Fearless, Adversarial Journalism – Spoken Edition

McDonald’s workers, pushing for higher wages and an end to workplace abuses, picketed Thursday outside franchises across the country. In an unusual twist, they were joined by volunteers from the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders. It was the campaign’s second bout of activist intervention in as many weeks, as campaign supporters had previously joined a picket line with University of California workers locked in negotiations with their bosses.

As the sun began to set over the prayer vigil outside Tennessee’s Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, where 68-year-old Don Johnson was about to die, another execution was underway some 400 miles south of Nashville. “I would like to thank Jesus for everything he’s done for me,” Michael Brandon Samra said as he lay on the gurney in Atmore, Alabama. “I want to thank Jesus for shedding his blood for my sins. Thank you for your grace, Jesus. Amen.

For those who lived through it, the Teaneck Democratic Municipal Committee meeting on May 8, 2017, is seared into their memories. Josh Gottheimer never wanted to be there in the first place. The New Jersey Democratic congressman hated town halls, but across the country, activists fired up in the wake of Donald Trump’s election were demanding their representatives hold them.

House Ways and Means Committee Chair Richard Neal, D-Mass., waited until April 3, months after Democrats regained the chamber, to formally seek President Donald Trump’s tax returns. As Neal resisted pressure from his colleagues to pull the trigger earlier, he was working with Republicans on finishing a retirement security bill that had been several years in the making.

Ellen Gallagher was stunned when she first learned that immigrants detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement were sometimes placed in isolation with no human contact for 22 hours a day. It was February 2014, only a few months into her stint as a policy adviser at the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, where she thought she’d be empowered to ensure that the department did not violate the rights of those who came into its crosshairs.

Michael Thompson is serving a 40- to 60-year sentence in Muskegon Correctional Facility in Michigan. He’s already spent a quarter of a century in prison. His father, mother, and his only son have died in the time he’s been behind bars. His mom’s final wish — which she told his nephew, Sheldon Neeley — was that Thompson wouldn’t die in prison. He’s 68. He felt ashamed at his mother’s funeral because he had to wear handcuffs.

Among the mega-corporations that surveil you, your cellphone carrier has always been one of the keenest monitors, in constant contact with the one small device you keep on you at almost every moment. A confidential Facebook document reviewed by The Intercept shows that the social network courts carriers, along with phone makers — some 100 different companies in 50 countries — by offering the use of even more surveillance data, pulled straight from your smartphone by Facebook itself.

When Stephen Noble Smith’s campaign sought topresent its 62-page finance filings to the West Virginia secretary of state, something went wrong.During the online submission process, the software broke down. “They had to call in the people who actually created the software because the file was too big to load,” said Smith. The breakdown is emblematic of what is different about Smith’s campaign for the Democratic nomination to be West Virginia’s governor.

Dulce Rivera lived for the one hour a day she was allowed outside, to pace alone on a patch of concrete encasedinmetal fencing. They called it “the yard,” but it was really a metal cage. Still, it was far better than the misery she endured the other 23 hours a day, locked alone in a cell with no one to talk to and nothing to distract her from her increasingly dark thoughts. Rivera, a 36-year-old transgender woman from Honduras and a longtime U.S. resident, was detained by U.S.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel leaves office Monday after two terms, and America mightbegin seeing a lot more of him after that. He’s already been shopping around for a cable news gig, meeting with executives at CNN and MSNBC, and is represented by his brother Ari’s talent agency. He’s been making the rounds of cable shows, dispensing advice about how Democrats need to focus on winning over Donald Trump’s base.

When first confronted with evidence that it was collaborating with Mexican law enforcement in a sweeping intelligence-gathering operation targeting journalists, activists and attorneys along the U.S.-Mexico divide, Customs and Border Protection was silent. When still more evidence emerged, in the form of documents leaked by a Department of Homeland Security whistleblower, the agency dismissed the significance of the revelations as routine law enforcement work.

Five states are pushing back against the latest Republican-led assault to weaken unions across the country, which targets in-home caregivers who work with Medicaid beneficiaries. On Monday, attorneys general representing California, Connecticut, Oregon, Massachusetts, and Washington filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration challenginga new rule, announced earlier this month, that impedes home care workers from paying union dues through their Medicaid-funded paychecks.

Sweden’s Prosecution Authority reopened an investigation of Julian Assange for rape on Monday, and will seek his extradition from Britain, the country’s deputy director of public prosecution, Eva-Marie Persson, told reporters in Stockholm. “On 20 August 2010, a police report was made regarding a suspected rape in Enköping, Sweden on 17 August 2010.

Abdikadir Mohamed felt nervous as he approached the customs desk at John F. Kennedy Airport on December 13, 2017. The previous summer he had married his wife, Malyuun, in a ceremony held in South Africa, and now he was on his way to Ohio, where she lived. Malyuun was pregnant with their second child, and Mohamed was anxious to be with her. He stepped to the counter clutching the one-year permanent residency document he’d been granted by the U.S. embassy in Johannesburg a few months earlier.

From the start,the murder that William Bonham was charged withlooked like a case of self-defense. Bonhamwas arrested for the stabbing death of his friend Kent “Frenchy” Brouillette in December 2015. The whole thing had started several months earlier, when Bonham, a musician who played gigs in New Orleans’s French Quarter, had $25,000 worth of instruments and equipment stolen from his room in a tenement house where both he and Brouillette lived.