Fearless, Adversarial Journalism – Spoken Edition

President George H.W. Bush addresses the nation from the Oval Office on Jan. 16, 1991, after U.S. forces began military action against Iraq, code-named Operation Desert Storm. Photo: Charles Tasnadi/AP The tributes to former President George H.W. Bush, who died on Friday aged 94, have been pouring in from all sides of the political spectrum. He was a man “of the highest character,” said his eldest son and fellow former president, George W. Bush.

The first billDemocrats plan to move in January when they take control of the House will mark a major step forward on a longstanding progressive goal — public financing of congressional campaigns. The provision is a largely overlooked part of a sweeping anti-corruption bill Democrats plan to start the year with, and will bestow with the symbolic designation of HR1. The program, based on Maryland Rep.

You’re rarely allowed to know exactly what’s keeping you safe. When you fly, you’re subject to secret rules, secret watchlists, hidden cameras, and other trappings of a plump, thriving surveillance culture. The Department of Homeland Security is now complicating the picture further by paying a private Virginia firm to build a software algorithm with the power to flag you as someone who might try to blow up the plane.

Rashida Tlaib, a Democratic representative-elect from Michigan, belongs to a cohort of incoming members of Congress who’ve vowed to upend the status quo — even on third-rail issues in Washington like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To that end, Tlaib is planning to lead a congressional delegation to the Israeli-occupied West Bank, she told The Intercept.

The U.S. military has long insisted that it maintains a “light footprint” in Africa, and there have been reports ofproposeddrawdowns in special operations forces and closures of outposts on the continent, due to a2017 ambushin Niger and an increasing focus on rivals like China and Russia.But through it all, U.S.

Hakeem Jeffries’s victory in the race for Democratic House caucus chair on Wednesday was a loss for progressive groups that rallied against him, but it was a victory for one national group in particular: Democrats for Education Reform, or DFER — a political action committee that funds candidates supportive of charter schools and is critical of teachers unions.

CNN on Thursday afternoon fired its commentator, Temple University Professor Marc Lamont Hill, after right-wing defenders of Israel objected to a speech Professor Hill gave at the U.N. on Wednesday in defense of Palestinian rights. CNN announced the firing just twenty-four hours after Hill delivered his speech.

The secrecy surrounding the work was unheard of at Google. It was not unusual for planned new products to be closely guarded ahead of launch. But this time was different. The objective, code-named Dragonfly, was to build a search engine for China that would censor broad categories of information about human rights, democracy, and peaceful protest.

A Tennessee-based journalist who was turned over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement after being arrested while covering a protest won temporary relief from deportation through the end of the month. But Manuel Duran, who was arrested in April and remains in ICE custody while a court reviews an appeal in his case, believes he was targeted because of his coverage of law enforcement’s collaboration with ICE in Memphis’s Latino community.

On a mid-September afternoon, 30,000 people marched down San Francisco’s Market Street in a demonstration they called Rise for Climate, Jobs and Justice. One group walked behind a banner bearing the name of an eponymous statewide campaign: “Brown’s Last Chance.” California Gov. Jerry Brown had developed a reputation as a climate champion, but protesters felt that the urgency of the moment demanded more of him.

In August, Reality Winner stood before a federal judge, ready to accept a plea bargain of more than five years in prison for sharing classified information with journalists. Surrounded by dozens of reporters, attorneys, and activists who have followed her case, the whistleblower told the court something deeply personal that she had not even shared with her closest family members before her arrest. Winner struggles with depression and bulimia.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaks to activists with the Sunrise Movement protesting in the offices of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi in Washington D.C., on Nov. 13, 2018.

Is it possible to tell whether someone is a criminal just from looking at their face or listening to the sound of their voice? The idea may seem ludicrous, like something out of science fiction — Big Brother in “1984” detects any unconscious look “that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality” — and yet, some companies have recently begun to answer this question in the affirmative.

S.A. was a high school sophomore when she had her first personal encounter with the post-9/11 surveillance state. It was 2010, and the federal government’s security apparatus had taken a particular interest in New York Muslims like herself. One of her classmates called the FBI to report that S.A. was a threat. Federal agents responded to the call and questioned S.A about terrorism, after which she grew paranoid about government surveillance and deleted her Facebook.

Jacque Wilson was in his car heading home from a softball game on a late August evening when his phone rang. It was his friend Kate Chatfield: She told him California Senate Bill 1437 had finally passed and was headed to Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk. “And I’m driving, and I just break down crying,” Wilson told The Intercept. The new law would dramatically redefine use of the state’s archaic felony murder rule in criminal prosecutions.