Vox Sentences: The government just protected $12T in retirement savings. Some is probably yours.

The Department of Labor raises standards for retirement advice; even South African President Jacob Zuma's own party wants him out; presidential candidates try to make a brand new start of it in old New York.

TOP NEWS

The fiduciary rule and you

Monkey Business Images / Shutterstock

• The Department of Labor has finalized a regulation that would require retirement advisers to act in the best interests of their clients, instead of maximizing their commissions.

  [Vox / Ariel Stulberg]

• The old regulation simply required advisers to make recommendations that were "suitable" for a given client — which could include acceptable, but not ideal, investments that happened to have lucrative commissions attached. Now advisers are being held to a fiduciary standard, which requires them to recommend the best action for the client to take.

  [Business Insider / Kathleen Elkins]

• When the initial regulations were set, most retirement income was managed through pensions. But with pensions replaced by 401(k)s and individual retirement accounts, more investments are overseen by individual investors of the type who hire these kinds of advisers. So the new regulation will protect a whopping $12 trillion in investments.

  [The New Republic / David Dayen]

• Labor has been working on the rule for a while, and did make some last-minute tweaks that will soften the regulation's impact — including delaying the regulation so that it won't come into effect until President Obama leaves office.

  [Wall Street Journal / Yuka Hayashi and Anna Prior]

• Still, for people like Phyllis Borzi, the Labor official who championed the rule (profiled in 2014 by Robert Schmidt), it's a long-awaited victory.

  [Bloomberg / Robert Schmidt]

Jacob Zuma vs. the world

Sean Gallup/Getty Images

• South Africa's highest court ruled last week that the country's president, Jacob Zuma, had violated the constitution by refusing a government order to pay back some of the £11 million in public funds he used to renovate his private estate.

  [The Guardian / Jessica Elgot]

• Zuma managed to survive an impeachment vote Tuesday, thanks to members of his party, the African National Congress, which has dominated the country's politics since the end of apartheid in the 1990s.

  [BBC]

• But Zuma's path isn't clear. The country's military union has said that if Zuma doesn't step down, members are encouraged to take any actions they can — as long as they're legal — to dislodge him.

  [Telegraph / Aislinn Laing]

• And the opposition parties have managed to put together an impressive show of unity in calling on Zuma to step down, one that is kindling some hopes that they could even form an effective coalition to unseat the ANC.

  [TMG Digital]

• Even some in the ANC aren't interested in protecting Zuma anymore. On Wednesday, several senior party leaders called on him to step down.

  [Financial Times / Krista Mahr]

• But the ANC's power in the country might be fading. The question appears to be whether the party will clean its own house or whether the opposition will do it for them.

  [Washington Post / Peter Granitz]

New York to candidates: Feh

Scott Olson/Getty Images

• Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders won last night's Wisconsin primaries. But neither is looking at an easy road ahead.

  [NYT / Jonathan Martin and Matt Flegenheimer]

• Sanders's performance in Wisconsin was strong, but not quite strong enough to match the pace he needs if he's going to catch Hillary Clinton. So by missing the opportunity, he's arguably falling further behind.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• The good news for Sanders's theory of political revolution: There are a lot of nonvoters out there who could be motivated by the right candidate.

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

• The bad news: Those first-time voters might not provide the down-ballot boost Sanders promises to make his proposals politically viable. In Wisconsin, young Democratic voters' ignorance of whom to vote for in a local judicial election helped the conservative candidate win.

  [Benchmark Politics]

• Ted Cruz's Wisconsin win has made a brokered Republican convention more likely. Unfortunately for him, most Republican voters don't actually like any of the plans that would help someone other than Donald Trump win it.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• And the next big primary is New York on April 19, which (as Trump's home state) would be tough territory for Cruz even if he hadn't insulted "New York values" last year — but he did, making it even tougher.

  [NY Daily News / Chauncey Alcorn and Leonard Greene]

• Not that being a New York native spares you the ire of New Yorkers. Sanders, a native Brooklynite, has been getting some heat for not appearing to know that subways no longer use tokens (a switch made some 15 years ago).

  [Huffington Post / Maxwell Strachan]

MISCELLANEOUS

This interactive should put an end to the myth that half of all marriages end in divorce; it's more like 30 percent. [Flowing Data / Nathan Yau]

• Remember how yesterday we told you the factional government in Tripoli, Libya, was dissolving? The leader of that government appears to have other ideas.

  [BBC ]

• A sociology paper tracking hundreds of sibling pairs over the years found that 70 percent of dads and 74 percent of moms admitted to treating one kid better than the other.

  [Quartz / Jenny Anderson]

• Azerbaijan's ambassador to the US is attacking Kim Kardashian, because that's the kind of world we live in now.

  [Foreign Policy / John Hudson]

• The case against Anne Hathaway's friends in The Devil Wears Prada.

  [BuzzFeed / Kat Angus]

VERBATIM

"'What the fuck was I thinking?’ is probably the mantra that some of these people need to be repeating to themselves." [Leslie Kaminoff to Slate / Michelle Goldberg]

• "[Hamilton] does a lot of this thing that we call 'Founders Chic' as a representational strategy. This is a way that writers of popular history (and some academic historians) represent the founders as relatable, cool guys. Founders Chic tends to really downplay the involvement of the Founding Fathers in slavery, and this play does that 100 percent."

  [Lyra Monteiro to Slate / Rebecca Onion]

• "Even after controlling for age, education, marital status, occupation, time in the workforce, and other factors, they found that this correlation was rather significant: specifically, the that a three percent increase in a state’s religiosity related to a one percent increase in its gender wage-gap."

  [NY Mag / Stephanie Russell-Kraft]

• "Harvard Medical School is one of only 10 medical schools in the nation that don’t have a department of family medicine, according to the American Academy of Family Physicians. Yale, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, and other elite schools are also among those 10."

  [STAT / Melissa Bailey]

• "A surge in the number of people buying adult colouring books has threatened pencil stocks world-wide as manufacturers struggle to cope with an increased demand for quality crayons."

  [Independent / Alexandra Sims]

WATCH THIS

The Panama Papers, explained with piggy banks [YouTube / Matt Yglesias, Carlos Waters, Christophe Haubursin, Joss Fong, and Joe Posner]

Vox / Javier Zarracina