remember as the man who led a weeklong standoff with federal agents over land use in 2014, in which no one was arrested.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• Anti-government sentiment runs way back in the Bundy family. They're part of a Mormon tradition that valorizes struggle against unjust rulers, and Cliven Bundy has said that his views were shaped by his family's history with the federal government (in one case, a town founded by a Bundy ancestor was abandoned after a land-rights dispute).

  [Oregon Public Broadcasting / John Sepulveda]

• Land use is also a major current Bundy grievance — shared by many western conservatives — with the federal government. The federal government gives them a 93 percent discount to graze on federal lands. But they don't believe the land should be federally owned at all.

  [FiveThirtyEight / Leah Libresco]

Tightening the gun-show loophole

Shutterstock

• Late Monday, the White House announced a set of executive actions that represent the biggest moves Obama's made on gun control during his presidency.

  [Oliver Darcy via Twitter]

• The executive actions will require anyone "in the business of selling firearms" to get a federal license — even if they do that business at gun shows or online. That means more sellers will have to run a background check for every gun sale they make.

  [ABC News / Arlette Saenz]

• The government is also going to hire 230 more people to run those background checks, an increase of more than 50 percent over current staffing.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• Obama issued a round of executive actions to tighten gun sales in early 2013, after the Sandy Hook massacre. But this round is much bolder.

  [Forbes / Rick Ungar]

• It's pretty safe to assume that Republicans will fight the executive actions. The question is how. They might file a federal court challenge — or might try to defund the Department of Justice.

  [The Hill / Tim Devaney]

• The truth of the matter is that reducing US gun deaths to European levels would likely require large-scale gun confiscation. And that is never happening.

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

• Not caught up on America's gun problem in general? This explainer should help.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

MISCELLANEOUS

Longtime FDA cancer chief Richard Pazdur was long reviled by patient advocates for being too slow to approve new treatments. Then his wife was diagnosed with ovarian cancer — and approvals sped up. [NYT / Gardiner Harris]

• In terrible news for both ISIS Twitter and white supremacist Twitter, the social network is now banning attacks "on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease" and "threatening or promoting terrorism."

  [Washington Post / Jessica Contrera]

• What the (failed) war on drugs can learn from the (successful) war on smoking.

  [Washington Post / Danielle Allen]

• Drag for teens is a thing now, and it sounds delightful.

  [Slate / Miz Cracker]

• Paying people $45,000 each to donate a kidney could eliminate the over 100,000 person kidney donation waiting list, save the lives of the thousands on that list who die every year, and spare taxpayers $12 billion annually in dialysis costs. So why don't we compensate donors?

  [Washington Post / Scott Sumner]

VERBATIM

"The American ideal was only ever a lie, says The Hateful Eight, but in the end, when the floorboards are slicked with blood and brain matter, and the fatally wounded have enacted a ritualistic parody of justice, it looks toward that same ideal with the hope that one day, someone will be suckered by it hard enough to make it come true." [AV Club / Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

• "At one point, the reactionary pundit Ann Coulter stopped by their table. [Larry] Wilmore was courteous, but [Leslie] Jones leaned across the table and stage-whispered, 'What the fuck is this frightening bitch doing here?' Coulter’s face froze in a rictus, and she soon backed away from the table."

  [New Yorker / Andrew Marantz]

• "Detective stories aren’t really about solving mysteries. Very few detective stories are Encyclopedia Brown-style 'solvable murder puzzles' where the reader can find every clue necessary to discover The Truth … Most mystery stories play with hunches and suspicions, but almost never with full, fair data. This is because most mystery stories are not as much about the mystery as they are about the mystery-solver."

  [Laura Michet]

• "'I just want to know what happened to me,' the guy begged, until the woman on the other end of the line finally gave in and told him what had happened: He’d been fleeced by a gang of ex-strippers who had spiked his drink with narcotics."

  [NY Mag / Jessica Pressler]

• "Students were asked to solve various problems, some with a partner and others individually. A few students—confederates of the researchers—were told to become noticeably upset while working alone. Inevitably, some students helped their partners during the individual section of the experiment—in other words, they cheated … Direct accusations elicited confessions from innocent and guilty subjects alike, and minimization proved especially effective: when the experimenters told subjects, 'You probably didn’t realize what a big deal this was,' the confession rate among guilty parties increased by about thirty-five per cent. Yet Russano observed 'collateral damages'—the confession rate among innocents tripled."

  [New Yorker / Douglas Starr]

WATCH THIS

Why Mormons identify with Syrian refugees [YouTube / Johnny Harris]

LDS

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