Vox Sentences: Atheists keep getting murdered in Bangladesh

The Democratic primary reaches the damage stage; another murder of an atheist in Bangladesh; the Obama administration mulls a ban on anonymous shell companies.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Unqualified support?

William Thomas Cain/Getty Images

• On Wednesday, Hillary Clinton said that Bernie Sanders "hadn't done his homework" on policy issues, and that that "raises a lot of questions." The remarks were paraphrased, as in this Washington Post headline, as Clinton questioning whether Sanders was "qualified."

  [Washington Post / Juliet Eilperin and Anne Gearan]

• Sanders replied by saying that if she called him unqualified, he'd turn it right back: "I don’t believe that she is qualified if she is through her super PAC taking tens of millions of dollars in special-interest funds."

  [The Atlantic / David A. Graham]

• Political media has spent the past 24 hours sniping back and forth about this.

• It's only meaningful to the extent that there's some fear that Sanders and his supporters are hardening their anti-Clinton attitudes to the point that they might not support her in a general election.

  [Vox / Ezra Klein]

• After all, a poll this week showed a quarter of Sanders supporters would refuse to vote for her in November.

  [McClatchy]

• Arguably, the Sanders campaign, led by campaign manager Jeff Weaver, has encouraged this attitude by saying they'll fight to the convention even if Clinton has more voter and delegate support.

  [Teddy Goff via Twitter]

• On the other hand, history shows that primary voters tend to come around to their party's candidate in the general, even when they said they wouldn't.

  [Salon / Walter Shapiro]

• Indeed, the Democratic nominee managed to win in 2008, even though his opponent called him unqualified then.

  [Huffington Post]

Brutal chilling effects

Nazimuddin Samad

• Bangladeshi law student Nazimuddin Samad, an organizer for an atheist advocacy group, was hacked to death with machetes in a drive-by attack on Wednesday.

  [BBC]

• Samad's murder is the latest in a string of attacks on atheist bloggers and advocates in the country, which started in 2013 and hit a high point last year with the murder of prominent blogger Avijit Roy.

  [Vox / Amanda Taub]

• The Bangladeshi government has not exactly leapt up to protect atheists. It's cautioned bloggers not to write on controversial subjects, and prosecuted some for hurting faith in Islam, the country's official religion.

  [WSJ / Salil Tripathi]

• And a court case over whether to drop Islam as the official religion, which was filed 28 years ago but suddenly taken up last month, has inflamed passions on both sides.

  [NYT / Maher Sattar]

• A New Yorker feature from last year explored what it's like to live under this sort of terror. When people talk about a "chilling effect" on ostensibly free speech, this is what they mean.

  [New Yorker / Samanth Subramanian]

Shell game

Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

• The Obama administration might be finalizing a regulation that would force banks to know the names of all account holders — even the ones whose accounts are under shell companies.

  [NYT / Louise Story]

• The regulation has reportedly been in the works since 2012 but should be finalized in the next few months.

  [Bloomberg / Alan Katz]

• In the US, shell companies have been used widely in the real estate industry — which might be what prompted the regulation to begin with.

  [NYT / Louise Story]

• But the timing is auspicious, given this week's massive leak of documents from a Panamanian law firm regarding shell companies.

  [The Guardian / Jill Treanor, Rowena Mason, and Juliette Garside]

• The documents haven't named too many Americans — largely because Americans have a Panama of their own in the state of Delaware, which makes it tremendously easy for companies to use it as a tax haven.

  [The Guardian / Jana Kasperkevic]

• Literally, legal experts say Panama modeled its corporate tax structure on Delaware.

  [NYT / Kirk Semple, Azam Ahmed, and Eric Lipton]

MISCELLANEOUS

What if every Wikipedia article were written by actual experts, fact-checked, and peer-reviewed? Meet the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. [Quartz / Nikhil Sonnad]

• Caitlin Dewey's investigation of Rule 34 — "If it exists, there is porn of it, no exceptions" — ends with a Russell paradox, and the rest is just as good.

  [Washington Post / Caitlin Dewey]

• DC's playgrounds, reviewed by 8-year-old Monty Sturdivant.

  [DCist / Monty Sturdivant]

• A new evolutionary morphology study fact-checks Moby Dick, finds that the whale totally could use his forehead to pwn those idiots on the Pequod.

  [Washington Post / Karin Brulliard]

• This article about Kyra Kennedy (granddaughter of Robert), Gaia Matisse (great-great-granddaughter of Henri), and their clique is the best argument I've ever seen for bloody class warfare.

  [NYT / Katherine Rosman]

VERBATIM

"Yes, I am a nine-year-old girl. But I’m a reporter, first. I report the news. And so long as there is news to report in Selinsgrove, I’m going to continue trying my best to give the people the facts." [The Guardian / Hilde Kate Lysiak]

• "On the one hand, the idea of charging already-exploited workers for access to information that could protect them from further abuse sounds ridiculous."

  [BuzzFeed / Caroline O'Donovan]

• "With almost no fanfare, President Obama’s budget proposal includes $11 billion over 10 years, which he says would end family and youth homelessness."

  [NYT / Nicholas Kristof]

• "As the absurd becomes commonplace, Berger’s work suggests, comedy has to be found in the mundane."

  [New Yorker / Adrian Chen]

• "It’s easy to sneer at the opium of the people. But it’s far more interesting to ask why the masses are lighting up."

  [Slate / Ruth Graham]

WATCH THIS

Our sterile homes might be giving us seasonal allergies [YouTube / Liz Scheltens and Gina Barton]

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