Vox Sentences: Will Alabama’s governor have to resign over phone sex?

Alabama, scandalized; the collapse of Canadian pharmaceutical giant Valeant; the World Cup–winning US women's team wants to be paid as much as its mediocre men's team.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Why Alabama's governor bought a bunch of Best Buy burner phones

Matthew Hinton/AFP/Getty Images

• Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley is facing calls for impeachment after being implicated in a sex scandal with one of his aides, Rebekah Mason. Mason resigned Wednesday.

  [CNN / Steve Almasy and Tara Kopan]

• The scandal erupted last week, when Bentley fired the head of the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency, Spencer Collier. Collier subsequently told the press that he had knowledge of an affair between Mason and Bentley, including incriminating tapes of their conversations, taped by Bentley's then-wife.

  [Montgomery Advertiser / Josh Moon]

• The tapes in question have since been made public. They're risqué, but they don't make it clear whether there was a physical affair — something both Mason and Bentley continue to deny.

  [AL.com / John Archibald]

• Bentley has being attacked as a moral failure (he's lost a leadership position at his church), and it's clear he engaged in sketchy behavior, including buying a series of burner phones at a Tuscaloosa Best Buy (presumably to text Mason with).

  [AL.com / Connor Sheets]

• But it's not clear whether any laws were broken. The US Attorney's office is looking into whether the relationship involved any misused public resources or campaign funds.

  [WKRG / Peter Albrecht]

• The Alabama state's attorney, meanwhile, is investigating what role the scandal might have played in the investigation of the speaker of the state House — who is still in his position, despite being about to stand trial on ethics charges.

  [AL.com / Mike Cason]

Valeant, explained

Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call

• Canadian pharmaceutical giant Valeant is in serious trouble with creditors and regulators. It's gotten so bad that on Thursday, Canadian securities regulators ordered the company's top officials not to sell any stock until they've provided more information about their operations.

  [Reuters / Rod Nickel]

• Valeant has lost 90 percent of its stock value due to concerns about dishonest accounting practices, worries about future earning potential, and concerns that the company can't cover its debts (the three are obviously interrelated).

  [Wall Street Journal ]

• A few years ago, Valeant was one of the hottest companies in pharmaceuticals, thanks to CEO Michael Pearson's strategy of aggressively buying up existing treatments and raising their prices.

  [Globe and Mail / Sean Silcoff]

• That sort of strategy requires a lot of borrowing — but continued growth relies on continued acquisition. At a certain point, the company needs to figure out how to pay back the loans it already has.

  [The New Yorker / James Surowiecki]

• Valeant's earnings reports were perfectly sunny. But there have been concerns about its accounting practices, and the company finally admitted it would have to revise its reports from 2014 and 2015, as well as the beginning of 2016.

  [Fortune / Stephen Gandel]

• The company is currently in talks with its creditors to negotiate just how long it has to file updated reports before it officially defaults on its debts.

  [USA Today / Kevin McCoy]

• The question hanging over all of this is how much Valeant's fall should scare other pharmaceutical companies. The accounting errors may well be specific to Valeant. The questionably sustainable acquisition-heavy strategy is not.

  [The Motley Fool / Sean Williams]

Equal pay for more-than-equal work

Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images

• Five members of the World Cup champion US women's national soccer team have filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against the US Soccer Federation, alleging they're paid only a fraction of what the men's team gets for comparable work.

  [Reuters / Suzannah Gonzales and Mica Rosenberg]

• The union representing the women's team has been stuck in unproductive negotiations with the federation over a new collective bargaining agreement. (It sued the federation last month.)

  [SBNation / Kevin McAuley]

• In that context, the response from the stars of the US men's team — that this issue can be addressed via collective bargaining — makes sense not as a dismissal, but as a gesture of labor solidarity.

  [ESPN.com]

• The equal-pay complaint is an offshoot of that argument; the lawyer for the women says the union brought up the question of equal pay and the federation called it an "irrational request."

  [Wall Street Journal / Joshua Robinson and Matthew Futterman]

• It is not an irrational request. By pretty much any measure — whether based on on-field success or off-field profits — the US women's national team is vastly more successful than the men's team.

  [Huffington Post / Justin Block]

• As the Washington Post's Jim Tankersley explains, the biggest effect of paying a more successful group of women less than men is to send a strong signal to women who could choose to become national-caliber soccer players that it isn't worth their time.

  [Washington Post / Jim Tankersley]

MISCELLANEOUS

UN peacekeepers have engaged in horrifying sexual abuse for years now, but the latest revelations might be the most sickening yet. [NYT / Rick Gladstone]

• FDR lost the California, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Illinois, and Massachusetts primaries in 1932, and faced Democratic elites plotting to sabotage his nomination. Here's how he won anyway.

  [Slate / Rebecca Onion]

• Always wanted to design a board game? Well, there's now a competition to design the best adaptation of Robert Moses's The Power Broker. Happy building!

  [Medium / Tim Hwang]

• RIP, Zaha Hadid, the first female celebrity architect.

  [CityLab / Kriston Capps]

• David Crunelle witnessed the Brussels airport bombings and tweeted about it. Then the press swooped in.

  [Medium / David Crunelle]

VERBATIM

"I’m particularly unimpressed with people who sat out the Congressional elections of 2010 and 2014 and then are angry at Democrats because we haven’t been able to produce public policies they like. They contributed to the public policy problems and now they are blaming other people for their own failure to vote." [Barney Frank to Slate / Isaac Chotiner]

• "In December, a second round of tests showed that the Olympic waterways teem with viruses and bacteria even far from land. Poop, there it is."

  [The Atlantic / Olga Khazan]

• "I can only assure them that there was not a single moment during my writing and researching of the review that I felt any such pleasurable or positive emotion."

  [NY Review of Books / Tamsin Shaw]

• "I suspect this is a Congress that would refuse to fight the next recession in the ways that would really work."

  [NY Mag / Annie Lowrey]

• "The disturbing thing for liberals now is that there are still so many gauchiste intellectuals who persist in believing that the roots of injustice might be found in liberal democracy itself, and the roots of justice in some version of unlimited, self-perpetuating power."

  [London Review of Books / Clive James]

WATCH THIS

Comedian Lauren Lapkus’s oddball characters, in 3 minutes [YouTube / Estelle Caswell and Lauren Lapkus]

Vox / Estelle Caswell

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