Vox Sentences: Brazil’s ginormous corruption scandal exposes the country’s class divides

Brazil's deepening political crisis; the last surviving perpetrator of the Paris attacks is caught; American mass transit is broken.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Class and corruption in Brazil

Mario Tama/Getty Images

• Brazil's corruption scandal is still threatening to swallow its government. Vox's Zack Beauchamp has the explainer you need.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• On Friday, legislators accelerated their plans to impeach President Dilma Rousseff. The actions for which Rousseff might be impeached actually aren't part of the Petrobras scandal itself, but rather concern her role in sheltering her predecessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, from the scandal by appointing him her chief of staff, angering her political opponents.

  [Bloomberg / Arnaldo Galvao, Raymond Colitt, and David Biller]

• Meanwhile, police used tear gas to disperse anti-government protesters — as pro-government protesters came together throughout the country to defend Rousseff and her Workers' Party (PT).

  [AFP / Natalia Ramos]

• There's a substantial class divide between the two groups. Brazil's working classes tend to support the PT, with its left-leaning populist agenda; the anti-government anti-corruption crusaders are disproportionately wealthy and white.

  [BBC / Luis Barrucho]

• To some, the split is evidence that Brazil's elite media has incited the anti-government protests — and that they're being used to push an anti-democratic agenda.

  [The Intercept / Glenn Greenwald, Andrew Fishman, and David Miranda]

• To others, though, it's an illustration of the deep social divide within Brazil — a cultural moment in which a single photograph of the protests can go viral among supporters and protesters of the government, for very different reasons.

  [The Globe and Mail / Stephanie Nolen]

A high-value target in custody

Carl Court/Getty Images

• The last surviving member of the team that allegedly carried out the November 13 terrorist attacks in Paris was arrested today during a raid in Brussels.

  [NYT / Steven Erlanger and Alissa J. Rubin]

• Salah Abdeslam is believed to have handled logistics for the attacks. He's believed to have driven the car that brought suicide bombers to France's national soccer stadium; according to some reports, he was supposed to wear a suicide vest himself but chickened out.

  [The Atlantic / David A. Graham]

• All of those "believed to"s indicate some of the things law enforcement officials hope to learn from Abdeslam while in custody. But it just scratches the surface: They'd like Abdeslam to tell them everything from how ISIS-trained terrorists get into Europe to what technologies they use to avoid surveillance.

  [Foreign Policy / Siobhan O'Grady]

• Whether they can get that information will be, as the New York Times's Rukmini Callimachi pointed out on Twitter, a major test of European (i.e., non-torture) interrogation techniques.

  [Rukmini Callimachi via Twitter]

• It's fitting that Abdeslam was captured this week: France appears to be turning away from the worst of its post-Paris hysteria, in the form of a constitutional amendment to strip citizenship from certain people. The country's senate passed a version of the amendment that's different enough from the version that passed the other legislative chamber to render final passage unlikely.

  [Washington Post / James Macauley]

The trains are not running on time

SFBART

• On Wednesday, as you may have heard if you know anyone in or around Washington, DC, the city's subway system shut down entirely (with only several hours' notice) for a system-wide safety inspection.

  [Huffington Post / Chelsea Kiene]

• Meanwhile, on the West Coast, the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system's Twitter account "stopped being polite and started getting real," in the words of Vox's Libby Nelson, openly admitting to frustrated riders that the city has just gotten too big and the transit infrastructure too old to provide reliable service.

  [Vox / Libby Nelson]

• New Yorkers, you will be shocked to learn, were smug. They should not have been. As this New York magazine story chronicles, the New York subway system is so fragile that a mechanical failure last fall cascaded into 625 different delays.

  [New York / Robert Kolker]

• What's going on here? Philip Kennicott argues that America gave up on transit long ago, when we gave up on the idea of urban infrastructure as something that could be not only reliable but aspirational, not only functional but beautiful.

  [Washington Post / Philip Kennicott]

• In giving up on the latter, we've arguably given up on the former as well: Consider the New York subway trains that don't have countdown clocks that tell riders when the next train is coming (for surprisingly complicated and fascinating reasons).

  [The Atlantic / James Somers]

• At least reliability can be clawed back somewhat, as Vox's Matt Yglesias pointed out in January. Take Houston, which vastly expanded the ridership of its bus system simply by offering fewer bus routes but offering them more frequently (more like, you know, subways).

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• If you are interested in learning more about transit planning, incidentally, Matt recommends this "Basics" series from urban planner Jarrett Walker.

  [Human Transit / Jarrett Walker]

MISCELLANEOUS

Who said it: Merrick Garland or Judy Garland? The answers may surprise you. [Mother Jones / Tim McDonnell]

• Most "let's solve global poverty with … apps!" proposals are bullshit. But there's one way in which drones really can improve public health in Africa.

  [The Globe and Mail / Geoffrey York]

• Making it official apparently really does matter: Even unmarried couples together for decades are likelier to break up than married couples.

  [Washington Post / Roberto Ferdman]

• The evidence that standing desks are good for you is surprisingly weak.

  [NPR / Angus Chen]

• The golden age of TV drama is dead (give or take The Americans, The Leftovers, and The People vs. OJ Simpson). Long live the golden age of TV comedy.

  [Variety / Maureen Ryan]

VERBATIM

"We were fighting a disease that killed many thousands and risked spinning out of control and yet we spent weeks waiting for a healthy colleague to get her forms processed." [NYT / Anthony Banbury]

• "The gateway to the modern Supreme Court seems to narrow early in life; apparently, late bloomers and non-Ivies need not apply. "

  [Slate / Akhil Reed Amar]

• "If you ask young parents why they have left a star city for its suburbs, or for a cheaper Sun Belt region, you won’t hear most of them say 'because I wanted to shop at strip malls and big box stores' or 'because I love driving everywhere.'"

  [Grist / Ben Adler]

• "Almond milk is not a milk; it’s not a beverage really."

  [Maye Musk to NY Mag / Kathleen Hou]

• "People who care about civil society have two choices: find some epistemic principles other than empiricism on which everyone can agree or else find some method other than reason with which to defend empiricism."

  [New Yorker / Jill Lepore]

WATCH THIS

28 times TV winked at its favorite films [YouTube / Estelle Caswell]

Alfred HItchcock/Bryan Fuller

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