Vox Sentences: His name was Alton Sterling

The death of Alton Sterling; Hillary Clinton's suspiciously familiar college plan; a British report on the war in Iraq.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

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• Alton Sterling of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was killed by a police officer on Tuesday. The Department of Justice has already announced it's investigating the case.

  [The Advocate / Maya Lau and Bryn Stole]

• 505 people have been killed by American police this year. At least 122, including Sterling, were black.

  [Washington Post ]

• But Sterling's killing has gotten more attention than most. It might be the horrific videos of his death taken by witnesses, which appear to show that Sterling had a gun but did not reach for it before he was killed — and that officers removed the gun from his pocket after killing him.

  [The Daily Beast / Zack Kopplin and Justin Miller]

• (Sterling died while carrying a gun in a state where open carry is legal — reopening questions about who, exactly, has the right to bear arms in America.)

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• Louisiana law allows the officer who killed Sterling to wait up to 30 days before being questioned — one of many ways in which laws grant differential treatment to police officers who kill civilians.

  [Fusion / Katie McDonough]

• The two officers whose body cameras should have recorded Sterling's death both claimed their cameras "fell off" at just the wrong time (reminding everyone that giving police body cameras is by no means a panacea).

  [Fusion / Daniel Rivero]

• The activist whose video of Sterling's death was first released actually waited to see how police characterized the incident before putting the video out there — seeing if they could be trusted — and they failed his test.

  [NY Daily News / Larry McShane]

• None of this is to say that Alton Sterling's death was anomalous. The whole problem is that it isn't. This poem by Charlotte Abotsi should hammer home just how familiar this all is by now.

  [Charlotte Abotsi via YouTube]

• Many black Americans are simply emotionally exhausted. The least nonblack Americans can do is try to understand why.

  [Brittany Packnett via Twitter]

Hillary feels the college Bern

Jessica Kourkounis/Getty Images

• Hillary Clinton announced a proposal Wednesday to make tuition at public universities free for families making less than $125,000 a year.

  [Vox / Libby Nelson]

• If you think this sounds more like Bernie Sanders's proposal during the Democratic primaries than Clinton's previous proposal (which focused on making college debt-free, not tuition-free) you're basically right.

  [Huffington Post / Tyler Kingkade and Amanda Terkel]

• Of course, a few months ago, Clinton was attacking Sanders's plan as giving free college to Donald Trump's children — and it's true that tuition-free college isn't exactly progressive.

  [Dissent / Matt Bruenig]

• Indeed, the fact that higher education funding has become so important to the Democratic Party says something about which segments of its base it responds to: College students get a hearing; single moms who need child care get some, but less, attention.

  [Inside Higher Ed / Libby Nelson]

• But there's a powerful counterargument. If public college is tuition-free, it vastly increases the likelihood that students will know that college is affordable for them — and that students might apply who might never have considered it otherwise.

  [Dissent / Tressie McMillan Cottom]

• The most important parts of Clinton's plan are her proposals to get states to improve college graduation rates — something Obama has tried, and largely failed, to pressure schools to do.

  [Vox / Libby Nelson]

Breaking: Iraq War terrible idea

Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty Images

• The British government released the "Chilcot report" Wednesday, an account of the process by which Britain got involved in the Iraq War.

  [Wall Street Journal / Jenny Gross and Alexis Flynn]

• For many in Britain, the report confirms what they already felt: that the war was not only a mistake but a permanent stain on the country's reputation.

  [The Guardian]

• The Chilcot report will certainly shape the legacy of former Prime Minister Tony Blair: While it doesn't accuse him of lying about the intelligence justifying intervention in Iraq, it makes it clear that he was hardly a simple dupe of the falsehoods of the Bush administration.

  [NYT / Carne Ross]

• To the contrary, the report shows that Blair followed Bush into war as a way to protect the US-UK "special relationship" — although the war ended up souring it.

  [Time / Jamie Merrill]

• For American audiences, what might be most chilling is the extent to which British experts predicted the war's messy aftermath, and how they were ignored and it happened anyway.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• For Iraqi audiences, none of this is news. They've been living the Chilcot report for more than a decade, and they are not amused.

  [The Guardian / Martin Chulov]

MISCELLANEOUS

Old and busted: Brexit. New hotness: Afrentry. [Washington Post / Anne Frugé]

• The new Alec Baldwin version of Match Game is … really good?

  [AV Club / John Teti]

• "Side hustles" aside, millennials are turning out to be the least entrepreneurial generation in recent history.

  [The Atlantic / Derek Thompson]

• The car accident death rate in the US is twice as high as in other rich countries. If it were as low as Sweden's, nearly 24,000 people would be spared every year.

  [CDC / Erin K. Sauber-Schatz, David J. Ederer, Ann M. Dellinger, and Grant T. Baldwin]

• Why is breakfast food so different from other foods? Blame cereal.

  [Priceonomics / Alex Mayyasi]

VERBATIM

"My father likes to keep some anonymity. It’s who he is. It’s who he is as a person." [Eric Trump to Washington Post / David Fahrenthold]

• "Me, personally, I’m not a big fan of violent movies, it’s not something I like to watch."

  [Takashi Miike to AV Club / Sam Fragoso]

• "Robert Downey Jr. is currently playing one of the world’s most popular superheroes, while Marissa Tomei and Diane Lane are playing the mother figures of superheroes. All three actors are 51 years old."

  [Quartz / Caroline Siede]

• "Zero Days, Gibney’s latest effort, is essentially a two-hour adaptation of Wikipedia’s 'Stuxnet' entry."

  [AV Club / Mike D'Angelo]

• "There’s a lot of dime-store counsel in this book, often followed by academic citations. It’s like reading an advice column by way of JSTOR."

  [NYT / Jennifer Senior]

WATCH THIS

Why Hollywood keeps making terrible sequels [YouTube / Zachary Crockett, Estelle Caswell, and Danush Parvaneh]

Vox / Zachary Crockett

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