Vox Sentences: Obama’s going to Ethiopia. Human rights groups aren’t happy.

Flying to Addis Ababa

President Barack Obama and Ethiopian reporter Simegnish 'Lily' Mengesha at a roundtable with persecuted journalists at the Roosevelt Room of the White House on May 1, 2015. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

• President Obama is traveling to Africa this week and has included a stop in Ethiopia, prompting criticism from human rights advocates concerned about the country's treatment of journalists.

  [Washington Post / Juliet Eilperin and David Nakamura]

• Six privately owned media outlets have shut down due to government harassment since 2014, at least 22 journalists and bloggers have faced criminal charges, and almost 30 have fled the country.

  [Slate / Sarah Margon]

• The crackdown has been justified through bogus accusations that the journalists are assisting terrorists.

  [Human Rights Watch / Felix Horne]

• That's how Ethiopian ambassador to the US Girma Biru defended the persecution of journalists: "If a journalist, or a teacher, or a professor, or a farmer is supporting these types of groups to instigate violence, then he should be charged."

  [Washington Post / Juliet Eilperin and David Nakamura]

• Human Rights Watch's Sarah Margon tells the Washington Post: "The decision to go to Ethiopia greatly undermines the stated goals and commitments of this administration when it comes to support for human rights, the rule of law and good governance in Africa and beyond."

• Ethiopia gets about $800 million a year in US military assistance for helping fight the Somali Islamist group Al-Shabaab.

  [LA Times / Robyn Dixon]

• Adekeye Adebajo critiques Obama's Africa record: "He hosted the first US-Africa summit in Washington last August, but this was effectively a talking shop involving empty pledges. His Power Africa initiative promised electricity to 20 million Africans, but remains largely unfunded."

  [The Guardian / Adekeye Adebajo]

Kasich fever, catch it!

Pikachu, I choose you. (Ty Wright/Getty Images)

• Who's running for president? Ohio governor John Kasich, that's who!

  [NYT / Sheryl Gay Stolberg]

• On paper, Kasich is an exceptional candidate: he's a second-term governor of the single most important swing state who was reelected in a 31-point landslide and also in an earlier life helped craft the balanced budgets of the late '90s as a member of Congress.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• But he also enthusiastically implemented Obamacare's Medicaid expansion (going over the heads of the Republican legislature to do it, even) and he tried and failed to crush public employee unions the way his presidential rival Scott Walker did in Wisconsin.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• He's also had a lot of unkind words for GOP policy on the poor: "When you die and get to the meeting with Saint Peter, he’s probably not going to ask you much about what you did about keeping government small. But he is going to ask you what you did for the poor. You better have a good answer."

  [New Republic / Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig]

• Kasich is thus earning a lot of comparisons to Jon Huntsman's 2012 run: both were tied to Obama and had reputations as moderates, winning media praise but not many actual voters. Kasich even hired two former Huntsman aides.

  [Politico / Kyle Kondik]

• But while Kasich's image is as a moderate, Harry Enten argues that he's actually about as conservative as Jeb Bush and well to Huntsman's right.

  [FiveThirtyEight / Harry Enten]

• Definitely read Andrew Prokop's definitive profile on Kasich, which delves into his time as the Paul Ryan of the 1990s.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• Also check out Andrew's piece on the time that Kasich rented the movie Fargo, hated it, and tried to get his local Blockbuster Video to take it off the shelves.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

Misc.

• Fun fact about me and a lot of other people on the autism spectrum: we don't want to be cured.

  [Washington Post / Sandhya Somashekhar]

• Fighting mass incarceration doesn't just meaning letting nonviolent drug offenders out of jail. It means letting violent criminals out earlier too.

  [New Yorker / Gilad Edelman]

• Only a small number of black kids growing up poor in rural Georgia beat the odds, graduate from college, make it to the middle class, etc. And those who do are significantly less healthy than the kids left behind.

  [The Atlantic / James Hamblin]

• Meet the emotional bodyguard: Hollywood's way of depicting men in romantic comedies who aren't totally awful.

  [NY Mag / Allison Davis]

• Porn performer Conner Habib argues that sex work opponents aren't just wrong: they're bigoted, just like homophobes and misogynists.

  [The Stranger / Conner Habib]

Verbatim

• "If you’re going to unfriend me, I’d just as soon not find out. But apparently my desire isn’t universal."

  [Slate / Jacob Brogan]

• "Joffrey from Game of Thrones quit Hollywood to make a play about bears flying a spaceship."

  [Uproxxx / Danger Guerrero]

• "Over the next four years, I sent and received countless rambling letters to friends, both off and on campus, a habit that persisted for a decade or so after graduation. Now I can’t remember the last time I wrote or read an email of more than four or five meaty, intimate paragraphs."

  [NYT / Teddy Wayne]

• "When your job is to be yourself, there’s a way in which you’re always working."

  [BuzzFeed / Ellen Cushing]

• "In the past year, since ditching the Seattle apartment he shared with his ex-boyfriend, he's flown more than 400,000 miles, enough to circumnavigate the globe 16 times. It's been 43 exhausting weeks since he slept in a bed that wasn't in a hotel, and he spends an average of six hours daily in the sky."

  [Rolling Stone / Ben Wofford]

Video of the day

• Vox interviews Joshua Oppenheimer, a documentarian whose two most recent films confront perpetrators of the Indonesian anti-Communist killings of 1965-66, in which over half a million people perished.

  [YouTube]