Fearless, Adversarial Journalism – Spoken Edition

On the first day the new Congress was in session in January, Rep. John Sarbanes, a Democrat from Maryland, introduced the For the People Act, known in the House of Representatives as H.R.1. The sweeping bill seeks to revamp lobbyist registration, campaign financing, and voting rights. The Brennan Center for Justice said it “would create a more responsive and representative government by making it easier for voters to cast a ballot and harder for lawmakers to gerrymander.

For years, the terms of the debate about climate change in the United States have been clear. One side — flush with fossil fuel cash — cast doubt on whether the problem existed at all, spreading disinformation and calling global warming an elaborate hoax to bring about socialism. For the most part, they were Republicans. On the other side were those who believed the science and usually rallied around some call for climate action, however vague.

Deciding whether tosign onto the Green New Deal resolution is not an easy call for many members of Congress. They have to contend with the usual opponents:coal, utilities, oil companies, and other big-pocketed interests who like today’s economic order just fine. But even on the left, coalition-building can be complicated.

The Medicare for All legislation unveiled Wednesday by Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat from Washington state, was written with the help of a broad swath of lobbyists and special interest groups, if perhaps not the kind associated with typical health policy legislation on Capitol Hill.

Muslim immigrants detained at a Florida jail made more than 20 requests — orally and in writing — for religious accommodation throughout last year. Their asks were simple: They wanted their meals to be religiously compliant, to be able to make their five daily prayers without obstruction, and to have access to basic items like prayer rugs and copies of the Quran.

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein may feel like she was treated unfairly by young activists who have hammered her for not backing the Green New Deal resolution, but she has plenty of company. In upstate New York, Utah, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania, voters who feel a much greater sense of urgency than their elected officials have been reacting furiously to politicians who say the attempt to turn the fossil fuel-based economy around in the next 12 years simply isn’t realistic. Rep.

Sen. Bernie Sanders waves as he takes the stage at the Our Revolution Massachusetts Rally in Boston, Mass., on March 31, 2017. Photo: Scott Eisen/Getty Images After Sens. Kamala Harrisand Cory Booker were asked about reparations for slavery in a Breakfast Club interview last week, the issue quickly became hot on the 2020 campaign trail, with candidates Elizabeth Warren and Julián Castro quickly voicing their support for the policy.

A federal judge on Thursday issued a ruling that could test the strength of the Trump administration’s theory behind stripping naturalized Americans of their U.S. citizenship. At issue is the question of whether Parvez Khan, a sexagenarian native of Pakistan, became a U.S. permanent resident — and ultimately a naturalized citizen — fraudulently, by concealing the fact that he had previously received an order of deportation under a different name.

Sixteen-year-old Jorge Alexander Ruiz took off alone in the middle of the night from San Pedro Sula, Honduras, to escape pressure to join a gang. Sitting outside the shelter for unaccompanied minors where he was staying in Tijuana, in early December, waiting for a chance to request asylum at the U.S. port of entry, he recalled the menacing words that drove him to catch a 1:30 a.m. bus to Guatemala. “‘You’re going to work for us for free,’” a gang member threatened him.

In October 1978, Fiat Brazil’s workers were on the verge of their first strike. The Italian carmaker’s factory in South America would go on to become its most successful: Today, more Fiats are produced in Brazil than in any country besidesItaly, and Fiats are the third most popular car in Brazil. But 40 years ago, as Fiat was growing into its Brazilian operation, turmoil was on the horizon.

Something peculiar isgoing on between Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and his vice president, Gen. Hamilton Mourão. Late last month, Bolsonaro was scheduled for a surgical procedure to remove the colostomy bag he’d been using since being stabbed ahead of the presidential election. Before he went under the knife, Bolsonaro told his advisers that he would not turn over the powers of the presidency to Mourão while in surgery.

On December 11, 1981 in El Salvador,a Salvadoran military unit created and trained by the U.S. Army began slaughtering everyone they could find in a remote village called El Mozote. Before murdering the women and girls, the soldiers raped them repeatedly, including some as young as 10 years old, and joked that their favorites were the 12-year-olds. One witness described a soldier tossing a 3-year-old child into the air and impaling him with his bayonet.

Roughly six months ago at New York’s Sing Sing prison, John Dukes says he was brought out with cellmates to meet a corrections counselor. He recalls her giving him a paper with some phrases and offering him a strange choice: He could go up to the phone and utter the phrases that an automated voice would ask him to read, or he could choose not to and lose his phone access altogether.

A woman speaks during the Indigenous Peoples March on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 18, 2019. Photo: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images By now, millions around the world have seen the viral video of dozens of Catholic schoolboys sporting “Make America Great Again,” or MAGA, hats tomahawk-chopping and mocking a Native elder, who was drumming and singing at the feet of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Paranoid conspiracy theories about George Soros — the liberal philanthropist and financier cast, in starkly anti-Semitic terms, as a shadowy puppet master bent on toppling governments — are now so common that it is easy to forget that this viral meme was first injected into the far-right imagination by Fox News more than a decade ago.