The Brian Williams helicopter scandal, explained

1. Brian Williams-gate NBC anchor Brian Williams falsely claimed he was in a helicopter hit by RPG fire in Iraq in 2003. An uproar from the helicopter's crew members, who said he was never there, forced him to retract and apologize. [Stars and Stripes / Travis J. Tritten] Here's a clear timeline of what Williams said happened, and what actually happened. [Vox / Amanda Taub] "I don’t know what screwed up in my mind that caused me to conflate one aircraft with another," Williams said. [TPM / Caitlin MacNeal] So did Williams misremember, or has he been lying? It's very hard to say. [The Atlantic / David Graham] There is a lot of scientific evidence that people misremember stressful events. [Washington Post / Amy Ellis Nutt] Regardless, Williams isn't alone in misremembering wartime events: several prominent politicians have also been called out for getting their history on battlefields wrong. [Bloomberg / Dave Weigel] It's not clear how much of a problem this is going to be for Williams' career. [Prospect / Paul Waldman] But it's definitely a problem for NBC News. [Washington Post / Eric Wemple] The Williams story was broken by Stars and Stripes, a Pentagon-subsidized paper. Here's the story behind their work. [Columbia Journalism Review / David Uberti] 2. Netanyahu versus the Democrats In late January, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accepted House Speaker John Boehner's invitation to speak to a joint session of Congress this March. Congressional Democrats, who see this as an attempt to undermine Obama's Iran policy, are mad. Yesterday, Israel's Ambassador to the US met with Democrats to smooth things over, and it didn't go well. [Politico / Edward-Isaac Dovere] Dozens of Democrats are threatening to boycott, one of a number of signs that Netanyahu's speech is hurting his quest to put more sanctions on Iran. [Vox / Zack Beauchamp] Interestingly, only a handful of Democrats are willing to express their anger with the Israeli Prime Minister publicly. [Washington Post / Greg Sargent] The Iranian nuclear negotiations are the key context here. Obama thinks they can work; Netanyahu thinks they'd be disastrous. [Bloomberg / Calev Ben-David] Congress would likely kill any deal by passing new sanctions on Iran, which is what Netanyahu would likely encourage them to do in his speech. [Vox / Zack Beauchamp] But congressional meddling may not be necessary; there are plenty of reasons to believe that the Iran deal will fail on its own. [Vox / Max Fisher] Regardless of how the speech and sanctions bill controversies work out, the US and Israel will remain close allies. [Vox / Zack Beauchamp] 3. The European plan for peace in Ukraine The leaders of France and Germany are trying to sell the Ukranian and Russian leaders on a new peace plan. [Reuters / Richard Balmforth and Pavel Polityuk] Meanwhile, fighting in eastern Ukraine is intensifying again. [Bloomberg / Sangwon Yoon, Kateryna Choursina, and Daryna Krasnolutska] And the value of the Ukrainian currency is in free-fall, underscoring the country's dire situation. [Wall Street Journal / Nick Shchetko and Alexander Kolyandr] An influential group of former American officials want the US to give Ukraine weapons. [Vox / Amanda Taub] Here's the case against arming Ukraine. [Vox / Jeremy Shapiro] 4. Misc. The psychology behind the great beanie-baby bubble of the 90s. [Slate / Mark Joseph Stern] How social media is hurting original thought. A senior advisor to Rep. Aaron Schock resigned after reporters discovered comments on his Facebook page comparing black people to zoo animals. [Vox / Jenée Desmond-Harris] Amy Pascal, the co-chairman of Sony Pictures, has announced she'll be stepping down. Pascal's emails were a major part of the Sony hack story last November. [Vox / Kelsey McKinney] How English became the international language of science. [Aeon / Michael Gordon] 5. Verbatim “Maybe Hipster Runoff really was the last gasp of true internet culture.” [Motherboard / Brian Merchant] "It is this victim complex I intend to tell you about, not the particular schisms between reactionaries. I am interested in the style of man who makes all such factions explicable. The kind who has in these last decades felt the theoretical foundation of his inherited supremacy begin to crumble and gone into defensive crouch, lashing out at every grain of sand that shifts beneath his feet." [Vox / Emmett Rensin] "The guilt in truly guilty pleasures is just intellectual honesty, an owning-up to the truth that we’re of two minds about a thing." [Boing Boing / Mark Dery] "I am a member of Congress." [Vox / A Member of Congress] Read the latest Vox Sentences here!

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