Vox Sentences: Brazil set to replace scandal-ridden president with scandal-ridden VP

Brazil's president is on the verge of losing power; suicide bombings in Baghdad; Kenya threatens to kick out 600,000 refugees.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

The last days of Dilma

Getty / Mario Tama

• The Brazilian senate is expected to vote late Wednesday to begin an impeachment trial of President Dilma Rousseff, suspending her from office.

  [The Guardian]

• Brazil's supreme court denied an appeal by Rousseff's government to delay the impeachment proceedings. She's basically run out of options.

  [Wall Street Journal / Rogelio Jelmayer]

• Rousseff's suspension will last 180 days. It could be the end of the career of Brazil's first female president (this article from the Guardian's Jonathan Hunt is a solid valedictory), and the end of 24 years of rule by Rousseff's Workers' Party.

  [The Guardian / Jonathan Watts]

• Her successor, Vice President Michel Temer, is widely expected to minimize government intervention in the economy as a way of fighting the country's severe recession.

  [Reuters / Caroline Stauffer]

• (According to one critique, this is the key to the whole thing: that the fight to impeach Rousseff is a way for her political opponents to replace her with someone who shares their policy agenda.)

  [The Intercept / Glenn Greenwald]

• It is definitely true that Temer's policies are not popular among Brazilians. Neither is Temer, for that matter — a majority of Brazilians want to see him impeached for his role in the scandal consuming Rousseff, as well as the Lava Jato scandal that's embroiled many of the country's legislators.

  [Vox / Brian Winter]

• Indeed, going down the order of succession after Rousseff, it's hard to find someone who isn't susceptible to being removed from office himself.

  [The Guardian / Jonathan Watts]

Trouble in Sadr City

AFP / Haidar Hamdani

• A trio of suicide bombings in Baghdad killed at least 80 people Wednesday, including, reports said, a group of brides preparing for their weddings at a beauty salon.

  [Reuters / Kareem Raheem and Ahmed Rasheed]

• ISIS has claimed responsibility for the attacks. Remember that for ISIS, suicide bombings are a sign that the group is too weak to recapture and retain territory. But that doesn't make them any less deadly.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• Compounding the persistence of suicide attacks in Iraq is the government's underinvestment in security — which is probably related to its pervasive corruption problems.

  [Newsweek / Jack Moore]

• Indeed, Wednesday's bombings (like previous ones this year) were concentrated in Sadr City — a neighborhood named for the father of Muqtada al-Sadr, the cleric currently leading anti-corruption protests against the government.

  [Foreign Policy / Henry Johnson]

• Protesters even came to the site of the bombings Wednesday to decry the government's failure to protect them from ISIS; as one protester said, the government should be doing as much to protect Sadr City as it does the "Green Zone" that civilians are forbidden to enter.

  [Sydney Morning Herald ]

The end of the world's biggest refugee camp?

Toronto Star / Michelle Shephard

• The Kenyan government is planning to close all its refugee camps and expel 600,000 refugees from the country.

  [The Independent / Peter Yeung]

• That includes the Dadaab refugee camp, which has existed since 1981 and which, at 300,000 refugees, is the largest camp in the world.

  [The Atlantic / Alan Taylor]

• Kenya has been known to threaten to close its refugee camps before, as a way of scaring the UN and aid groups into giving the government more funds. But it looks like it's serious this time.

  [Quartz / Lily Kuo]

• The government blames refugee camps for fomenting the Somalian terrorist group al-Shabaab and trafficking weapons. There is exactly zero evidence of this.

  [The Intercept / Cora Currier]

• There are, on the other hand, huge security concerns associated with kicking 600,000 people out of the country and returning some of them to active war zones.

  [The Guardian / Murithi Mutiga and Emma Graham-Harrison]

• Even for those who aren't in mortal peril in their home countries, decades of refugee displacement can't be simply undone. Researcher Stephanie Schwartz discusses what she's seen among Burundian refugees returned to their home countries.

  [Washington Post / Stephanie Schwartz]

• At the very least, the Kenyan struggle should (but won't) be a wake-up call for facile invocations of how "neighboring countries" should be the ones to accept refugees in conflicts like Syria.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

MISCELLANEOUS

Thanks to a bill unanimously passed by Congress(!!), the government will remove all existing uses of "Oriental" and "Negro" in federal law. [The Atlantic / Matt Ford]

• Most "a dating site for ___" sites make no sense to me (Dara). But "a dating site for conspiracy theorists" totally makes sense.

  [Daily Dot / Jaya Saxena]

• Donald Trump's "chief policy adviser" says that a Trump presidency would cause the 2026 budget to have a $7 trillion surplus. (It's currently projected to have a $1 trillion deficit.)

  [MarketWatch / Robert Schroeder]

• Several major Syrian refugee aid groups have been suspended in a corruption scandal, because humanity is terrible.

  [Humanosphere / Tom Murphy]

• The difference between "gene variants associated with staying in school" and "the education gene."

  [The Atlantic / Ed Yong]

VERBATIM

"Saving Luttrell was an extraordinary act of courage, and it destroyed Gulab’s life." [Newsweek / R.M. Schneiderman]

• "The photograph will involve 100 nude women holding large mirror discs, reflecting the knowledge and wisdom of progressive women and the concept of 'Mother Nature' into and onto the convention center, cityscape and horizon of Cleveland."

  [Spencer Tunick via Washington Examiner / Ryan Lovelace]

• "Many hearing people, having grown up in a society that privileges the spoken word, have never experienced the need to send a message in any medium but their own."

  [The Establishment / Alex Lu]

• "It's possible that here is another addition to the long list of reasons for the seeming absence of other civilizations in the universe: intelligence will always be beaten by pathogens capable of degrading minds."

  [Scientific American / Caleb A. Scharf]

• "From my conversations with members of Congress, they’re saying, ‘Gimme a break. We know these people and we know who we would rather govern with.’"

  [Elaine Kamarck to ThinkProgress / Alice Ollstein]

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