Vox Sentences: Baltimore to DOJ — “Take my police department, please!”

1. Calling in the feds

Attorney General Loretta Lynch (left) with Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. (Jose Luis Magana-Pool/Getty Images)

• Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake has asked the Justice Department to investigate her city's police department.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• The move followed a similar request by members of the City Council, who wrote to Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

  [Baltimore Sun / Luke Broadwater]

• Rawlings-Blake: "I believe the process can help repair the public’s trust in the Baltimore Police Department — even where that trust has long been broken— by bringing about transparency, accountability, and greater community understanding."

  [Stephanie Rawlings-Blake]

• The request comes after newly confirmed Lynch visited Baltimore yesterday, where she met with the family of Freddie Gray, whose death in police custody spurred widespread protests.

  [NYT / Richard Pérez-Peña]

• The Justice Department had weighed an investigation of Baltimore, but held off because "the city appeared willing to make changes and had invited an earlier, voluntary review."

  [NYT / Stephen Babcock and Richard Pérez-Peña]

• Already the city has worked with a program called the Collaborative Reform Initiative for Technical Assistance, "a less-onerous and adversarial Justice program that emphasizes cooperative support for local law-enforcement agencies."

  [Marshall Project / Simone Weichselbaum]

• Lynch hasn't said whether she'll approve Rawlings-Blake's request. Spokesperson Dena Iverson: "The Attorney General is actively considering that option in light of what she heard from law enforcement, city officials, and community, faith and youth leaders in Baltimore yesterday."

  [Vox / German Lopez]

2. Build your fences, we digging tunnels

Hillary Clinton with Rafael Lopez and Erika Castro — both beneficiaries of the Obama administration's executive actions on immigration — at Rancho High School on May 5, 2015, in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images)

• Hillary Clinton delivered her most detailed comments on immigration to date in a roundtable in Nevada. Here's the full text.

  [Hillary Clinton]

• She promised to maintain President Obama's executive actions protecting undocumented immigrants, and expand them to include any immigrants with "deep ties and contributions to communities," including parents of DREAMers (undocumented immigrants who arrived as children).

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• She reiterated support for a path to citizenship, and condemned Republican plans for paths to legalization but not full citizenship as "code for second-class status."

  [MSNBC / Alex Seitz-Wald]

• She also specifically called for reforms to detention policies, including private detention facilities for immigrants that are paid "per bed" and thus have an incentive to over-detain.

  [ThinkProgress / Esther Yu-Hsi Lee]

• The comments were reassuring to immigration advocates, who feared she'd take a relatively timid line on the issue, especially in light of comments last year suggesting she thought most Central American child migrants should be sent back.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

3. "You down with NDP, yeah you know me" –Alberta

The Syncrude oil sands site, outside of on April 28th, 2015, in Fort McMurray, Canada. (Ian Willms/Getty Images)

• As 47 years of conservative provincial governments, voters in Alberta have voted the New Democratic Party (NDP), traditionally the leftmost party in Canadian politics, into power.

  [NYT / Ian Austen]

• Among the factors in the Progressive Conservative Party's historic defeat was a proposed budget that raised taxes on regular people and charities but not corporations.

  [National Post / Jen Gerson]

• Outgoing Alberta Premier and Conservative leader Jim Prentice also had a major gaffe when he said Albertans should "look in the mirror" to understand why there was a budget shortfall.

  [Globe and Mail / Allan Maki]

• The Conservatives aren't even the second biggest party; that distinction goes to the Wildrose Party, an Alberta-only right-wing party.

  [CBC News]

• It's worth mentioning that parties in Canada don't work like ones in the US do. Provincial parties are separate from federal parties; a member of Wildrose in Alberta could be a Conservative at the federal level, for instance.

• So why should people outside Alberta care? Mainly because Alberta has a ridiculous amount of oil, and the NDP will probably change the Conservatives' light regulations on the oil sector.

  [CBC News / Tracy Johnson]

• Exactly how they'll regulate oil is unclear, but the biggest likely change would be a hike in oil royalties, which would boost Alberta's coffers at the expense of big oil companies.

  [Vox / Brad Plumer]

4. Misc.

• In 2006, Jeopardy! switched to using an online test for potential contestants, rather than having people fly to Los Angeles. A big increase in women players ensued.

  [FiveThirtyEight / David Goldenberg]

• Sounds like the 1992 Mike Huckabee Senate race was a pretty wild time, with Huckabee calling for people with AIDS to be quarantined and warning that his conservative Democrat opponent was in favor of gay throuples.

  [Mother Jones / Tim Murphy]

• Moderate drinking is often touted as good for one's heart. Looks like it's not.

  [David Roodman]

• Sarah Zhang does an audit of Scientific American's 2005 predictions of scientific breakthroughs to come. They don't fare so well.

  [Gizmodo / Sarah Zhang]

• As a Seahawks fan, the schadenfreude from the Pats getting caught cheating is really helping make up for the heartbreak of that last Super Bowl interception.

  [Vox / Joseph Stromberg]

5. Verbatim

• "The prefatory bitch, if I were to animate her, is a zephyr at your statement’s back, blowing it past the shoals of dissent, into the realms of the inarguable. Bitch, says this bitch, you know I’m right."

  [Slate / Katy Waldman]

• "Our economy is in the midst of a grand shift toward the Hollywood model. More of us will see our working lives structured around short-­term, project-based teams rather than long-­term, open­-ended jobs."

  [NYT / Adam Davidson]

• "You can stream it on a phone. You can stream it on your own. You can stream it on TV. You can stream it globally."

  [Netflix]

• "One practical benefit of a philosophical education is that it helps you to construct elaborate justifications for your favorite vices."

  [WSJ / Alison Gopnik]

• "Dogs can run, but they can’t hide from PooPrints. BioPet Vet Lab, which specializes in canine genetic testing, is partnering with the appropriately named London borough of Barking and Dagenham to track down dog owners who fail to remove their pets’ public deposits."

  [Veterinary Practice News]