Vox Sentences: The Iran deal goes to Congress

Super Senate Sweepstakes Showdown

Kerry, Moniz, and Lew. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

• Secretary of State John Kerry, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, and Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to defend the nuclear deal the administration negotiated with Iran and other major powers.

  [NYT / Michael Gordon and Jonathan Weisman]

• Republican members of the committee were blunt, with chairman Bob Corker saying, "I believe that you've been fleeced" and Idaho's Jim Risch alleging that Kerry had been "bamboozled."

  [Reuters / Patricia Zengerle and Matt Spetalnick]

• Kerry pushed back forcefully, saying the idea that a better deal could've been reached was a "fantasy, plain and simple … The choice we face is between an agreement that will ensure Iran’s nuclear program is limited, rigorously scrutinized and wholly peaceful or no deal at all."

  [WSJ / Felicia Schwartz]

• The whole thing was basically a circus, but by far the most bananas part was Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) lecturing Moniz, an MIT physics professor, about "electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapons," which are about as real as lightsabers.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• Congress has a 60-day review period for the deal and will vote on a resolution either approving or disapproving, but would need a two-thirds majority in both chambers to override Obama's veto.

  [The Guardian / Sabrina Siddiqui]

• Don't get how the Iran deal works? Here's a simple, clear explanation from nuclear proliferation expert Aaron Stein.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

This Island Kepler 452b

An artist's guess of what Kepler 452b could look like. (T. Pyle/JPL-Caltech/NASA Ames)

• Astronomers at NASA have identified Kepler-452b, a planet 1,400 light years away from Earth, as the most Earth-like planet they've found to date.

  [Reuters / Irene Klotz]

• It orbits a star similar to the Sun, takes 385 days to orbit, and is about 60 percent larger than Earth.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• It's not totally clear if Kepler-452b is rocky or gaseous; astronomer Jon Jenkins, one of the researchers who found the planet, put the likelihood of the planet’s being rocky was 50 percent to 62 percent.

  [NYT / Dennis Overbye]

• There's no direct evidence as of yet that the planet could support life, but it's in the "habitable zone" of its star, the area where water, a prerequisite for life, could exist.

  [WSJ / Robert Lee Hotz]

• For more, see German Lopez's rundown.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

Sandra Bland update

Facebook photo of Bland

• An official autopsy of Sandra Bland, whose death in a Texas jail cell after a minor traffic stop has provoked national outrage, showed injuries consistent with suicide, as claimed by police, rather than homicide, as alleged by her family and others.

  [NYT / Richard Pérez-Peña]

• The autopsy claimed there were no injuries on Bland's face or hands of the kind one would expect to see from a violent struggle — but did find a back injury that could've been sustained from an officer pushing his knee against it, as Bland claimed was happening in the video of the arrest.

  [ABC News / Meghan Keneally]

• Bland's family has said it's waiting for the results of an independent autopsy to come back.

  [Houston Chronicle / St. John Barned-Smith, Leah Binkovitz, and Jayme Fraser]

• For more, see German Lopez's summary of what we know here.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

Misc.

• The Americans with Disabilities Act, signed into law 25 years ago this Sunday, was both a landmark piece of a civil rights legislation and a pivotal event in the history of architecture.

  [Curbed / Patrick Sisson]

• Today I learned that Milwaukee has the greatest flag of all the flags.

  [Ted / Roman Mars]

• The US and Canada have been at peace since 1815 but some goddamn lobstermen in Maine and New Brunswick might ruin everything.

  [Macleans / Zane Schwartz]

• Nashville has quietly become one of the friendliest cities in the country for immigrants.

  [The Atlantic / Ted Hesson]

• The way we play piano has changed considerably since Mozart and Beethoven wrote for it. Now musicologists are rediscovering classical keyboard techniques, and finding it produces a noticeably different sound.

  [NYT / Rachel Nuwer]

Verbatim

• "I can affirmatively say that I have made out with far fewer space aliens [than Captain Kirk]."

  [Ted Cruz to NYT / Ana Marie Cox]

• "Horror-film fans will not like this picture; some of it is actually horrifying."

  [New Yorker / David Denby]

• "People with their phones and shit … people would rather show that they were around you for five seconds than have an actual conversation."

  [Hannibal Buress to AV Club / Miles Raymer]

• "Consider that San Francisco, the city where Airbnb was founded and remains headquartered, was one of the top-five-performing markets for hotels in 2014, with 84.1 percent occupancy and room rates that increased 10.9 percent."

  [Slate / Alison Griswold]

• "Critics of the 'effective altruism' movement … have argued that not all good causes in the world are quantifiable, that issues like human rights and equality cannot be measured through randomized control trials. Development experts involved with Evidence Action, on the other hand, said that a surprising number of things that may appear unquantifiable can actually be measured, especially given recent advances in empirical methods."

  [Harvard Magazine / Zara Zhang]

Video of the day

• Why police sketches could become a thing of the past

  [YouTube / Vox]