Fearless, Adversarial Journalism – Spoken Edition

Purdue Pharma, the maker of Oxycontin, revolutionized the opioid industry through aggressive marketing tactics that encouraged the widespread use of prescription painkillers. That part, by now, is well known, as an out-of-control opioid epidemic ravages a generation of young people with such potency that it has dragged down the overall life expectancy of the American people.

Patrick Ryan, acongressional candidate from New York, isleaning on his experience as a small business entrepreneurto establish his readiness for office, but he has curiously failed to mention the business he used to work in: domestic surveillance.

A little more than a year ago, on January 29, 2017, Iona Craig was at the tail end of a month-long reporting trip to Yemen. On that day, special operators from the U.S. Navy’s SEAL Team 6 launched a surprise raid in a remote part of Yemen, apparently trying to capture or kill an Al Qaeda leader. This was the first covert assault of the Trump era, and the White House, which was not challengedin the U.S. media, hailed it as “highly successful.” Except it wasn’t.

Puerto Rico, in the midst of the chaos and instability following Hurricane Maria, is moving quickly forward with plans to institute a wide swath of education reforms, with the help of the aggressively ideological federal education department, helmed by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

EMILY’s List is dumping big money into an upcoming Democratic primary in Texas’s 7th Congressional District, pitting the women’s group against a pro-choice woman who was, in the months after the election of Donald Trump, a face of the resistance. Laura Moser, as creator of the popular text-messaging program Daily Action, gave hundreds of thousands of despondent progressives a single political action to take each day.

For a moment, it seemed the hackers had slipped up and exposed their identities. It was the summer of 2013, and European investigators were looking into an unprecedented breach of Belgium’s telecommunications infrastructure. They believed they were on the trail of the people responsible. But it would soon become clear that they were chasing ghosts – fake names that had been invented by British spies.

During the first weekend of February, Baltimore resident Ralph Moore joined hundreds of others outside in the freezing cold with a simple request: that nobody kill anybody. Moore is the vice president of By Peaceful Means, a nonprofit that works with at-risk youth to teach them about conflict resolution. “People in Baltimore are angry,” he told The Intercept, referring to the city’s spike in violent crime. “I grew up in West Baltimore.

Late in the morning of October 4last year, a convoy of Nigerien and American special forces soldiers in eight vehicles left the village of Tongo Tongo. As they made their way between mud-brick houses with thatched roofs, they were attacked from one side by dozens of militants, if not hundreds. Outnumbered and outgunned, the Nigeriens and Americans fled, some on foot, running for cover behind trees and clusters of millet, their boots caked in the light brown earth.

Tucked quietly into the most recent congressional measure to keep the government open was the most sweeping and ambitious piece of child welfare legislation passed in at least a decade. It’s an attempt to reshape the entrenched foster care system as a raging opioid epidemic swells the population of children in need. The measure overcame the opposition of group homes who pocket thousand of dollars per month for each child warehoused in their custody.

The United States intelligence community has been conducting a top-secret operation to recover stolen classified U.S. government documents from Russian operatives, according to sources familiar with the matter. The operation has also inadvertently yielded a cache of documents purporting to relate to Donald Trump and Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

For 10 years, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s investigative office has worked to keep its internal handbook out of American courts. The handbook could have been used in court to show how ICE’s push to lead on denaturalization cases stands in contrast to the language of federal law governing the process, an immigration lawyer said.

Pap Koudjo is a satirical journalist from Togo, who founded and ran his own magazine that was critical of the oppressive 50-year rule of the government in the West African nation. He was threatened several times for his work and was once attacked in the street by a member of the military. He fled to the United States and applied for asylum two years ago, hoping to eventually bring his family to safety here.

On a Thursday afternoon in November 2015, a light snow was falling outside the windows of the Ecuadorian embassy in London, despite the relatively warm weather, and Julian Assange was inside, sitting at his computer and pondering the upcoming 2016 presidential election in the United States.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is unconstitutionally using its power to suppress political dissent by targeting outspoken immigration activists for surveillance and deportation, according to allegations in a federal lawsuit filedon Fridayby immigration rights groups. “Defendants have investigated, surveilled, harassed, raided, arrested, detained, and even deported these activists in order to silence them,” the complaint alleges.

Stacey Abrams is a progressive: just ask her. “I believe in shared power. I believe in a sacred power. I believe in a people power — the willpower of progressives to put real progressives in the every seat. Especially in the South,” the Atlanta gubernatorial candidate said in August, giving the keynote address at the left-leaning NetRoots Nation conference in Atlanta. She further burnished her progressive credentials by naming virtually every national progressive cause.