Vox Sentences: China tried to stabilize its stock market. It just crashed faster.

China's stock market crashes, is frozen, crashes again; Obama's raids on Central American immigrants are a mess; and zomg people stop it Ted Cruz is allowed to be president.

TOP NEWS

China panics, everybody freeze

ChinaFotoPress/ChinaFotoPress/Getty Images

• A lot of people are very worried about what is going to happen on China's stock market Friday. Trading has closed for the past days after stocks fell 7 percent each day.

  [BBC / Andreas Illmer]

• After a shaky market last fall, Chinese regulators had just instituted a "circuit breaker" this week to keep stocks from falling too far by pausing or freezing trade if stocks fell below a certain threshhold.

  [The Telegraph (UK) / Hazel Sheffield]

• But the circuit breakers made matters worse — they gave people time to panic. Thursday, the stock market was only open for an hour before it lost 7 percent and had to close.

  [Foreign Policy / David Wertime]

• Sensibly, the Chinese government has stopped the circuit breaker experiment.

  [Quartz / Steve Mollman and Heather Timmons]

• But that won't be enough to calm the concerns of Chinese residents. As China analyst Damien Ma told Vox's Zack Beauchamp last summer, the real concern is political: Economic instability could impede the reforms China needs to make to ensure it continues to grow in the future.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• Even if the market recovers soon, this week's downturn could have lasting effects. Last year, the Chinese market triggered a global crash that cast a pall over most of the world's central banks for several months.

  [Vox / Timothy B. Lee]

• And in 2015, the Dow had its worst first four days of the year ever — due largely to worries about China.

  [CNBC / Matt Egan]

These immigration raids are going very badly

Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times via Getty

• Over the weekend, the Obama administration started nationwide immigration raids to find and deport Central American families who'd been ordered to leave the country.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• The raids have instilled terror in the immigrant community — even though many unauthorized immigrants, hypothetically, shouldn't be targeted.

• As this article by Esther Yu-Hsi Lee about some of last weekend's raids captures, an immigration raid is a deeply traumatic experience.

  [Think Progress / Esther Yu-Hsi Lee]

• And many immigrants have memories of past raids under the George W. Bush administration, for which big, high-profile sweeps were the centerpiece of immigration enforcement.

  [LA Times / Antonio Olivo]

• The administration is conducting the raids in response to a new upswing in immigration from Central America. But since that migration might be due to more violence — El Salvador's murder rate skyrocketed in 2014 — sending people back could put them in danger.

  [USA Today / Alan Gomez]

• 121 immigrants have been arrested, and some may have been deported already. But the raids are already turning into a huge political mess.

• Most of the immigrants who've had the chance to ask for stays of deportation in court have gotten judges to agree — which almost never happens, and is an indication judges are very worried about how the raids are working.

  [McClatchy / Franco Ordoñez]

• And the government of El Salvador — which, like other governments in the region, is usually accommodating to the US regarding immigration enforcement — is instead telling Salvadorans in the US about their rights if faced by an immigration officer, and forced the US government to stay the deportation of 21 Salvadoran nationals.

  [LatinoUSA / Julio Ricardo Varela]

Birtherism, eh?

Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

• Let us be clear: There is no good reason to believe that Ted Cruz, despite being born in Canada, should be considered anything other than a "natural-born" citizen of the US — and therefore eligible for the presidency.

  [Harvard Law Review / Neal Katyal and Paul Clement]

• Unfortunately, the definition of "natural-born" isn't spelled out in the Constitution, or really in US law. So there's technically a chance someone could challenge Cruz in court, at least.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• That's all Donald Trump needed to suggest on Tuesday — that nominating Cruz might stick the GOP with a "precarious" court battle — to get a large swath of otherwise intelligent Americans to cast aspersions on Cruz's eligibility.

  [Washington Post / Robert Costa and Philip Rucker]

• The newly minted Cruz birthers include Nancy Pelosi and other congressional leaders who really, really ought to have more dignity than that.

  [CNN / Deirdre Walsh]

• Perhaps the most ironic Cruz birther is John McCain — whose own claim to "natural-born" citizenship, more tenuous than Cruz's due to McCain's birth in the Panama Canal Zone, had to be reaffirmed with a congressional resolution when he ran in 2008.

  [NYT / Carl Hulse]

• Cruz is displeased. He has decided to blame the whole affair on Marco Rubio, who has no apparent role in this whatsoever.

  [Texas Tribune / Patrick Svitek]

• Meanwhile, Trump, the man who has the most to fear from Cruz — because Cruz is currently beating him in Iowa polling — is laughing all the way to the ballot box.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

MISCELLANEOUS

Researchers in Australia have recovered an 4.5 billion-year-old meteorite in the outback. The rock is older than Earth itself. [ABC / Laura Gartry]

• Stereotypes have it that popular histories like Joseph Ellis's or David McCullough's are mainly read by men. Turns out more than 70 percent of them are written by men too.

  [Slate / Andrew Kahn and Rebecca Onion]

• Thanks to Bernie Sanders's former chief of staff, I (Dara) now know I've been interpreting the Robert Frost poem "Two Tramps in Mud-Time" wrong for years.

  [Bloomberg / Joel Stein]

• The best headlines about Hillary Clinton's campaign are definitely coming from the Chappaqua Daily Voice.

  [NY Mag / Jaime Fuller]

• This piece arguing that the only two good Star Wars movies were Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith is wrong in ways I didn't even realize film criticism could be wrong.

  [New Yorker / Richard Brody]

VERBATIM

"Scientists revealed Wednesday the trigger that can plunge a colony of obedient and sterile worker bees dutifully serving their queen into a chaotic swarm of sexual rebellion and regicide." [AFP]

• "So you’ve decided to be sarcastic in an email or text. Wow, great idea! There is exactly no chance that choice could go south on you."

  [Slate / Katy Waldman]

• "Cons aren’t about money or about love. They are about our beliefs. We are savvy investors. We are discerning with love interests. We have a stellar reputation. We are, fundamentally, people to whom good things happen with good reason."

  [Maria Konnikova via Washington Post / Carlos Lozada]

• "The bigger a gym is, the smaller its profits will be. Hence a gym’s mission to attract the perfect customer: People who intend to work out, but don’t."

  [Washington Post / Ana Swanson]

• "Her co-star in a church play, Charles Black pressed Wilma into an elopement in May 1939. Wilma later learned that their marriage had been a cover for his sexual affair with their minister's wife. Alcoholism and adultery continued throughout their marriage and ended in Wilma's filing for divorce in 1969. Wilma is survived by the five children born to this union: Brenda (PA), Ronald (ID), Donald (CO), David (NC) and Debra (CO). She is also survived by 16 known grandchildren and their families."

  [Obituary of Wilma Black, The News & Observer]

WATCH THIS

Want a happier marriage? Share the housework equally. [YouTube / Liz Scheltens and Estelle Caswell ]

Vox / Liz Scheltens and Estelle Caswell