Fearless, Adversarial Journalism – Spoken Edition

Thirty-six-year-old Hugo Adrian Palazón is a cartonero, or recycler, from a poor neighborhood of Buenos Aires, Argentina. He supports his wife and five children by collecting cardboard boxes, tin cans, and plastic bottles on the city streets. Or at least he did, until he lost one of his eyes. On December 18, 2017, thousands marched in Buenos Aires against a controversial pension reform that unions said would slash benefits and hurt retirees.

The town of Banff on the northeastern coast of Scotland is a peaceful place, with just 4,000 residents and a picturesque bay that flows into the open sea. Fifty miles from the nearest big city, the air is fresh and the pace of life is slow. But for one young man, the town’s seaside location offered no contentment. He was stockpiling weapons and planning an act of terrorism.

When Karen Thorburn checked messages on her home answering machine on a Wednesday evening in early April, one of them was not like the others. It was a groggy-sounding voice, leaving a short but to-the-point message for her husband, Andy, who is running for Congress in California’s 39th District. “Hi Andy. It’s Gil Cisneros. I’m gonna go negative on you,” the man said, before going silent for an awkward four secondsand hanging up.

It has been a mere six months since a U.S.-led coalition drove the Islamic State from its self-declared capital of Raqqa, Syria. As the offensive drew to a close in October 2017, news cycles around the world ran triumphant reports of the Islamic State’s humiliation, touting the victory as a final blow to the waning, would-be caliphate.

One of themost outrageous acts of Barack Obama’s presidency was his failureto veto the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2012. Thefiscal year 2012 NDAA included provisionsthat appeared to bothcodify and expand a power the executive branch had previously claimed to possess —namely, the power to hold individuals, including U.S.

Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif.,becamethe latest lawmaker to swear off all donations from corporate political action committees, telling a radio host in mid-April that she made the move after being asked about it at a town hall by a constituent. Harris joins five other senators who havevowed not to take corporate PAC contributions: Sens. Cory Booker, D-N.J.; Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.; Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.; Maria Cantwell, D-Wash.; and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.

From the momentScott Warren was arrested by Border Patrol agents on a remote property just north of the Mexican border, in January this year, there were questions. The 35-year-old college instructor, with a doctorate in geography and a history of academic and humanitarian work along the border, was found in a building known locally as “the Barn,” in the company of two young undocumented men from Mexico.

The Trump era has been breathing new life into often dormant local politics —and the president’s crackdown on immigrants, in particular, has made resistance to federal immigration enforcement a central issue in some municipal elections. As the increasingly aggressive tactics of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have come under scrutiny, the question of whether local police should help ICE deport people has taken on new importance in local races.

From the beginning of the Trump administration, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has championed the notion that the nation’s largest city is also a sanctuary — a place where a majority of undocumented immigrants need not fear that a minor interaction with law enforcementwould set them on a path to deportation. While the rhetoric of the city’s liberal mayor may make sense politically, letters recently sent from the New York office of U.S.

When a federal judge dismissed the indictment against cattle rancher Cliven Bundy earlier this year due to what she described as “outrageous” misconduct by Nevada prosecutors, she repeatedly referred to similar wrongdoing in a case from a decade earlier. In that older case, an appeals court delivered an incredibly rare ruling: The prosecutorial misconduct was so severethe court threw out dozens of criminal charges and barred the government from filing new ones.

Sacramento, California, has been all over the news for the past month, since police shot and killed an unarmed black man, 22-year-old Stephon Clark, in the backyard of his own home on March 18. An independent autopsy conducted at the family’s request showed that Clark was shot six times in the back, according to the Los Angeles Times.

In his new book, James Comey describes his deep admiration for Martin Luther King Jr. and decries the FBI’s treatment of him as “a dark chapter in the Bureau’s history.” Shortly after he became FBI director in 2013, Comey instructed the entire workforce of the FBI to read King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” one of Comey’s favorite writings.

MSNBCweekend host Joy Ann Reid apologized last Decemberfor a series of homophobic blog posts she wrote from 2007 to 2009 about then-closeted-Governor Charlie Crist of Florida, whom she repeatedly mocked as “Miss Charlie” andridiculedwith ugly anti-gay stereotypes.

The bulldozer that accidentally triggered an island-wide blackoutin Puerto Rico last week was operated by D. Grimm Inc., a company that reports up to the Oklahoma-based firm Mammoth Energy Services. The same subcontractor was blamed for another blackouttwo weeks agothat affected 870,000 homes. Attempting to repair a downed wire on Wednesday, a bulldozer got too close to a live, high-voltage line, triggering a chain reaction that left most of the island’s 3.

By now, it is well known that Donald Trump wants to jail reporters in order to force them to reveal their sources. “They spend a couple of days in jail, make a new friend, and they are ready to talk,” Trump told former FBI Director James Comey, according to a memo Comey wrote after a conversation between the two men in February 2017.