Fearless, Adversarial Journalism – Spoken Edition

A 26-year-oldorganizerin Chicago is mounting a primary challenge to Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill., who has been a member of Congress for 26 years. Robert Emmons, whose best friend, high school classmate, and freshman roommate was shot and killed in 2015, is making gun violence prevention a cornerstone of his campaign.

It’s hard to imagine things going much worse for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in 2019. As he preps for the election he has long hoped will make him the majority leader, his prized recruits across the country have spurned him. In Texas, Colorado, and Montana, his top choices have (so far) turned down Senate runs in exchange for presidential bids. In Georgia, Stacey Abrams eluded him, her eye still on the governor’s mansion (or possibly the vice presidency).

Defenders of the chemicals known as PFAS have seized upon an industry-funded study of cancer patients as evidence that the compounds used to make Teflon, firefighting foam, and many other products aren’t as dangerous as they seem. The study, which was funded by the Minnesota-based global conglomerate 3M and published in February 2018 in the journal Toxicological Sciences, exposed 49 terminal cancer patients to high doses of PFOA.

President Donald Trump speaks to members of the media before boarding Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 9, 2019. Photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg/Getty ImagesForget uranium enrichment: Has Iran mastered time travel? Last month, the Trump White House put out a typically Orwellian statement, chock-filled with lies, distortions, and half-truths about Iran and the 2015 nuclear deal.

As an Iranian Americanjournalist covering the Iran-U.S. relationship, Negar Mortazavi is accustomed to receiving vitriol on social media. Still, she found it unusual when she saw on Twitterthat someone had called her a “treasonous criminal” and “a spy and an enemy of the people.” The tweets got darker: “If the U.S. had laws of the Middle Ages like Iran, this mouthpiece of the corrupt regime would have been executed,” one read, in Farsi.

Prosecutors in Brazilhave launched what looks like a last-ditch effort to block President Jair Bolsonaro from nominating his son Eduardo to be the country’s next ambassador to the United States.

On a clear, blue day in late spring, Arizona Assistant Attorney General Myles Braccio stood before a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. It was just after 10 a.m. Braccio had a half-hour to salvage a 24-year-old death penalty conviction that had been overturned by a federal judge.

Two for-profit prison companies have lost major contracts in Denver over their work in immigrant detention, as backlash to President Donald Trump’s immigration policy continues to mount. The stunning $10.6 million rebuke to the two firms, CoreCivic and the GEO Group, was led by newly elected city council member Candi CdeBaca, who won in June on a radical platform backed by the Democratic Socialists of America.

On December 29, 2017, the night his daughter was born, Augusto left the hospital and rode his motorcycle to his home in Matagalpa, Nicaragua, to pick up a change of clothes for his wife. On his way back, he was stopped at a police checkpoint and taken into custody. Police officers questioned him for hours about his father, a former mayor and member of the opposition party to Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega.

In late 2010, Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire, and Zahra Hankir started a Google Doc titled “Mideast Reporters.” Bouazizi’s self-immolation, an act of protest against police corruption, would become the catalyst for anti-government protests across the Middle East and North Africa. Hankir, then a reporter at Bloomberg News, wanted to keep track of the journalists documenting that pivotal moment in the region’s history.

Before he was deported, Jimmy Aldaoud had never stepped foot in Iraq. Born in Greece to Iraqi refugee parents, he immigrated to the United States with his family via a refugee resettlement program 40 years ago, when he was just 15 months old. He considered himself American and knew hardly anything of Iraqi society.

Police keep watch outside Walmart near the scene of a mass shooting on Aug. 3, 2019 in El Paso, Texas. Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images The recent white supremacist mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, and the Justice Department’s new willingness to label this kind of attack domestic terrorism have prompted renewed calls for the creation of more powerful anti-terrorism laws to investigate and prosecute right-wing domestic extremists.

Influential corporate trade organizations and nonprofits spent $535 million on lobbying in 2017 and as much as another $675 million on unregulated efforts to influence public policy, according to a two-month investigation.

Author Marianne Williamson speaks during the second Democratic primary debate of the 2020 presidential campaign season, hosted by CNN at the Fox Theatre in Detroit on July 30, 2019. Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images Marianne Williamson has been a surprisinglyvaluable voice in the 2019 Democratic presidential debates. She’s been radical in the real meaning of the word, calling on America to treat not just our tangle of symptoms but the underlying diseases.

A principal goal of the Trump administration’s policy at the U.S.-Mexico border —and in Central America, considered of late only in relation to that border — has been to get other governments to handle the increase in migrants seeking to enter the United States. This means getting Mexico to send troops to its border with the U.S.; to enforce the system of “metering,” which limits the number of asylum-seekers who may approach a U.S.