Fearless, Adversarial Journalism – Spoken Edition

Central Falls, in Providence County, Rhode Island, is home to 19,000 people living shoulder to shoulder on 1.2 square miles of hard New England earth. The majority of its residents are Latino: 72 percent speak a language other than English — mostly Spanish, but also Portuguese and French Creole. More thana third are foreign born and slightly less than that live below the poverty line.

When Guled Muhumed boarded his flight from San Antonio to El Paso, Texas, on Monday, he noticed something unusual. The 32-year-old Somali national and longtime U.S. resident was en route to his10th immigrant detention facility since Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested him on the streets of Rochester, Minnesota, on September 29, 2017, as he drove his 17-month-old daughter to day care.

The conservative approach to social programs has evolved in sophistication over the decades. With frontal assaults on Social Security and Medicaid having been badly beaten back, the GOP has repackagedits attempt to roll back these programs by putting recipients to work. Work requirements were the cornerstone of the 1996 welfare reform, and each subsequent assault on public benefits has used them to kick in the door. Want food stamps? Work. Want Medicaid? Work. Want disability? Work.

On March 5, as many as 500 antifascists converged on the campus of Michigan State University in East Lansing to protest a speech by white supremacist golden boy Richard Spencer. The protesters — including MSU students, campus workers, antifa organizers, and people from surrounding towns — outnumbered those who had come to hear Spencer speak by many orders of magnitude. White nationalists were also vastly outnumbered by cops.

The first time Noor Salman told her aunt about the abuse she’d suffered at the hands of her husband was also the first time she found herself free of him. It was June 2016, just five days after her husband, Omar Mateen, had walked into Pulse nightclub in Orlando and opened fire, killing 49 people and injuring manyothers before he died in a shootout with police. Salman and her aunt, Susan Adieh, had driven the 13 hours from Port St.

Though he has openly disparaged much of his agency’s mission, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt has remained steadfastly enthusiastic about Superfund, the federal program responsible for cleaning up some of the country’s most contaminated industrial sites.

Since Hurricane Maria slammed into Puerto Rico six months ago, dealing a new blow to an island already crippled by devastating austerity measures, some 200,000 residents have moved to the U.S. mainland. They were encouraged to do so by government officials who —as The Intercept has reported —seem to want to rebuild Puerto Rico “with many fewer Puerto Ricans.

Last December, the Mexican governmentenacted a new law that empoweredits military to act domestically against “internal security threats,” cementing the role of the country’s armed forces in combatting crime and giving them expanded surveillance authorities. The law also allows the Mexican president to deploy troops for immediate actionagainstthose threats.

Late last month,roughly 80 immigrant men from Somalia, Kenya, and Sudan arrived at a remote, for-profit detention center in West Texas to await deportation. In the week that followed, the men were pepper-sprayed, beaten, threatened, taunted with racial slurs, and subjected to sexual abuse. The treatment they endured amounted to multiple violations of federal law and grave human rights abuses — and it all happened over the course of a single week.

Late one night in May 2009, Shannon Mouillesseaux, an American working for the United Nations Refugee Agency, awoke to a bang in her hotel room in Sri Lanka. A band of hooded, masked men in army uniforms kicked down her door, forced her to the ground, and proceeded to physically and sexually assault her so severely that she feared for her life. Trained in assisting populations in crisis, Mouillesseaux knew what to do in the aftermath of a sexual assault.

The Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity at the Department of Housing and Urban Development was designed to confront discrimination, segregation, and poverty. Instead, under the Trump administration, the agency is gearing up to confront a much strangerboogeyman: The emotional support snake. For media and lawmakers, the idea of pet owners selfishly and fraudulently exploiting legal accommodations for Americans with disabilities has proven irresistible.

In a sting operationtwo years ago, Seattle-area police infiltrated a group of men who patronized Korean-born sex workers and wrote about them for a website called The Review Board. The undercover cops recorded the group’s gatherings at local restaurants, during which the men discussed the attributes of the sex workers; “she’s as close to perfect as I think they get made,” one man was heard saying.

Democrats in Washington state this winter exploded onto the political scene. In November, an unabashed progressive, Manka Dhingra, won a special election that flipped control of the state Senate and unified control of government, uncorking pent-up legislation that had long been gathering energy.

Internet paranoiacs drawn to Bitcoin have long indulged fantasies of American spies subverting the booming, controversial digital currency.Increasingly popular among get-rich-quick speculators, Bitcoin started out as a high-minded project to make financial transactions public and mathematically verifiable —while also offering discretion.

For Jim Auld,it began at a house party. On August 9, 1971, while he and his friends drank pints of beer and danced to the Rolling Stones in their nationalist neighborhood of West Belfast, the government of Northern Ireland and the British Army began “Operation Demetrius.” Auld strolled back to his parents’ house around 3:30 a.m. and thought it was odd that the lights were still on. He found the door already open, and a man with a rifle waiting for him on the other side.