Vox Sentences: China, Taiwan, Kenya, a phone scam, and a $3.5B railroad

Just another Taiwan/China/Kenya diplomatic incident; a moderate euthanasia proposal in Canada; the campaign you should be following this spring: Brexit.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

A diplomatic "abduction"

Sam Yeh/AFP/Getty Images

• The government of Taiwan is currently outraged with China for, it claims, "abducting" about 45 Taiwanese citizens from a prison in Kenya. Vox's Jenn Williams explains.

  [Vox / Jenn Williams]

• The Taiwanese citizens had been accused of participating in a phone-scam ring out of Nairobi. China has complained for a while that Taiwanese citizens are frequent phone fraudsters.

  [Forbes / Ralph Jennings]

• But after the defendants were acquitted earlier this week, they were removed from their cells — despite, as one cellphone video captured, fighting to stay in.

  [CNN / James Griffiths]

• They're now in China, where the government plans to prosecute them again for the phone fraud. (China considers all Taiwanese to be Chinese citizens anyway, and in 2011 the two countries made an agreement to collaborate on some criminal enforcement efforts.)

  [NYT / Dan Levin]

• China appears to be slowly amping up its aggressions toward Taiwan since Taiwan's elections in January, when it elected a new president who favors more autonomy for the country.

  [LA Times / Ralph Jennings]

• Kenya, like most other countries, doesn't recognize Taiwan diplomatically as a separate country at all. And it has every reason not to upset China, which is building a $3.5 billion railway through Kenya right now — and offering a loan of $600 million to help the Kenyan government close its budget deficit.

  [Financial Times / Ben Bland]

Death care in Canada

Shutterstock

• The Canadian government introduced a bill today that would legalize assisted suicide for adults in the late stages of serious illness.

  [The Star / Tonda MacCharles]

• Last year, the Canadian supreme court struck down a ban on assisted suicide. It gave the government until June 2016 to pass a bill changing the law, so that the government could set conditions rather than just allowing anyone to commit assisted suicide.

  [The Canadian Press]

• The bill the government settled on would only apply to Canadian citizens on Canadian health care — avoiding the practice of "suicide tourism" that has popped up in some countries, like Switzerland, that don't put citizenship restrictions on euthanasia.

  [Vox / Libby Nelson]

• It would also exclude children and people suffering only from mental illness, avoiding the ethical issues that have sprung up around Belgium's law allowing euthanasia for the depressed, bipolar, and autistic, which Rachel Aviv goes into in this New Yorker feature.

  [New Yorker / Rachel Aviv]

• It's worth noting that not everyone who considers assisted suicide goes through with it. In Oregon, for example, more than a third of prescriptions filled for euthanasia drugs aren't actually used.

  [Vox / Sarah Kliff]

• Canada's parliament, however, does have to pass a bill by June. Given how contentious the debate might be, that's not much time.

  [Ottawa Citizen / Ian MacLeod]

Guns of Brexit

Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

• Several weeks before the UK votes on "Brexit" — leaving the European Union — the polls are extremely tight. Per one poll tracker, staying in the EU is polling at 43 percent while leaving is polling at 42 percent.

  [Financial Times]

• That's way too close for comfort for European banks. The Bank of England decided this week to keep interest rates low, in part because it's trying to prepare for Brexit-induced instability.

  [The Guardian / Katie Allen]

• And the mere possibility of Brexit has resulted in a steady decline in the value of the pound since the referendum was announced.

  [Bloomberg]

• The good news for Brexiteers: The official campaign to leave the EU is the Tory-led, moderate "Vote Leave" campaign, not the UKIP-led, anti-immigrant "Grassroots Out" platform.

  [The Economist ]

• The bad news: Being the "official" campaign allows Vote Leave to spend 7 million pounds; the British government, meanwhile, has already sent out one leaflet opposing Brexit that cost 9 million pounds to distribute.

  [The Telegraph / Kate McCann and Michael Wilkinson]

• President Obama makes a point of not doing anything that could be construed as meddling in other countries' elections during foreign trips. But he'll be in Britain next week, and he's expected to urge Britain not to leave.

  [Reuters / Roberta Rampton]

MISCELLANEOUS

The Conservative Jewish movement has overturned an 800-year-old ban on eating kitniyot (rice, corn, and legumes) during Passover. Tell all the people you know who keep kosher for Passover, and watch them argue about it. [Forward / Liza Schoenfein]

• Since the 1940s, some 1,500 pregnant women in Ireland have had their pelvic cartilage and ligaments sliced open, and sometimes their pubic bone itself sawn through, without their knowledge or consent.

  [Vice / Mari Shibata]

• How often men and women across the world cry per month. (Nigerians and Peruvians are apparently totally stone-faced.)

  [NY Mag / Mona Chalabi]

• The case for banning cellphones in movie theaters.

  [The Atlantic / David Sims]

• Somebody has proven that Magic: The Gathering is Turing complete. That is, you can make a computer out of Magic cards.

  [ToothyCat]

VERBATIM

"There is in fact a real-life Gone Girl — she’s 80, notorious for poisoning and killing her husbands and boyfriends, and known to an entire country as the Black Widow. This week, she was on the prowl." [NY Mag / Catie L'Heureux]

• "A treasured footnote to the Taylor Swift backstory is that she spent much of her childhood being raised at, of all places, a Christmas-tree nursery."

  [Vogue / Jason Gay]

• "I want to see a massive unicorn mare, on the scale of the Kelpies. She would symbolise Scotland and would stand proud with her horn facing north over our beautiful Borderland. Her name would be Scotia and she would pull thousands of visitors off the A1 and up the A68, which is by far the most scenic route in Scotland."

  [The Scotsman]

• "A 12-year-old girl asked Putin who he would choose to save first from drowning, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan or Ukrainian leader Petro Poroshenko, both heads of countries with which Russia has pointedly difficult relations. Putin replied, 'If a person is determined to drown, it’s impossible to save them.'"

  [ABC News / Patrick Reevell]

• "In so firmly resisting any growth for Hannah, Girls also resists our expectations of what a television show should be. Outside of the most frozen-in-amber TV sitcoms, where characters are allowed to achieve a stasis that borders on petrifaction, we expect our serialized TV characters to grow and change."

  [NY Mag / Kathryn VanArendonk]

WATCH THIS

How a TV show gets made [YouTube / Estelle Caswell and Caroline Framke]

Vox / Tom Humberstone

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