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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
"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."
"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.'"
"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."
"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."
Путин поднял флаг на атомном подлодке "Князь Пожарский" в Северодвинске
Сотрудники столичного главка Росгвардии приняли участие в литургии по случаю Дня крещения Руси
«Россети Центр» обеспечили электроэнергией объекты водоснабжения Смоленской области
«Юля носила вызывающую одежду, чтобы привлечь моё внимание!» Игорь Чехов вспомнил начало любовной истории с Юлей Топольницкой в шоу «Вкусно с Анфисой Чеховой. Любовное настроение» на ТВ-3
Чемпионат по военно-спортивному многоборью среди росгвардейцев завершился в Грозном
В День парашютиста героем рубрики «Знай наших» стал сотрудник вневедомственной охраны столичного главка Росгвардии младший лейтенант полиции Александр С.
«Краснодар» и московское «Динамо» проведут сегодня первые матчи в Кубке России
Легкоатлеты из Мордовии показали лучшие результаты мирового сезона на международных соревнованиях в Москве
