Vox Sentences: US upgrades Syrian refugee response from “pathetic” to “slightly less pathetic”

The US plans to take 10,000 Syrian refugees next year; a new human ancestor is discovered; and the Iran deal is, officially, Congressionally bulletproof.

TOP NEWS

Give me 10,000 of your tired, your poor

AFP / Don Emmert

• The White House announced today that President Obama's refugee policy for 2016 will include a request for the US to take "at least" 10,000 Syrian refugees.

  [Washington Post / Juliet Eilperin and Carol Morello]

• That is a lot more than the 1,500 or so the US has taken in so far.

  [Vox / Javier Zarracina]

• But it's much less than humanitarian groups and some Democrats have been calling for — they want the US to agree to take 65,000 Syrian refugees.

  [Washington Post / David Miliband]

• In past years, about half of all refugees who get permanently resettled come to the US. But the government hasn't been keeping up its legacy in Syria.

  [Congressional Research Service / Andorra Bruno]

• One of the biggest problems: refugees have to prove that they've never provided "material support" to a terrorist-affiliated group. And given the tangled legacies of the Syrian civil war, a lot of rebel groups count as "terrorists."

  [National Journal / Lauren Fox]

• And some congressional Republicans are more than happy to fearmonger about terrorists coming in as refugees; Rep. Pete King (R-NY) implied Obama's announcement would allow another Boston Marathon bombing.

  [Frank Thorp via Twitter]

• To refresh your memory: this is the same Rep. Pete King (R-NY) who was a fundraiser for the IRA in the 1980s.

  [Mother Jones / Timothy Murphy]

Meet your new ancestor, Homo naledi

AFP / Stefan Heunis

• Scientists formally announced the discovery of a new human ancestor, Homo naledi, at a site in South Africa.

  [Vox / Joseph Stromberg]

• Ed Yong has the details of the discovery — which is stunningly thorough, based on 15 relatively full skeletons. (Many human ancestors don't even have one.)

  [The Atlantic / Ed Yong]

• Homo naledi has some traits associated with relatively-close human relatives from the Homo genus, but other traits are closer to the older genus Australopithecus. And because we don't know how long ago the fossils date to yet, we can't tell exactly where it fits on the timeline.

  [eLIFE / Chris Stringer]

• The scientists who found Homo naledi think it's 2 million years old, but critics think it could be mere tens of thousands of years old — an isolated throwback population.

  [Scientific American / Kate Wong]

• The bones belong to the government of South Africa, but they were excavated by a South African/American team, and the dig was funded in part by the National Geographic Society.

  [Washington Post / Amy Ellis Nutt]

• That's the part of the National Geographic Society Rupert Murdoch doesn't own, by the way.

  [NYMag / Jaime Fuller]

The Senate officially fails to sink the Iran deal

AFP / Saul Loeb

• A bipartisan resolution officially disapproving of the US/Iran nuclear deal failed to make cloture Thursday, thus effectively killing the disapproval resolution via filibuster.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• With the failure of the disapproval resolution, Congress has missed its last chance to block the deal, which formally goes into effect at the middle of this month.

• This did not dissuade House Republicans from passing a resolution (on a party-line vote) saying the deal was illegitimate to begin with, which they might use to challenge it in court.

  [CNN / Ted Barrett, Manu Raju, Deirdre Walsh and Tom LoBianco]

• Answering questions on the social-media platform Quora, President Obama (or "President Obama") didn't exactly say that a vote against the deal would be a vote for war...but he didn't not say that.

  [Quora / Barack Obama]

• Meanwhile, the New York Times' graphic tracking the Senate vote raised some eyebrows for listing not just whether various Senators opposing the deal had many Jewish residents of their states, but whether they were Jewish themselves.

  [New York Times via Twitter / Kyle W. Orton]

• It's definitely true that one of the arguments against the Iran deal is that it's bad for Israel, and Israel's security is important to many Jewish members of Congress. But this can easily shade into alleging that American Jews have "dual loyalty," or are more loyal to Israel than to the US — which is an old, bad anti-Semitic trope.

• Anyway, the Times, apparently realizing its error — and since the vote was done anyway — has deleted the column in question.

  [New York Times / Alicia Parlapiano]

MISCELLANEOUS

Americans accused of crimes have a right to effective counsel. Because of public defender underfunding, millions are denied that right. [Washington Post / Tina Peng]

• On the 4th amendment jurisprudence of "99 Problems."

  [Saint Louis University Law Journal / Caleb Mason]

• Reports of the death of the religious left are greatly exaggerated.

  [Washington Post / John Sides]

• How to plan a successful coup.

  [Washington Post / Kim Yi Dionne]

VERBATIM

"He used to say, ‘Pain is temporary; film is forever!'" [Rose McGowan on Robert Rodriguez to BuzzFeed / Kate Aurthur]

• "Discounting the rest of the student body and just focusing on athletes, a full 85 percent of players living on campus live below the federal poverty line … Pay them their goddamn money."

  [SB Nation / Spencer Hall]

• "'I reviewed jail on Yelp because I couldn't afford a therapist."

  [Jennifer Vekris to Marshall Project / Beth Schwartzapfel]

• "Remember a group that was enslaved and made to work. Slavishly, you know in the fields. … Maybe your first move isn’t to go camping."

  [Burning Man founder Larry Harvey to The Guardian / Steven Thrasher]

• "The great paradox of Greek life is that the people who are constantly pushing you, sometimes gently, sometimes not, to engage in behaviors that can kill you do not actually want you to die."

  [Pacific Standard / Mike Riggs]

WATCH THIS

Vox / Joss Fong

• How scientists discovered Homo naledi, our new human ancestor

  [YouTube / Joss Fong]