Vox Sentences: The election that will determine Iran’s future

North Korea loses one of its last remaining trade partners; Friday's big Iranian election; will this be the night the GOP finally goes after Trump? (Nah.)

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Even China is getting worried about North Korea

Ed Jones/AFP/Getty

• China is poised to approve new international sanctions on North Korea over its nuclear program (after years of pressure from the US).

  [New York Times / Somini Sengupta]

• China is one of North Korea's few remaining trade partners, and Chinese officials were initially reluctant to change that. But they got concerned enough about Korean nukes to give in.

  [Financial Times / Geoff Dyer and Charles Clover]

• The concerns are twofold: worry about North Korea's nuclear program (like the "hydrogen bomb" the country claimed to test last month), and worry about its rocket program. North Korea says the rockets are just supposed to deliver satellites to orbit; others are pretty sure they're for ICBMs.

  [Foreign Policy / Jeffrey Lewis]

• The US, South Korea, and Japan were already sanctioning North Korea. But China is responsible for the vast majority of North Korea's food and energy — so withholding its support means a lot more.

  [Bloomberg / Kambiz Foroohar ]

• The new sanctions — which are supposed to be "substantive," though the details aren't public yet — are now headed to the UN Security Council for approval.

  [Associated Press / Edith Lederer]

• Big winners: South Korea. The mood there has been getting more hawkish as North Korea's gotten more aggressive in its testing.

  [BBC News / Stephen Evans]

• And now that China's on board with sanctions, it may be open to the deployment of an American defense missile shield in South Korea.

  [Washington Times / Guy Taylor]

A big test for Iran's moderates

Vox / Johnny Harris

• Friday will be a huge day for Iran. The country will be voting for members of parliament and the Assembly of Experts — the body that elects the country's supreme leader.

  [The Guardian / Ian Black]

• Since the current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is 76 and in failing health, that could matter a lot.

  [The Associated Press]

• The major candidate slates: the moderate Universal Coalition of Reformists, associated with President Hassan Rouhani; the Voice of the Nation, a moderately conservative coalition headed by a member of parliament (who's also on the Reformists' list); and the hard-line Grand Coalition of Principlists, associated with Khamenei.

  [US Institutie of Peace / Katayoun Kishi]

• Khamenei is not going gently into that good night. More candidates applied to him to run than ever before — and he rejected more than ever before.

  [Brookings Institute / Emma Borden and Suzanne Maloney]

• The Obama administration has argued the US-Iran nuclear deal will help moderates (like Rouhani, who helped negotiate it) gain power in Iran's domestic politics. We'll see.

  [The Washington Post / Carol Morello]

GOP's anti-Trump cavalry running behind schedule

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

• Will tonight's Republican debate be the night one of the also-ran GOP candidates finally stops attacking other also-rans and starts attacking near-presumptive nominee Donald Trump?

  [The New York Times / Ross Douthat]

• It's been months since Trump rose to the top of the polls, and it might be too late to stop him.

  [The Week / Michael Brendan Dougherty ]

• In a metaphor for this entire campaign, GOP-establishment-last-hope Marco Rubio feinted toward attacking Trump before the debate (albeit attacking him on his past support for Obamacare, which missed the point that Trump's unorthodox economic populism is part of his appeal)…

  [The Washington Post / Greg Sargent]

• …then backed off. His campaign says Trump's supporters like him too much for Rubio's attacks to work, so he'll go after Ted Cruz instead.

  [Politico / Alex Isenstadt]

• Cruz is almost certainly toast anyway. Then again, so's Rubio: A new poll on Thursday showed Trump beating Rubio 44-28 in Florida, Rubio's home state.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

MISCELLANEOUS

You know how we mentioned rumors that Obama was considering Nevada's Republican governor, Brian Sandoval, for the Supreme Court? Sandoval has now ruled out the idea. [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• An NYPD officer shot and killed an unarmed black man in a housing project stairwell. He got indicted and convicted. It's how the system is supposed to work. But some Asian-American activists are wondering why it happened with a Chinese-American cop when it hasn't with white cops in the past.

  [NYT Mag / Jay Caspian Kang]

• Amanda Nguyen is only 24, but she's already helping spearheading legislation improving how the legal system treats sexual assault victims.

  [The Guardian / Molly Redden]

• SeaWorld hired spies to infiltrate animal rights groups. Seriously.

  [NYT / Jonah Bromwich]

• An emergency room doctor explains how Leo DiCaprio's character in The Revenant could've survived being mauled by a bear and buried alive.

  [Time / Alexandra Sifferlin]

VERBATIM

"'JonBenét Ramsey became Katy Perry. That’s a fact,' declares a faceless voice, over a screenshot of the Ramsey murder Wikipedia page." [The Kernel / Rick Paulas]

• "Car accidents, gun-related deaths, and drug overdoses account for nearly half of the life-expectancy gap between men in the United States and those in other high-income countries."

  [The Advisory Board]

• "I have a breakout in the shape of the Big Dipper on my right upper lip. I don't know how these things happen, but it must be written in the stars! Great joke."

  [TinyLetter / Claire Carusillo]

• "The early fixation on whether or not Dunham 'deserved' to have a TV show, whether she should have a political megaphone of any kind, whether the title was too culturally arrogant or merely imprecise, and whether the writers had an obligation to represent a multicultural Williamsburg-Bushwick 20-something scene, all focused media attention on aspects of the series other than what was actually onscreen. That's too bad, because what's onscreen is consistently more thoughtful, self-aware, and honest than the mountains of press clippings about Lena Dunham would ever suggest."

  [NY Mag / Matt Zoller Seitz]

• "The Mortons’ legal woes are by no means over: This past September, they allege in court filings, they were raided by IRS agents, who held them at gunpoint, then took their computers, cell phones, a mass of files, and their marriage license, all of which they were storing in one of their cats’ bedrooms."

  [Jezebel / Anna Merlan]

WATCH THIS

The 1968 scandal that gave us the modern primary system [Vox / Liz Scheltens, Joe Posner, and Carlos Waters]

Vox / Liz Scheltens, Joe Posner, Carlos Waters

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