Vox Sentences: A member of Britain’s Parliament is assassinated

An extremely dark turn in Britain; the Senate will vote on guns; food riots in Venezuela.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Jo Cox, 1974-2016

Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

• Jo Cox, a 41-year-old member of British Parliament, was murdered today by a constituent during her weekly "surgery" (a tradition of one-on-one meetings with constituents in need).

  [BBC ]

• Cox was a rising star in the Labour Party. She was a first-term member of Parliament but had held several high-profile roles before that — including head of policy for Oxfam.

  [The Guardian / Julia Langdon]

• She was a passionate campaigner for development and human rights, as this tribute from Conservative MP Andrew Mitchell shows. During her time in Parliament, she was most vocal about the need to do more for Syrian refugees and was an outspoken supporter of Britain remaining in the European Union.

  [The Telegraph / Andrew Mitchell]

• Which makes it particularly worrisome that, according to two witnesses, the man who shot and stabbed Cox shouted, "Britain First," as he attacked her. (A suspect has been arrested in the murder.)

  [The Guardian / Helen Pidd]

• Both sides of the Brexit campaign have suspended their campaigning in light of the murder, even though the referendum will be held in only a week.

  [AFP / Alice Ritchie]

• The suspension comes just as the Leave side of the referendum has, for the first time, taken a solid lead in polls.

  [Evening Standard / Joe Murphy]

• But it also comes as right-wing politician Nigel Farage had unveiled a poster in favor of leaving the EU picturing a horde of foreign-looking refugees — sending the not-so-subtle, not to say appallingly racist, message that staying in the EU would cause Britain to be overrun by scary brown people.

  [Huffington Post / Steven Hopkins]

• It's too early to say if Cox was killed because of her support for remaining in the EU. But the tone of the "Leave" campaign has often been apocalyptic. Columnist Alex Massie walks the right line for the Spectator: "When you encourage rage you cannot then feign surprise when people become enraged."

  [The Spectator / Alex Massie]

The filibuster worked!

Pete Marovich/Getty Images

• The Senate is expected to vote Monday afternoon on several gun control amendments after Democrats held a 15-hour filibuster calling for Congress to respond to last week's massacre in Orlando.

  [Reuters / Susan Cornwell and Richard Cowan]

• The filibuster, which lasted until around 2 am, was a rousing success on social media — and successfully pressured Republican Senate leadership to allow votes.

  [Senate TV via NYT ]

• (During those 15 hours, for what it's worth, 12 people were killed and 36 more injured by gun violence in America.)

  [Vox / Zachary Crockett and Javier Zarracina]

• The leading Democratic proposal would give the federal government more authority to prevent people from buying guns because they're suspected of terrorist involvement. (This proposal has been widely misreported as being a ban on purchases by people on the "terror watch list," which it is not.)

  [Vox / Dara Lind and Jeff Stein]

• Republicans are trying to come up with alternatives that would provide more robust due process to those seeking to buy guns, which Democrats dismiss as unworkable.

  [Washington Post / Karoun Demirjian]

• There's also likely to be a fight over expanded background checks — which have failed on several occasions in recent years, most notably after the Sandy Hook massacre.

  [Politico / Burgess Everett and Seung Min Kim]

• These are likely to fail, too. But the presumptive Republican nominee supports the first idea — at least in theory — so who knows.

Venezuela keeps getting worse

Federico Parra/AFP/Getty Images

• Things are getting extremely bad in Venezuela. More than 400 people were arrested Thursday for looting and rioting in the midst of widespread food shortages.

  [BBC ]

• At least four people have been killed in the riots.

  [AP]

• The food shortages and riots are the latest stage of the country's decline into dysfunction, as explained in this Christian Science Monitor feature.

  [Christian Science Monitor / Whitney Eulich and Mariana Zuniga]

• Opposition politicians continue to try to mount a recall campaign against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. But they're being met with police opposition as forceful as that meeting food rioters.

  [Time / Ioan Grillo and Jorge Benezra]

• The Venezuelan government is petitioning the country's Supreme Court to reject the recall petition, and Maduro has promised that there will be no recall this year.

  [BBC ]

• The United States is getting fed up. Secretary of State John Kerry called on Maduro this week to let the recall go forward, lest the country sink further into disorder.

  [AFP / Leila Macor]

MISCELLANEOUS

What Donald Trump was like as a boss on The Apprentice: "He was always very open about describing women by their breast size." [Slate / Seth Stevenson]

• The Tuskegee experiment technically ended in 1972. But the mistrust in medicine it (quite understandably) generated is still killing people today.

  [NY Mag / Jesse Singal]

• Meet the Neu Jorker: an incredibly detailed, full-length parody of everyone's favorite forum for longform journalism and John McPhee writing about rocks and stuff.

  [The Neu Jorker]

• Elizabeth had an abortion at 32 weeks when she learned her fetus wouldn't be able to breathe outside the womb. It involved flying to Colorado from New York (because that's where one of the only four doctors to do this is) and paying $25,000 cash.

  [Jezebel / Jia Tolentino]

• LinkedIn sold for $26 billion. It still failed.

  [The Verge / Casey Newton]

VERBATIM

"[Ulysses] has acquired an opposite, and equally defensive, reputation: endless and impenetrable. This is like calling Mt. Everest too high. You have to work to get to the top, but the view is unsurpassed." [New Yorker / Louis Menand]

• "There are striking parallels between the intimate terrorism of domestic violence and the mass terrorism perpetrated by lone-wolf attackers like Mr. Mateen seems to have been. Both, at their most basic level, are attempts to provoke fear and assert control."

  [NYT / Amanda Taub]

• "I don’t dislike this new Ghostbusters movie because they’re all women, that’s silly and ridiculous … I hate the new Ghostbusters movie because my number one issue when judging a film is and has always been Hollywood finance reform."

  [McSweeney's / Samuel Priest]

• "Kim Kardashian West's boob is so soft it makes velvet feel like splinters. It makes the fur on a baby bunny's tummy feel like a plastic bag of syringes. It is so soft that touching it is like scooping up the delicate pink dawn sky with your fingers, or holding a ball of lotion in your hand. It is softer than the thick, warm, all-enveloping smoothness that caresses a globule of wax as it travels up a lava lamp. I know this because Kim Kardashian West has just put down her passion-fruit iced tea and peeled back her sleeveless Adidas x Kanye West bodysuit so that I could place my hand on it (the boob) while we eat dinner under the furious early stars at the Beverly Hills Hotel."

  [GQ / Caity Weaver]

• "I think he was thrown by the fact that I wasn’t being sycophantic—which I couldn’t be, because I didn’t realize who he was at the time. He said, ‘I have some advice for your show,’ and I went, ‘No thanks, we don’t need any advice,’ which threw him even more. And then, while we’re talking, some woman comes up and says ‘Can I have a picture?’ and he starts to pose—it was kinda sad, honestly—and instead she hands the camera to him and starts to pose with me. It was, like, Sorry, dude, I know you’re a big deal—and, in his case, he actually is a big deal—but I’m the guy from ‘Yogi Bear 3-D,’ and apparently that’s who she wants a picture with."

  [TJ Miller on Elon Musk, via New Yorker / Andrew Marantz]

WATCH THIS

Airplane black boxes, explained [YouTube / Joss Fong and Dion Lee with Christophe Haubursin and Tara Golshan]

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