Vox Sentences: Happy Friday! Here’s how many civilians the US has killed with drones.

The US releases some (questionable) data on drone strikes; ISIS takes hostages in Bangladesh.

TOP NEWS

US government gives itself a 95% in drone strikes

Isaac Brekken/Getty Images

• The US government released information Friday afternoon about its use of drone strikes in counterterrorism operations outside of conventional wars (that is, in countries like Pakistan and Yemen rather than Afghanistan). The estimates state that the US has killed 2,500 terrorists since 2009, and 64 to 116 civilians.

  [NYT / Charlie Savage and Scott Shane]

• (It is not a coincidence that the release came on the afternoon before a three-day weekend. The government knows how to Friday News Dump.)

  [Political Dictionary / Taegan Goddard]

• This estimate varies greatly from the assessments of journalists and NGOs, which tend to estimate that hundreds of civilians have been killed in drone strikes.

  [Bureau of Investigative Journalism]

• The government report denies an allegation that's been flying around since 2012: that the government considers any "military-aged male" a terrorist.

  [The Atlantic / Conor Friedersdorf]

• But without releasing any details about its estimates — something advocates have long called for — it's impossible to know why the government's numbers are so different from those of independent watchdogs.

  [Just Security / Jameel Jaffer]

• Without reliable empirics in the drone debate, each side basically has its own facts — which means they're often talking past each other at best, and shouting at each other at worst.

  [Al Jazeera]

• More importantly, it's impossible to improve drone policy if the government won't admit there's any imprecision in either the technology being used or the humans making the judgment calls.

  [War on the Rocks / Melissa S. Hersh and Douglas A. Ollivant]

• The government's release also included a document outlining best practices for reporting drone strikes in future, which raises some hopes for policy to be improved — but who knows whether the next president will follow them.

  [Lawfare / Bobby Chesney]

Bangladesh can't ignore ISIS anymore

Zakir Hossain Chowdhury/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

• As of this writing, gunmen have taken about 20 hostages in a cafe in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh.

  [CNN / Farid Ahmed, Catherine E. Shoichet, and Joe Sterling]

• At least two police officers were killed in the attack on the cafe, and at least 15 people have been injured.

  [Reuters / Serajul Quadir]

• ISIS has claimed responsibility.

  [BBC]

• This puts the Bangladeshi government in an awkward position. For the past few years, the local extremist groups assassinating gay and atheist activists have often claimed affiliation with ISIS.

  [New Yorker / Samanth Subramanian]

• But the government has denied any connection — instead preferring to use the attacks to punish its political enemies, without destroying the networks committing them.

  [NYT / Willam B. Milam]

• By turning a blind eye, the government might have allowed ISIS to put down roots in the country, making the situation much more dangerous for everyone.

  [BBC / Samir Mustafa]

Gay Talese's fact-checker has a cold

Robin Marchant/Getty Images

• Journalist Gay Talese has a new book coming out this summer. In the past 24 hours, he's disavowed it — then, erm, reavowed it.

  [Vox / Constance Grady]

• Talese is one of the most famous magazine journalists of the 20th century; his 1966 profile "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" is so well-respected that Vanity Fair interviewed him on the anniversary of its publication.

  [Vanity Fair / Rachel Tashjian]

• His forthcoming book — excerpted in the New Yorker this spring — is about a former motel owner who claimed to have spied on his occupants having sex for decades.

  [New Yorker / Gay Talese]

• Except that the Washington Post has discovered that (among other discrepancies) the motel owner didn't own the hotel during part of the period of his alleged voyeurism. Told this, Talese said Thursday that he didn't see how he could promote the book, since its subject had proved so unreliable.

  [Washington Post / Paul Farhi]

• Then on Friday, he took it back and un-disavowed the book.

  [AP / Hillel Italie]

• The New Yorker, for its part, maintains that since Talese mentioned some discrepancies in the motel owner's account, the reader should know it was unreliable: caveat lector. And besides, said editor David Remnick, "This is not an account of, say, national security."

  [Washington Post / Erik Wemple]

• For some, the saga is some well-earned schadenfreude because of Talese's behavior at a forum earlier this year, when he made racist comments to a New York Times Magazine reporter and said he didn't know of any inspiring woman writers.

  [NYT / Sridhar Pappu]

• For others, it's a demonstration of the pitfalls of "new journalism" — the mid–20th century movement with which Talese has sometimes been associated, which often placed art above accuracy.

  [New Republic / Jeet Heer]

• For me (Dara), it's mostly horrifying that the New Yorker, a magazine whose reputation is in part built on a ridiculously thorough fact-checking process, appears to believe that what a story is about is relevant to how thoroughly it should be fact-checked.

  [Columbia Journalism Review / Peter Canby]

MISCELLANEOUS

Food stamps are open to every American who needs them. Why aren't housing subsidies? [Slate / Jake Blumgart]

• Hillary Clinton is a fan of the Toast, in particular "Two Monks." She wrote a farewell ode to the site to prove it.

  [The Toast / Hillary Clinton]

• There has been a massive cheese heist in Wisconsin. 20,000 pounds of cheese are gone. Our thoughts are with the cheese.

  [Associated Press]

• One way to deal with peak TV: watch everything in fast-forward. Jeff Guo swears by it.

  [Washington Post / Jeff Guo]

• Science has a reproducibility crisis. Could automating more lab work and giving a bigger role to robots help fix it?

  [Slate / Stephanie Wykstra]

VERBATIM

"I can’t provide refugees fast enough for all the Canadians who want to sponsor them." [Immigration Minister John McCallum to NYT / Jodi Kantor and Catrin Einhorn]

• "At one point, two aides confirmed, Mr. Trump was not even aware that the event had to be held in Cleveland, a decision made almost two years ago by the Republican National Committee."

  [NYT / Jeremy Peters and Ashley Parker]

• "Abdel Kader became concerned that the jihadists might target the manuscripts. So they moved them out of the big libraries of Timbuktu into safe houses around the city. They did it at night, putting the manuscripts in boxes and moving them by donkey cart to people’s basements and storage rooms."

  [National Geographic / Simon Worrall]

• "For the past two-and-a-half decades and over several hundred consultations, I’ve helped clergy from multiple denominations and faiths to filter episodes of mental illness — which represent the overwhelming majority of cases — from, literally, the devil’s work. It’s an unlikely role for an academic physician."

  [Washington Post / Richard Gallagher]

• "'Gove is a cunt who set this up from the start,' one friend of Johnson texted a political journalist at the Sun. More publicly, Jake Berry, Conservative MP and one of Johnson’s closest allies, tweeted: 'There is a very deep pit reserved in Hell for such as he. #Gove.'"

  [The Guardian / Rowena Mason and Heather Stewart]

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