Vox Sentences: Ted Cruz reaches the “anger” stage of Trump grief

The 2016 Republican primary reaches an appropriately dignified end; why most of Detroit’s teachers are calling in sick; Australia’s lethally inhumane offshore immigrant detention centers.

TOP NEWS

Indiana wants Donald Trump

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

• Donald Trump has won the Indiana primary. (Hillary Clinton has probably won the Indiana primary.)

  [Vox / Libby Nelson]

• Ted Cruz's campaign is over in all but name. In addition to the fact that Trump has a basically insurmountable delegate lead, Cruz's popularity among Republicans is collapsing — while Trump's is surging.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• And so, in what is becoming a pattern among Republican candidates facing imminent demise at Trump's hands, Cruz went nuclear on the frontrunner Tuesday, calling him a "pathological liar." (We cannot address all the levels of irony here. Please read Vox's Andrew Prokop for those.)

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• Cruz's most inflammatory claim, by the way — that Trump has called avoiding sexually transmitted disease "my personal Vietnam" — is both 100 percent true and just one of a bucketload of things Trump has said on The Howard Stern Show that are just waiting for attack ads from Democratic-affiliated PACs.

  [Daily Beast / Tim Mak]

• Of course, if Trump keeps saying tabloid-sourced, totally nutso things like that Cruz's father was an associate of the man who killed JFK, the Democratic PACs won't even need to dig into the archives.

  [PolitiFact / Louis Jacobson and Linda Qiu ]

• Hillary Clinton, for her part, is ready for the general election. Expect the heavy attacks to start soon.

  [MSNBC / Alex Seitz-Wald]

Detroit's teachers are sick and tired

Bill Pugliano/Getty Images

• Detroit Public Schools teachers held their second day of mass "sickouts" Tuesday, resulting in the closure (for the second straight day) of 94 of the city's 97 public schools.

  [CNN / Michael Pearson and Joshua Berlinger]

• (The mass sickout is essentially a strike — but it's illegal for teachers to strike in Michigan.)

  [Reuters / Suzannah Gonzales and Karen Pierog]

• Why the sickout happened: DPS is running out of money. It may not be able to pay its teachers through the end of the year, and as of the end of last week it hadn't assured teachers they would be paid.

  [Vox / Tara Golshan]

• The standoff appears to have abated late Tuesday, as the "transition manager" for DPS (which has been under state control since 2009) reportedly sent teachers a signed contract guaranteeing their pay.

  [Click On Detroit / Dave Bartkowiak Jr.]

• The guarantee was backed up by the Michigan state legislature's passage of a package of bills giving $500 million in funding to DPS, while limiting collective bargaining rights.

  [Reuters / Suzannah Gonzales and Karen Pierog]

• How much of that money will make it to teachers and students is another question. The school district just rehired an inspector general to investigate fraud (after the last inspector general had been fired in 2015 to save money)...

  [Detroit Free Press / Ann Zaniewski and John Wisely]

• ...and a dozen Detroit principals were charged in March by federal officials in a kickback scheme involving contracts for imaginary school supplies.

  [Chicago Tribune]

Deterrence kills

Luis Ascui/Getty Images

• In the past week, two migrants seeking asylum in Australia (but being held in a detention center on the offshore island of Nauru) have set themselves on fire to protest their treatment.

  [CNN / Pamela Boykoff]

• The self-immolations come soon after a judge in Papua New Guinea, the site of another offshore Australian detention center, ordered that center to close. Asylum seekers are often held for months or years in the offshore centers and told they'll never be able to settle in Australia.

  [BuzzFeed News / Mark Di Stefano]

• This is a deliberate feature of Australian immigration policy — the country openly uses the threat of interception and detention as a way to try to deter future migration. It's been criticized in the past for circulating posters that say, "You will not make Australia home," and graphic novels that show detained immigrants feeling miserable and regretful about their attempts to seek asylum.

  [The Guardian / Oliver Laughland]

• Australia's actions go against the spirit of the obligation for countries to accept asylum seekers. But Australia is hardly the only offender. Both Europe and the US treat deterrence as the core of their immigration enforcement strategies.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• But detention often happens out of sight of the public (foreign journalists aren't even allowed to visit the center in Nauru). So Australian advocate Lali Foster reminds residents of other countries, "Don't let your detention centers out of your sight."

  [The Migrationist / Lali Foster]

• In that spirit, you should know that the US's primary detention center for immigrant families — which holds up to 580 immigrants, most of whom are currently Central American families seeking asylum — has just been granted a child care license by the state of Texas, basically ensuring it will remain open permanently.

  [NYT / Julia Preston ]

MISCELLANEOUS

No, Mussolini did not get the trains running on time. [Independent / Brian Cathcart]

• A Rube Goldberg machine, but in HTML.

  [Slate / Lily Hay Newman]

• The federal government is, for the first time, paying for an entire American community to relocate to avoid the effects of climate change.

  [NYT / Coral Davenport and Campbell Robertson]

• The internet is killing the "mixed-attractiveness" couple.

  [Priceonomics / Alex Mayassi]

• The heroin and prescription opioid epidemics are often treated as the same thing. They're not.

  [Boston Globe / Evan Horowitz]

VERBATIM

"Execution is actually the third leading case of death on death row in California." [Carol Steiker to Harvard Law Today / Colleen Walsh]

• "Now, Mr. Zhang said, he had no choice but to return to the Lu Yuan market each morning, even if his prospects are dim. 'I have no other options,' he said. A friend motioned to the water. 'There’s always the river,' she said."

  [NYT / Javier Hernández and Owen Guo]

• "The last stop of this meditation is Zagorsk, Russia, where, troubled by the anti-Semitism he encountered there, my friend Andrew Solomon asked a local peasant why, in his estimation, there was such antipathy everywhere against Jews. Without a moment’s hesitation, the peasant answered, in Russian: 'It is because the Jews have a secret vegetable they eat so they don’t become alcoholics like the rest of us. And they refuse to share that vegetable with anyone else.'"

  [Vanity Fair / Amy Fine Collins]

• "The gap between the food we cook and the food we talk about has never been larger. Culturally, it’s the same gap that exists between The Americans—the brainy FX spy show that seems to have nearly as many internet recappers as viewers—and shows like the immensely popular and rarely discussed NCIS."

  [Slate / Nicholas Hune-Brown]

• "In The Craft, the witches’ collective powers are a way to silence those who demean and subjugate them—whether it’s the men who threaten their safety, peers who judge them, or beauty ideals that restrict them. They don’t want to escape their identities as teenage girls; they want to escape the idea that this should limit them in any way."

  [AV Club / Sinead Stubbins]

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