Fearless, Adversarial Journalism – Spoken Edition

“A warm friendship connects the Ethiopian and American people,” U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced earlier this year. “We remain committed to working with Ethiopia to foster liberty, democracy, economic growth, protection of human rights, and the rule of law.” Indeed, the website for the U.S. Embassy in Ethiopia is marked by press releases touting U.S. aid for farmers and support for public health infrastructure in that East African nation.

NSA agents successfully targeted “the entire business chain” connecting foreign cafes to the internet, bragged about an “all-out effort” to spy on liberated Iraq, and began systematically trying to break into virtual private networks, according to a set of internal agency news reports dating to the first half of 2005.

On a balmy day in February, Jedidiah Brown drove onto a busy expressway in the heart of Chicago, firearm in tow, with the intention of killing himself. The South Side activist, now 30 years old, sat in his parked car holding the gun to his head while he broadcast over Facebook Live. He cited the death of a family member and living in a city rocked by police violence and political corruption as reasons for the episode.

On a sweltering July afternoon, Houston police officer Jesus Robles slowed his squad car as he passed a pushcart vendor hawking popsicles called paletas in a park named after the father of Mexican independence. “This is the heart of Magnolia,” he explained, using an affectionate term for the longtime immigrant community served by the Houston Police Department’s Eastside Division.

The Democratic Socialists of Americahave a big question to answer — a 24,000-person strong question. According to a recent announcement, that’s how many members the group claims to have, thanks in part to the interest in socialism prompted by the insurgent presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders and as a reaction to theelection of a far-right president in Donald Trump.

It was supposed to be a moment of celebration and reflection for one of those too rare occurrences in the Mideast — popular protests by Palestinians had stymied the imposition of a new facet of Israel’s 50-year-long occupation. Instead, even after Israel backed down on the changes it had imposed at the Al Aqsa Mosque compound, the situation in Jerusalem continued to spiral into familiar scenes of security forces chasing scrambling demonstrators.

Just over a year ago, in Brasília, one of the most nauseating and humiliating political spectacles I’ve ever seen took place over nine hours.

The Intercept Brasil turns one year old today. On our launch date of August 2 of last year, we explainedour purposes and objectives by observingthat “there is a hunger among Brazilians for alternative forms of reporting.

The President’s Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis called on President Trump Monday to declare a public health emergency over the epidemic of overdose deaths nationwide. This urgency came in an interim report by the commission that was itself more than a month late. Per Trump’s executive order establishing the commission, interim recommendations were due June 27, with a final report October 1.

An article published on July 14 by Mother Jones produced widespread anger. The piece, written by Kevin Drum, began by discussing newly published research from two political science professors on public perceptions of homeless people. Drumaddressed the seemingly contradictory findings that people generally support aid to the homeless but also favor banning panhandling and sleeping in public.

Before the Affordable Care Act had even been signed into law, congressional Republicans were promising to repeal it. Those solemn vows continued throughout the 2010 midterms, helping Republicans take back the House in the tea party wave. They used that position of power to pass repeal after repeal after repeal — and to point at the Democratic-controlled Senate as an obstacle to be overcome. In 2014 they finally took the upper chamber back.

The media is now filled with headlines about North Korea’s missile test on Friday, which demonstrated that its ICBMs may be able to reach the continental U.S. What isn’tmentioned in any of these stories ishow we got to this point — in particular, what Dan Coats, President Donald Trump’s Director of National Security,explained last weekat the Aspen Security Forum. North Korea’s 33-year-old dictator Kim Jong-un is not crazy, said Coats.

The United Arab Emirateshasone of the most repressivegovernments in the world. The Gulf dictatorshipbrutallycracks downon internal dissent and enablesabusive conditions for its massive migrant labor force. It also playsa key rolein the bloodywarin Yemen,running a network of torture prisons in the “liberated” parts of the country.

The Justice Department is seeking to impose extreme secrecy rules in the trial of alleged Intercept source and whistleblower Reality Winner that could prevent her defense team from citing countless publicly available news articles in appearances before the court — and even prevent Winner herself from seeing evidence relevant to her defense.

A rare role reversal played out in Washington on Thursday night, as the Senate took a break from debating repeal of the Affordable Care Act to pass a bipartisan bill that will serve to alienate U.S. allies and isolate America. That job, of course, is typically reserved for President Trump, but Congress showed decisively that the administration doesn’t have a monopoly on the practice, voting 98-2 to apply new sanctions to Russia, Iran, and for good measure, North Korea, too.