Vox Sentences: Protesters force Trump to jump a wall (or at least a highway median)

This time, it really is the Trump protesters' fault; the US rules the Kunduz hospital bombing an accidental atrocity; sabotage at the Large Hadron Collider.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Oddly, some Californians don't like Donald Trump

Al Drago/CQ Roll Call

• Protesters blocked traffic outside a Republican convention in Burlingame, CA today, forcing Donald Trump to leave his car and jump across a highway median to walk to the convention venue and speak.

  [Talking Points Memo / Allegra Kirkland]

• Trump joked at the convention that his adventure "felt like crossing the border," which, okay, is almost a funny joke.

  [CBS SF]

• Today's incident came on the heels of a violent protest outside Trump's rally in Costa Mesa, CA last night, in which protesters smashed the window of a police car.

  [The Guardian / Andrew Gumbel]

• At least one Trump supporter was punched during the rally and protest. 17 protesters were arrested.

  [Associated Press /Michael R. Blood and Gillian Flaccus]

• Ironically, the protesters appear to be doing the instigating in California — which is what Donald Trump has been saying (falsely) they've been doing all along.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• Then again, public opinion on violence at Trump rallies appears to depend on what the public already thinks of Donald Trump.

  [Vox / Michelle Hackman]

Doctors Without Answers

Karam al-Masri/AFP/Getty Images

• The US has released its investigation into the bombing of a Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres, or MSF) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan in December 2015, which killed 42 people.

  [NYT / Gregor Aisch, Josh Keller and Sergio Pecanha]

• 16 military servicemembers have been disciplined in the bombing, including 1 general.

  [Al Jazeera]

• But none of them are facing criminal charges. The US report says that the Kunduz bombing was the result of mistakes — the botched result of an attempt to bomb an insurgent site 400 meters away.

  [The Guardian / Spencer Ackerman and Sune Engel Rasmussen]

• By that logic, the government argues, the Kunduz bombing wasn't a war crime. (If the US had known it was bombing a hospital, it would have been a war crime.)

  [The Atlantic / Krishnadev Calamur]

• The report's "fog of war" narrative appears consistent with on-the-ground reports, which the Intercept's May Jeong writes reveal "remarkable chaos and uncertainty, even by the standards of war."

  [The Intercept / May Jeong]

• But MSF is deeply unsatisfied with the inquiry. The organization continues to ask why, if the situation was so confused, the US didn't call off the bombing mission.

  [Medecins Sans Frontieres]

Saboteur!

Johannes Simon/Getty Images

• The Large Hadron Collider, the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world and one of the most impressive pieces of machinery humanity has ever produced, was disabled overnight after a weasel gnawed through a power cable.

  [NPR / Geoff Brumfiel]

• The LHC will be back online by mid-May. The weasel, who was electrocuted, will never be back online.

  [Slate / Rachel Gross]

• Particle accelerators are prone to this sort of thing. In 2006, the particle accelerator at Fermilab in Batavia, IL was attacked by what the lab's newsletter described as a "coordinated attack" by a family of raccoons.

  [Fermilab Today]

• (It has been widely reported that the Large Hadron Collider was disabled by a bird dropping a baguette into it in 2009, the LHC now claims that report was apocryphal — leaving the question of whether it happened or not in an appropriately quantum unresolved state.)

  [New Scientist / Jacob Aron]

• Then again, when you're dealing with machinery so sensitive that mechanics have to adjust the proton beams to account for the luminosity of full moons (not to mention the tides of Lake Geneva), it's not surprising that it could be so easily sabotaged.

  [Quantum Diaries / Pauline Gagnon]

• And it's hardly as if animals are solely a burden to particle accelerators. In the 1970s, Fermilab trained a ferret to run through the accelerator's vacuum pipes with a string so that mechanics could pull a cleaning rag back through the pipes.

  [Fermilab History and Archives Project]

MISCELLANEOUS

In 1960, Harper Lee wrote a profile of Alvin Dewey, the Kansas lawman her friend Truman Capote would immortalize in "In Cold Blood." Here it is, online for the first time. [The Grapevine / Harper Lee]

• Sixth-graders in the richest American school districts are a full four grade levels ahead of sixth-graders in the poorest districts.

  [NYT / Motoko Rich, Amanda Cox, and Matthew Bloch]

• If you care about voting rights, you should want caucus elections — in Iowa and everywhere else — abolished.

  [Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law / Jennifer Patin]

• Point Roberts, Washington is in the United States — but it can only be reached through Canada.

  [Slate / lewblank]

• Take Your Kid to Work Day at NPR led to a full minute of dead air on Thursday's Morning Edition.

  [Gawker / Andy Cush]

VERBATIM

"Here's something most people don't know about surgery—at a certain point in an operation, it can smell. Really bad." [Atlas Obscura / Sarah Laskow]

• "Increasing military aid won’t add one iota of security to Israel, which is armed to the teeth. It will harm Israel."

  [Haaretz / Gideon Levy]

• "A few years later, Stanley met a young girl at school, Helen Bestick. She wrote in her diary, 'I met a Jew today.'"

  [NYT Mag / Adam Davidson]

• "Khanna and his editors clearly believe that his prose style is a winning one, but for this reader it was like struggling through the transcription of a TED talk on a recursive loop."

  [NYT / Daniel Drezner]

• "With animals, you don’t have to account for politics, or worry about offending them with your disinterest. They won’t call you a cunt on the internet, or follow you home."

  [BuzzFeed / Devon Murphy]

WATCH THIS

How mandatory minimums helped drive mass incarceration [YouTube / Rob Montz and Joe Posner]

Vox / Rob Montz and Joe Posner

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