Vox Sentences: Abortions for some, face-saving bipartisan deals for others

1. In a sense, it's a compromise. In another, more accurate sense, Republicans won.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and his successor, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY), after the deal was reached. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

• The Senate has reached a deal to proceed with a bipartisan anti–human trafficking bill.

  [NYT / Jennifer Steinhauer and Emmarie Huetteman]

• The bill was held up because of disagreements over whether the fund it creates for victims of sex trafficking, paid for from fines levied against convicted traffickers, could be used to pay for abortions.

  [Slate / Betsy Woodruff]

• Democrats argued that because the money comes from fines, not taxpayers, it shouldn't be subject to the Hyde Amendment, which has for decades barred the use of federal money for abortions.

  [Politico / Burgess Everett and Seung Min Kim]

• The final deal bars the fine money from being used for any health services, restricting it to legal costs; another taxpayer-funded program, with the normal abortion restrictions, would fund health care for victims.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• That lets Democrats say they didn't expand Hyde's purview, and lets Republicans say they didn't allow federal funds to go to abortion. But substantively, it gives Republicans what they wanted and doesn't do anything to expand access to funds for abortion.

• Weirdly, Planned Parenthood is praising the deal anyway.

  [Planned Parenthood Action Fund]

• One practical implication of the bill moving forward is that the Senate will finally vote on attorney general nominee Loretta Lynch; Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has conditioned a vote on passage of the trafficking bill.

  [Politico / Burgess Everett]

• Some sex-worker advocates and policy experts argue the bill would lead to overpolicing and civil rights violations, and could wind up hurting both trafficked and voluntary sex workers; a better approach, they argue, would be to fight the poverty and homelessness that put children at risk of being trafficked in the first place.

  [RH Reality Check / Emily Crockett]

2. Saudi wishing in the Yemen

A Yemeni man poses with a shell he found in his house a day after an air strike by Saudi-led coalition warplanes on the nearby base on Fajj Attan hill on April 21, 2015, in the capital Sanaa. (MOHAMMED Huwais/AFP/Getty Images)

• Saudi Arabia is ceasing its monthlong bombing campaign in Yemen against the Shia Houthi rebels who've taken the capital.

  [NYT / Rick Gladstone]

• Saudi Brig. Gen. Ahmed Asiri declared that the campaign had achieved its objectives, and that the Saudi government would adopt a new strategy combining humanitarian relief, counterterrorism efforts, and diplomatic attempts to broker a peace.

  [Washington Post / Ali al-Mujahed and Hugh Naylor]

• But it's unclear whether the bombings did anything; the Houthis are still advancing, making Asiri's assertions sound somewhat dubious.

  [NPR / Krishnadev Calamur]

• The Saudi announcement followed a statement by a senior Iranian diplomat that predicted a "halt to military attacks" within hours; that suggests the Saudi decision may have been the result of back-channel negotiations with other stakeholders.

  [Reuters / Sam Wilkin and Mohammed Ghobari]

• Iran is widely believed to be backing the Houthis, and the US deployed an aircraft carrier near Yemen to deter the Iranian government from getting more involved.

  [Slate / Elliot Hannon]

• A political solution is still a ways away; the Yemeni government's nominal Foreign Minister Riyadh Yassin has said that the Houthis must "withdraw from all cities and villages of Yemen … and lay down their arms" before the official government will negotiate.

  [AFP]

3. Gray's life matters

Young men show their support for Freddie Gray (whose nickname was "Pepper") by wearing clothes printed with "#Pray4Pepper" and "#JusticeForFreddie" in the Sandtown neighborhood where April 21, 2015, in Baltimore, Maryland. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

• The US Department of Justice has launched an investigation into Baltimore police officers' involvement in the Sunday death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who had been arrested a week prior.

  [NYT / Richard Pérez-Peña]

• While investigators haven't confirmed that Gray suffered the spinal cord injury that killed him at the hands of police, bystander videos "showed officers dragging Gray, who is screaming in apparent pain, to a police van."

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• Some witnesses allege police slammed Gray to the ground while making the arrest; it's unclear what, if anything, was done to Gray while he was transported in the van.

  [MSNBC / Trymaine Lee]

• Police also ignored Gray's pleas for medical assistance, and Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony Batts admitted there were many occasions when medics should have been called for Gray but were not.

  [Baltimore Sun / Justin Fenton and Jessica Anderson]

• Six police officers involved in the arrest have been suspended with pay.

  [Baltimore Sun / Justin George]

• According to ProPublica, young black men like Gray are 21 times likelier to be killed by police than their white counterparts.

  [ProPublica / Ryan Gabrielson, Ryann Grochowski Jones, and Eric Sagara]

4. Misc.

• Sure, Waka Flocka Flame's presidential campaign is improbable and also constitutionally untenable. But he's the leader America needs.

  [Rolling Stone / Simon Vozick-Levinson]

• A new study finds that brothers of sex offenders are four to five times likelier to be sex offenders themselves, and half-brothers are only twice as likely, suggesting a significant role for genetics.

  [Practical Ethics / Will Davies]

• McDonald's runs an experimental restaurant in Sydney, Australia, where you can't buy Big Macs or Chicken McNuggets but can buy stuff like "chipotle pulled pork over brown rice" or "balsamic strawberry craft sodas."

  [Now I Know / Dan Lewis]

• Food stamps and other government benefits are often described as "subsidies" for low-wage employers. They're not.

  [Washington Post / Michael Strain]

• Want to watch porn ethically? Then start paying for it.

  [CityLab / Shauna Miller]

• Many states' policies of throwing delinquent child support payers in jail is creating "a cycle of debt, unemployment and imprisonment."

  [NYT / Frances Robles and Shaila Dewan]

5. Verbatim

• "Pikachu: Nonverbal creature primarily raised for companionship and blood sports."

  [BuzzFeed / Daniel Kibblesmith]

• "For every dollar spent on lobbying by labor unions and public interest groups, large corporations and their associations now spend $34."

  [New America Foundation / Lee Drutman]

• "If he were a teacher, Mark Halperin would give nearly everybody a B of some kind, except for Marco Rubio, who he thinks is fun."

  [Sam Wang]

• "Mark Rylance speaks Shakespeare as if it was written for him the night before."

  [Al Pacino via GQ UK / Ed Caesar]

• "We’re not far off, the movie asserts, from the point at which humanity will start to seem undesirable in comparison to the lack of messiness that a sentient abstraction can offer"

  [AV Club / Mike D'Angelo]

• "Operating through a CIA front organization, established in cooperation with former National Student Association officers, [Gloria] Steinem recruited young Americans to participate in the 1959 communist-organized World Youth Festival in Vienna, and did the same a couple of years later when another such festival was held in Helsinki."

  [The American Prospect / Aryeh Neier]