Fearless, Adversarial Journalism – Spoken Edition

As Circuit Court Judge Evelyn Baker stared down at Bobby Bostic in her St. Louis courtroom, she was filled with disgust. It was the winter of 1997. Bostic had been found guilty of committing a series of armed robberies in his own neighborhood when he was only 16. His victims had come to his side of townin a spirit of giving, carryingdonations for Christmas. Bosticand his 18-year-old friend Donald Hutson had held them up at gunpoint.

One day last spring, Dennis was walking to his 10th-grade English class at Hempstead High School on Long Island when he felt someone run up behind him. Three boys he had seen around school but didn’t know started shouting at him.

In January 2017, the FBI began interviewing Rob Porter’s former romantic partners, part of the standard process for granting security clearance to high-level White House aides. On the day of her scheduled interview with the FBI, Porter’s former wife Colbie Holderness said her husband was approached by a friend of Porter’s.

At least six progressive insurgents managed to out-raise their establishment Democratic opponents in House races in the final quarter of 2017, a stunning development that threatens to upend the way the party goes about selecting candidates. The fundraising upsets reflect a burst of progressive energy that is also powering Democrats more broadly. Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-Texas, challenging Ted Cruz, once again out-raised the Texas senator.

Karl Marx used to say that unemployed people were capitalism’s reserve army. Though he didn’t invent the term, he meant that capitalism drew its strength from this army, standing at the ready to take a worker’s job if the current one didn’t like it. If unemployment levels are high enough, bosses can pay lower wages and treat workers poorly. If one of them quits, there are plenty more in reserve.

On December 13, I entered the Cook County Courthouse in Chicago prepared to be taken into custody and jailed for contempt. At issue was a subpoena demanding I answer questions about the whistleblower whose tip prompted me to investigate the fatal 2014 police shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald.

As the FBI conducted a background check on an incoming senior White House official last year, the bureau learned of the man’s history of domestic abuse. Rob Porter, a top aide to President Donald Trump, physically assaulted both of his previous wives, according to the two women.

Iowa Republican Steve King is a notorious bigot who has comfortably served in Congress since 2003, but a surprising challenger in the historically Republican district is proving he may have what it takes to unseat King in November. Former professional baseball player J.D. Scholten is a progressive who is one of four Democrats who have tossed their hats in the ring of Iowa’s 4th District.

On a cold day in January, Lewis Conway Jr. walked around the apartment complex in Austin, Texas, where he stabbed a man nearly 27 years ago. He spent two decades under the supervision of the state’s correctional system as punishment. He doesn’t shy away from talking about any of it. “It was transformational,” he says. In part, it is Conway’s experience inside the criminal justice machine that is motivating his most recent endeavor: running for public office.

To all appearances, Ahmad Sheikhzadeh led the life of a typical New York academic. A 62-year-old Columbia University Ph.D., he lived alone in a small West Village rental, practiced yoga, attended lectures with friends, and conducted research at New York University’s labyrinthine Bobst Library.

Virtually every headline about the Puerto Rican government’s newly released fiscal plan has focused on its finding that the island won’t be able to pay back the vast majority of funds owed to its creditors, many of them American-based hedge and mutual funds. Even in the new plan’s rosy projections for economic growth, the island would only be able to return a small fraction of its at least $74 billion in municipal debt in the next 30 years.

In the early-morning hours of December 6, a wildfire began spreading through the hills surrounding Bel Air, California, eventually blazing through the Santa Monica Mountains along the side of the 405 freeway and damaging parts of a vineyard owned by Rupert Murdoch. Although no lives were lost, six homes in one of the wealthiest communities in the U.S. were incinerated. Six days later, the Los Angeles Fire Department announced it had determined the cause.

Lawmakers in Ohio and Iowa are considering bills that would create new penalties for people who attempt to disrupt the operations of “critical infrastructure” such as pipelines. The bills make the states the latest of at least eight to propose legislation aimed at oil and gas industry protesters since Donald Trump’s election.

It was the year of the tech backlash. Throughout 2017, Facebook, Google, and Twitter were hauled before Congress to answer for their roles in election hacking. More and more prominent political, business, and media figures warned of the growing power of the technology giants, and some offered solutionsrarely uttered in this country: breaking the companies up and/or turning them into public utilities. At Davos last week, Salesforce.

With more than a million people headed to the Twin Cities over the next 10 days for the Super Bowl, local corporations, St. Paul school district officials, and civic leaders are bracing for what may be a public relations nightmare: the first teachers strike in St. Paul in over 70 years. The St. Paul Federation of Teachers, nine months into its contract negotiation, authorized a strike vote for January 31.