Vox Sentences: Britain moves toward war in Syria

...and the Labour Party's already at war with itself; what the IMF approval of China's currency means; and Congress agrees on a bill a whole three days before the deadline!

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

OMNISHAMBLES.

Ben Pruchnie/Getty Images

• Britain's Parliament is set to vote Wednesday on whether to start bombing Syria — something Prime Minister David Cameron has wanted to do for some time, but is taking advantage of hawkish sentiments post-Paris to put up for a vote.

  [BBC]

• But on the eve of the vote, all attention is on the opposition Labour Party — which is (to borrow a Britishism) a total omnishambles right now.

  [The Economist / Bagehot]

• New Labour head Jeremy Corbyn passionately opposes the airstrikes. Most of his party's leadership — including its foreign-policy head — openly support them.

  [Huffington Post / Ned Simons]

• This fight and other recent statements on foreign policy from Corbyn and his allies — a Corbyn appointee blamed past Labour PM Tony Blair for the terrorist attacks that hit London in 2005, for example — reportedly have party members wondering whether they can toss Corbyn out.

  [The Economist / Bagehot]

• In the meantime, David Cameron is taking advantage of the mishigas to say that you're either with him or with Corbyn — who he basically called a "terrorist sympathizer" today.

  [The Guardian / Nicholas Watt]

• Under pressure, Corbyn has agreed that Labour members of Parliament will be allowed to vote however they like on airstrikes in Syria. Since plenty of Labour members had already voiced support, that means the resolution for war will almost certainly pass.

  [The Guardian / Patrick Wintour and Rowena Mason]

• Corbyn's not dialing down the rhetoric. He accused his airstrike-supporting foreign-policy head, Hilary Benn, of being willing to kill innocent people.

  [The Telegraph / Michael Wilkinson and Lexi Finnegan]

• But his actions — first alienating his party members, then allowing them to vote as they liked— have made the war he wanted to prevent all but certain.

  [The Telegraph / Mary Riddell]

• Foreign policy foibles involving Labour MPs are as good a spur as any to watch Armando Iannucci's modern classic In the Loop. It basically predicts everything happening right now, only backwards.

  [YouTube]

A basket full of renminbi

ChinaFotoPress/Getty Images

• The International Monetary Fund announced today that it's adding China's currency, the renminbi, to a prestigious group of major currencies called the Special Drawing Rights (or SDR) basket.

  [NPR / Jim Zarroli]

• You might know China's currency as the yuan. The two mean slightly different things. Yuan is used for discrete amounts of money ("5 dollars," "5 yuan"), renminbi for the currency as a whole ("the dollar," "the renminbi").

  [BBC / Stephen Mulvey]

• In practical terms, this means very little to anyone. The Economist's article on the change leads with the fees for boats crossing the Suez Canal — because that's one of the very few financial transactions on earth that actually uses the SDR as a currency.

  [The Economist ]

• The SDR is mostly useful as a reserve currency in times of crisis, when it can supplement countries' individual currency reserves — like the financial crisis, for example.

  [CNBC / Neelabh Chaturvedi]

• The best argument that the renminbi's inclusion is that it solidifies China's role as a global economic powerhouse — and encourages continued investment in the country, in the same way the adoption of the dollar as a default currency both symbolized and helped America's rise in the early 20th century.

  [New York Times / Neil Irwin]

• Paul Krugman thinks this is a silly argument. Rising economic powerhouses get investment because they're rising economic powerhouses, not because of how their currency is used.

  [New York Times / Paul Krugman]

Congress finds $305B in highway money under the couch

Mark Wilson / Getty Images

• Negotiators in Congress have agreed on a bill to keep federal highway spending going for another five years, at a cost of $305 billion.

  [The Atlantic / Russell Berman]

• The bill would pay for highway funding by drawing money out of the Fed's surplus funds, and by reducing the dividends the Fed pays to banks.

  [Bloomberg Business / Billy House and Cheyenne Hopkins]

• This would be the thirty-fifth short-term fix to highway funding that Congress has passed since 2009.

  [US News / Gabrielle Levy]

• And the problems with America's crumbling highway infrastructure go way deeper than money troubles.

  [Vox / Brad Plumer]

• But in 2015's Congress, any deal is a deal. Speaker Paul Ryan is already boasting that the deal will pass with a "sizable majority."

  [The Hill / Keith Laing]

• Heck, Congress is feeling so functional lately that it might even pass a bill to fund the government for another year without threatening a shutdown first.

  [Politico / Jake Sherman]

MISCELLANEOUS

Meet Lavasa, a $30 billion private city in India built from scratch by a real-estate billionaire and his development company. The company has the right to evict, to tax, and appoint the city manager. [The Guardian / Matt Kennard and Claire Provost]

• British sympathy for the American confederacy was premised on a widely held myth: that the war was about free trade, not slavery.

  [NYT / Marc-William Palen]

• Believe it or not, there are still practicing Shakers. Three of them, to be exact.

  [Busted Halo / Anthony Chiorazzi]

• Rutland, VT used to have among the worst heroin problems of any city in America. Now it's recovering, thanks to an innovative policing strategy that "seeks to help troubled residents rather than simply build up arrest and incarceration numbers."

  [Boston Globe / Brian MacQuarrie]

• Some of the best policy reporting being done in Washington is being published in trade journals that only lobbyists get to read.

  [Washington Monthly / John Heltman]

VERBATIM

"Gun control advocates and politicians frequently cite the statistic that more than 30 Americans are murdered with guns every day. What’s rarely mentioned is that roughly 15 of the 30 are black men." [ProPublica / Lois Beckett]

• "in the 1960s, scientists started looking for ways of persuading animals to vaccinate themselves."

  [The Atlantic / Ed Yong]

• "And when GBF loses his title, the character literally explodes, unlike Plaintiff."

  [Judge Anne Thompson via Gawker / Brendan O'Connell]

• "Because no decision was reached in the fourth hearing of a case in which Aydın-based physician Dr. Bilgin Çiftçi was accused of insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan after sharing a meme comparing Erdoğan's facial expressions to the Gollum character in the The Lord of the Rings movies, a court has demanded an expert examination to investigate Gollum's character to decide whether a comparison with him is an insult."

  [Today's Zaman]

• "Utilitarians, it turns out, are not psychopaths."

  [The Philosopher's Magazine / Massimo Pigliucci]

WATCH THIS

The math problem that stumped thousands of mansplainers [YouTube / Estelle Caswell and Zachary Crockett]

Vox / Estelle Caswell