Vox Sentences: Haiti postpones election in the face of chaos

Haiti postpones its presidential runoff for the third time; Oscar voting changes good for diversity, bad for nuns; standing athwart Trumpery yelling, "Stop."

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

CORRECTION: Yesterday's edition said that Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned by radioactive plutonium. It was radioactive polonium.

TOP NEWS

This is not going well

Hector Retamal/AFP/Getty Images

• Haiti has postponed its presidential runoff, which was scheduled to happen on Sunday, indefinitely.

  [Miami Herald / Jacqueline Charles]

• The delay comes after violent protests in which police fired at several people (attacking a man who had apparently shot at them).

  [Reuters / Frank Jack Daniel]

• It also comes after leading opposition candidate Jude Célestin announced he would drop out of the race, so as not to participate in a fraudulent election.

  [The National / Andrew Leamonth]

• The runoff has already been delayed twice after the initial election in October.

  [Financial Times / Andres Schipani]

• And that election — in which government-endorsed candidate Jovenal Moïse got 33 percent to Célestin's 25, was deemed by Haiti's independent election commission to have "important irregularities."

  [AP]

• The opposition candidates are hardly noble reformers. Célestin is suspected of involvement in the disappearance of a government official in 2009, and supporters of former Sen. Moïse Jean-Charles are openly calling for the death of current president Michel Martelly.

  [The Guardian / Michael Deibert]

• The Haitian government and elections commission don't have much time to negotiate a new election. Haiti's constitution demands that Martelly step down on February 7 — and to countries monitoring and pressuring Haiti to hold fair elections, that deadline hasn't been negotiable.

  [Financial Times / Andres Schipani]

#OscarsNoLongerSoWhite?

Kevin Winter/Getty Images

• The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced a group of reforms to increase the diversity of Academy members and, by extension, Oscar voters.

  [Variety / Tim Gray]

• The group has a long way to go. The most recent survey, conducted by the LA Times in 2012, found that 93 percent of Academy members were white, 76 percent were male, and the average age was 63.

  [Los Angeles Times / John Horn and Doug Smith]

• One of the factors: Membership in the Academy is for life, even if you leave the film industry entirely (to, say, become a nun).

  [The Independent (UK) / Chris Evans]

• To get in some fresh blood, the Academy is now instituting 10-year terms — with automatic extensions for anyone who stays active in film.

  [Vox / Todd VanDerWerff]

• But it's not like people active in film can't be racist too — as current Oscar nominee Charlotte Rampling and past winner Michael Caine showed just today, with remarks about how black actors should be "patient" (Caine) and might simply not be good enough for nominations (Rampling).

  [Vox / Alex Abad-Santos]

• The Academy will need to improve on a lot of fronts. Here are some suggestions.

  [The Film Experience / Nathaniel Rogers]

NROuroboros

Ethan Miller/Getty Images

• The conservative magazine National Review published a major package in which several conservative pundits anti-endorse Donald Trump.

  [National Review]

• The package is clearly meant to evoke one of the most famous episodes in the magazine's history, when founder William F. Buckley denounced the far-right John Birch Society, effectively kicking them out of the conservative movement.

  [NYT / David Welch]

• Except that instead of saying Trump is too far right, the magazine spends most of its time saying he's not reliably conservative enough (both because he's supported Democrats in the past and because his ideology is authoritarian rather than conservative).

  [Vox / Jeff Stein]

• Indeed, when it comes to immigration the lead editorial specifically calls out Trump's plan for being too soft on legal immigrants, and for letting in some unauthorized immigrants after deporting 11 million of them.

  [Washington Post / Max Ehrenfreund]

• Liberals, for their part, have chided National Review for its failure to own up to the conservative establishment's role in creating the current populist moment.

  [Gawker / Tom Scocca]

• Meanwhile, the people who actually have the power in the Republican Party appear to be siding with Trump over Cruz — on the logic that they can more easily recover from four months of Trump than four years of Cruz.

  [NYT / Jonathan Martin]

MISCELLANEOUS

How much would an Imperial Star Destroyer cost to make? About $636 billion — plus $44.4 trillion to transport to Mars. [Quora / Kynan Eng]

• The "Uberman" sleep schedule prescribes six 20-minute naps a day, and nothing more. Its adherents swear it makes them more productive. Sleep science suggests it's a horrible idea.

  [Vice / Elizabeth Preston]

• More than a dozen people have come to this one couple's home in the Atlanta suburbs in search of their lost phones. They're never there. No one — not the phone carriers, not Google or Apple, not the FCC — knows why lost-phone apps are sending everyone to the same place.

  [Fusion / Kashmir Hill]

• In defense of small talk.

  [Washington Post / Alexandra Petri]

• People who stand on the left on escalators don't waste everyone's time. The people who walk on the left do.

  [CityLab / Aria Bendix]

VERBATIM

"Q-tips are one of the only, if not the only, major consumer products whose main purpose is precisely the one the manufacturer explicitly warns against." [Washington Post / Roberto Ferdman]

• "It’s impossible to understand early twentieth-century progressives without eugenics. Even worker-friendly reforms like the minimum wage were part of a racial hygiene agenda … The minimum wage, in addition to providing some workers with a better standard of living, would guard white men from competition."

  [New Republic / Malcolm Harris]

• "Note that no teenagers would actually use the terminology 'Moralistic Therapeutic Deist' to describe themselves."

  [Christian Smith]

• "Sources confirmed Friday that you are still going to die one day and there is nothing you can do to prevent it."

  [The Onion]

• "''I''m rooting for Hillary,' said one half-joking somebody in the GOP establishment. 'She can't win a mandate, so we hold the House and don't get slaughtered in the Senate. We will have a great midterm in 2018 running against her,' he said, requesting anonymity for obvious reasons. 'We are a great opposition party.' [CORRECTION: The somebody in question wanted to clarify that he is not at all joking, not even halfway, and is indeed fully rooting for Hillary Clinton.]"

  [Huffington Post / Ryan Grim and Sam Stein]

WATCH THIS

Flint's water crisis, explained in 3 minutes [YouTube / Joe Posner, Joss Fong, Libby Nelson, Johnny Harris, Sarah Turbin]

Vox / Joe Posner

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