Fearless, Adversarial Journalism – Spoken Edition

A Wall Street Coup Thousands of Kentucky public school teachers swarmed the state Capitol earlier this year, angry not about low salaries, but about their shrinking pensions. Among their concerns: the high portion of their money that has ended up in the hands of Wall Street in opaque, high-cost products that seem to benefit no one aside from the people who sold them. Rising pension costs helped to send teachers in Colorado into the streets in protest a few weeks later.

The Trump administration is considering whether to grant a South Carolina request that would effectively allow faith-based foster care agencies in the state the ability to deny Jewish parents from fostering children in its network. The argument, from the state and from the agency, is that the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act should not force a Protestant group to work with Jewish people if it violates a tenet of their faith.

The notorious conservative activist James O’Keefe is at it again. This week, O’Keefe— known for undercover videos aimed at embarrassing liberals and Democrats— went after Sen. Claire McCaskill, a centrist Democrat running for re-election in Missouri. Through his nonprofit Project Veritas Action, O’Keefe released a video showing McCaskill campaign staffers making comments about their belief that she could be more liberal than some might imagine.

The hospital industry has partnered with a major Democratic consulting firm in an unusual alliance against Massachusetts’s nurses and the bulk of its progressive infrastructure. At issue is a ballot initiative that aims to improve patient safety by limiting the number of nurses that can be assigned to a single nurse. If passed, the initiative, known as Question 1, will make Massachusetts the second state in the country to have nurse staffing limits in place.

Burhan Mohumed was home alone one afternoon in July 2016, when two FBI agents knocked on his apartment door in the West Bank neighborhood of Minneapolis and asked to be let in. They wanted to talk to him, they said through the door, about “radicalism in the community.

In the summer of 2001, North Carolina executed 42-year-old Ronald Wayne Frye, convicted of stabbing and robbing his 70-year-old landlord in 1993. The crime was brutal and there was no question of his guilt. Yet the circumstances of Frye’s trial and conviction would come to shock members of the public — and even members of his own jury — as his execution approached.

For the first time since he was elected statewide in Delaware in 1976, Sen. Tom Carper faced a political scare this summer, when an insurgent challenger picked up late momentum by highlighting Carper’s fealty to corporate interests over the people of the state.

Calling Beto O’Rourke’s $38 million dollar fundraising quarter a “record” doesn’t quite do that total justice: O’Rourke,who is challenging Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, raised 30 percent more from July to October of this year than Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown has raised in all six years of his re-election campaign, and more than Jeb Bush raised for the entirety of his 2016 presidential run.

There is an unforgettable passage in Graham Greene’s classic “The Quiet American” in which the title character, a CIA agent named Alden Pyle, admits that Vietnam is much more complicated than he’d imagined. “I had not realized how tribal politics was and how divorced it could be from principles or conviction,” Pyle says.

In April, the Congressional Progressive Caucus announced that it was going to be drawing a line: Itspolitical action committee would no longer accept corporate campaign donations. “If we are going to end the influence of corporations and special interests in government, we have to start by not relying on their support,” saidcaucus co-chair Mark Pocan, D-Wis. “Only by being fully independent of their financial influence can we prioritize people over corporations.

SPENCER, Iowa— “The step’s broken, so watch yourself on the way up,” says J.D. Scholten, as he hops into the Winnebago that’s been his mode of transportation and overnight hotel for the past few months. I’m not as rangy as Scholten, a 6-foot-6 former Minor League pitcher, but I manage to tumble into the vehicle, nicknamed “Sioux City Sue.

More than ayear after the Trump administration quietly began a program of separating migrantchildren from their families along the U.S.-Mexico border, the full number ofpeople impacted remains unclear. According to a new report, however, the government’s own data indicates that the campaign was far more expansive — and far more destructive — than previously acknowledged. Figures provided by U.S.

When Carlos Hidalgo was detained at theICE processing center, in Adelanto, California, guards would mock the detainees lined up to get their meals by imitating the call of cows. “Moo! Here are the cows, walking through!” Toiletries and clean clothes were in constant shortage and sick detainees were sometimes left in their soiled clothes, he told The Intercept.

Brazil just experienced one of the most dramatic moments in its democratic history. Four years ago, Jair Bolsonaro was an Army reservist and a congressman from Rio de Janeiro with relatively limited national exposure and connected to a minor party. When his name did pop up, it was usually to be condemned forhis outrageous, stupid, hateful, racist, misogynist, or homophobic comments, or his enthusiasm for the military dictatorship and the torture that it inflicted on dissidents.

Chissa Rivaldi never expected to be in a fight with her university over birth control. Four years ago, when she was deciding where to pursue a doctoral degree in biology, she had two key things in mind: a supportive adviser and an institution with a robust research program. She found what she was looking for in the University of Notre Dame.