Vox Sentences: The Philippines elects a president with ties to murderous vigilantes

A sitting US president will finally visit Hiroshima; the Philippines' Trumpily terrifying new president; a terrible mezcal law in Mexico.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

US almost meets bare minimum of human courtesy

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

• Barack Obama will become the first sitting US president to visit Hiroshima (during his trip to Japan later this month), nearly 61 years after the United States dropped atomic bombs there and in Nagasaki.

  [NYT / Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Jonathan Soble ]

• The White House hastened to reassure the public that the president wasn't going to apologize for dropping the atomic bombs, because we live in a fallen world where apologizing for doing terrible things is apparently bad.

  [The Guardian / Justin McCurry, David Smith, and Alan Yuhas ]

• The Hiroshima visit is a bookend to a speech Obama gave in Prague in 2009, calling for the elimination of all nuclear weapons — a stance cited as one reason he won the Nobel Peace Prize later that year.

  [Foreign Affairs / Jennifer Lind]

• He obviously has not met that goal in his eight years in office. Tom Z. Collina argues that in fact, Obama's record on nuclear nonproliferation has been mixed.

  [Foreign Policy / Tom Z. Collina]

• The revisiting of Hiroshima comes just in time for tensions to rise in the Pacific, with China and Japan (as well as the Philippines) getting increasingly testy over territorial claims.

  [Foreign Policy / Elias Groll]

• Late last month, Japan unveiled its new, domestically built stealth aircraft — the most prominent symbol to date of its increased militarism under Shinzo Abe.

  [CNN / Thom Patterson]

• The wild card in the region is the Philippines, which has just elected a man who once promised to jet-ski over to a China-claimed island and plant a Filipino flag there. About which, see more below.

  [Japan Times / Jesse Johnson]

The world leader Trumpier than President Trump

Jes Aznar/Getty Images

• Tough-on-crime, loose-cannon populist Rodrigo Duterte has won the presidency of the Philippines.

  [Foreign Policy / Gina Apostol]

• Duterte has been called the Filipino Donald Trump. It's a fairly apt comparison — Tom Smith engages in a pretty rigorous compare-and-contrast for the Guardian — but how apt it really is depends on how seriously you take Trump.

  [The Guardian / Tom Smith]

• To wit: Duterte has promised that he'll eliminate crime within six months in the country by giving police officers free rein to kill criminals. It sounds like offensive, Trumpian bluster.

  [The Intercept / Robert Mackey]

• Except that when he was mayor of Davao City, the Philippines' third-largest city, he did preside over a decline in crime — but was also widely linked to a vigilante squad that may have actually killed hundreds of criminals.

  [Vice ]

• But many people are drawn to law and order. Especially when it comes from a man like Duterte, who styles himself a man of the people in a country that's grappling with serious economic inequality.

  [The Guardian / Oliver Holmes]

• Interestingly, Duterte is unusually tolerant of LGBTQ people (in a country that traditionally isn't). And the country just elected its first transgender legislator.

  [Fusion / Nidhi Prakash]

Illegal: mezcal

Omar Torres/AFP/Getty Images

• Mexico has passed a terrible, horrible law that will force many of the country's producers of mezcal not to use the word to describe their products (or the word agave to describe what they're made of).

  [The Guardian / David Agren]

• It's not an unusual type of law. Mexico is one of plenty of countries that use regulations of "appellation" to limit certain food or drink names to things made particular ways in particular places (see also: Champagne, Parmigiano-Reggiano, bourbon).

  [Huffington Post / David J. Duman]

• But in addition to preventing mezcal distillers from using a word they have used for generations to describe their products, Mexico's new law effectively bans them from even distinguishing pure mezcals made from 100 percent agave from bottom-shelf fillers with 49 percent grain liquor.

  [Reason / Jacob Grier]

• The regulations come at a time when mezcal is a booming market in the US — as in, nobody-can-get-enough-of-the-stuff booming. This New Yorker feature is a great snapshot of the mezcal industry on the eve of the law.

  [New Yorker / Dana Goodyear]

• And for those who want to enjoy their Mexican agave liquors without regard to label, here is a guide from Eater's Bill Esparza.

  [Eater / Bill Esparza]

MISCELLANEOUS

Jeopardy, but with Jonathan Franzen. [Slate / Katy Waldman]

• Radiohead has formed at least 20 companies for its various projects. That's actually not a bad idea.

  [The Guardian / Alex Marshall]

• Most coffee cups on TV shows are empty — and actors are really bad at pretending they're not.

  [Slate / Myles McNutt and Daniel Hubbard]

• Psychologist Angela Duckworth is responsible for popularizing the term "grit" — and is now slightly alarmed at what it's come to mean in the popular press.

  [NY Mag / Melissa Dahl]

• Reports of the death of work are greatly exaggerated.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

VERBATIM

"I’ll need to rush to come to America before November, because if Trump wins, I’ll be banned from coming." [London Mayor Sadiq Khan to Washington Post / Karla Adam]

• "Because of an editing error, an article on Monday about a theological battle being fought by Muslim imams and scholars in the West against the Islamic State misstated the Snapchat handle used by Suhaib Webb, one of Muslim leaders speaking out. It is imamsuhaibwebb, not Pimpin4Paradise786."

  [NYT / Laurie Goodstein]

• "Records show International Scherick, LLC, Scherick's company, has applied for a trademark on the term 'crazy bitch.'"

  [Jezebel / Anna Merlan]

• "The idea of the biological clock is a recent invention. It first appeared in the late 1970s. 'The Clock Is Ticking for the Career Woman,' the Washington Post declared, on the front page of its Metro Section, on 16 March 1978. The author, Richard Cohen, could not have realised just how inescapable his theme would become."

  [The Guardian / Moira Weigel]

• "Think of 'woke' as the inverse of 'politically correct.'"

  [NYT Mag / Amanda Hess]

WATCH THIS

The poison-eating heroes who helped make food safe [YouTube / Phil Edwards]

FDA

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