Fearless, Adversarial Journalism – Spoken Edition

“Boring.” That was Donald Trump’s instant verdict on the New York Times’s blockbuster investigation into the rampant tax fraud and nepotism that undergirds his fortune. Sarah Huckabee Sanders heartily concurred, informing the White House press corps that she refused to “go through every line of a very boring, 14,000-word story.

In Washington Heights, a hilly neighborhood at the northern tip of Manhattan, 128 P&L Deli Grocery is the busiest hub on the block. Outside, neighbors lounge in lawn chairs and pass around a hookah hose. Inside, customers watch baseball on an iPhone mounted behind the counter and sip tamarind juice through straws. Yucca, plantains, and bagged heads of lettuce loiter by the entrance. Porfirio Mejia, the Dominican-born New Yorker who has owned this grocery for six years, seems to know everyone.

There is an under-appreciated reason that explains why, apart from Christine Blasey Ford’s remarkable testimony abouthersummer of 1982and what adrunken 17-year-old Brett Kavanaugh did to her, almost nothing has been heard about his after-hours conduct from the people who knewKavanaugh best at Georgetown Preparatory School.

This article includes graphic images that some readers may find disturbing. On a chilly nightin December 2016, Julianne Perry led a group of volunteers over the shoulder of the highway and into the darkness of California’s Central Valley, toward the sound of lowing cattle. Their headlamps lit the way across dirt fields, their nostrils and throats filling with the choking smell of ammonia and feces floating in the humid air.

In 1991, whenGabriella Blum was 16 years old, the Israel Defense Forces suggested she go see the world. She’d skipped first grade and subsequently graduated high school in Tel Aviv early — too early to start the mandatory military service all Israelis begin at 18. So the IDF told her to check out Chiang Mai and Mumbai, and to call them in two years.

On the evening of September 26, 2017, 28-year-old Loujain al-Hathloul sat at home in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia,eyeing her smartphone. A stream of notifications cascaded down the screen as her social media feeds eruptedwith messages of shock, joy, and speculation. Moments before, an ordinary Tuesday had turned historic: King Salman al-Saud took to state-run television to issue a stunning royal decree: Saudi women, at long last, would be granted the right to drive.

On a Monday morning in late September, I arrived at a house in a gated subdivision in Alabama and asked for James F. Cooper, a retired agent with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. A tall, sturdy man in his 70s came to the door a few minutes later. His white hair was in a slightly overgrown crew cut; he wore athletic clothes and navy blue Crocs. “What can I do for you?” he asked, stepping outside.

Rudy Giuliani has become a controversial figure in this year’s election —in the Brazilian state of Amazonas. With his eyes on reelection this Sunday, governor Amazonino Mendes signed a controversial $1.6 million consultancy contract with Giuliani Security & Safety(GSS). Mendes is prominently touting the deal in his campaign, promising it will “revolutionize” the state’s grim security predicament.

I believe in the presumption of innocence. As an American, a lawyer, and a black woman, I believe it is perhaps the most important principle in our criminal justice system — a last bulwark against the structural momentum that incentivizes convictions over justice and minimizes the value of some lives under the pretext of protecting others. The presumption of innocence is, in fact, the fundamental project of Black Lives Matter.

From the moment Arizona sex crimes prosecutor Rachel Mitchell was chosen by Republicans to question Christine Blasey Ford before the Senate Judiciary Committee, colleagues were quick to describe her as fair and trustworthy — an attorney who shuns controversy. “Rachel doesn’t seek attention as a lawyer,” her former supervisor Cindi Nannetti told the Arizona Republic. “She has excellent judgment. She demands thorough investigation by police officers.

The marriage between capitalism and conservatism has been a strange one. While conservative parties around the world differ widely in their composition and specific policy proposals, conservatism as an ideology can broadly be described as a defense of the established order. Social stability, the maintenance of tradition, and a hierarchical view of society tend to be consistent aspects of any conservative creed.

The new argument from Republicans looking to confirm Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh –in spite of Christine Blasey Ford’s sexual assault claims — is that he should be judged by the same standard extended to criminal defendants. Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona cited “due process” as the reason he would vote for Kavanaugh last week (before protesters cornered him in a Senate elevator), and Sen.

Oswaldo joined the Salvadoran gang Barrio 18 when he was 14 years old. By the time he was in his early 20s, he wanted out — and luckily, gang leaders gave him permission to leave. But they warned him: “No one will offer you a hand out there like the gang has.” For a long while, that was true. For Oswaldo, his gang clique was his adopted family. They had his back, and they found food and shelter for him and his family.

Prisons are reminiscentof Tolstoy’s famous observation about unhappy families: Each “is unhappy in its own way,” though there are some common features — for prisons, the grim and stifling recognition that someone else has total authority over your life. My wife Valeria and I have just visited a prison to see arguably the most prominent political prisoner of today, a person of unusual significance in contemporary global politics. By the standards of U.S.

Comments submitted to a top banking regulator supporting a 2015 merger between OneWest Bank and CIT Bank were attributed to people who never sent them, according to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and reviewed by The Intercept. The fake comments appear to be tied directly to Joseph Otting, the head of the regulatory agency himself.