Fearless, Adversarial Journalism – Spoken Edition

It was just before sunrise, and John was cruising down a near-empty Dallas highway when a speeding car rear-ended him at over 65 miles per hour. His body lunged forward, but in the moment, he didn’t think he was seriously hurt; with his adrenaline pumping, John just felt a bit “shaken up.

Even before Benjamin Netanyahu locked him in a warm embrace, Jared Kushner began his effort to broker peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians by making it clear that he completely accepts Israel’s vision of itself as an innocent victim. That’s because Kushner started his 15-hour trip to the Middle East on Wednesday by mourning with the family of an Israeli police officer, Hadas Malka, who was killed by a Palestinian assailant in East Jerusalem on Friday.

Apparently, martyrdom numbers among the responsibilities of the head of the Organization of American states. On Saturday, OAS Secretary General Luis Amalgro, a longtime critic of Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro, said that he would resign “in exchange for freedom in Venezuela.” “I will resign from the General Secretariat the day that free, fair, and transparent elections are held without impediments,” the former Uruguayanforeign minister pledged.

“There has been far too much tolerance of extremism,” declaimed Theresa May, standing outside Downing Street on Monday morning, “… and that means extremism of any kind, including Islamophobia.” The British prime minister was speaking in the aftermath of a brutal terror attack near a London mosque in which a man drove a van into a group of Muslim worshippers. The alleged attacker, according to eyewitnesses, shouted: “I want to kill all Muslims.

The Democratic Party is at its lowest ebb in the memory of everyone nowalive. It’s lost the White House and both houses of Congress. On the state level it’s weaker than at any timesince 1920. And so far in 2017 Democrats have gone 0 for 4 in special elections to replace Republican members of Congress who joined the Trump administration.

Twenty-five years after they were convicted of a crime that never happened, Fran and Dan Keller were formally exonerated on June 20 in Austin, Texas. The couple’s prosecution in 1992 was part of a wave of cases across the country amid an episode of mass hysteria known as the Satanic Panic, when accusations flew that the childcare industry had been infiltrated by bands of Satanists hell-bent on brainwashing and sexually abusing young children.

Earlier this month, the Pentagon announced the results of an internal review into a U.S. drone attack on a mosque in a village in Syria. There had been allegations that at least 38 people, all of them civilians, had been killed in the March 16 attack, but the Pentagon review upheld the Defense Department’s initial statement that it had targeted an Al Qaeda meeting. Only one person — “small in stature” — may have been a child who was killed, the review found.

By the time law enforcement officers began evicting residents of the Oceti Sakowin Dakota Access Pipeline resistance camp near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation on February 22, the brutal North Dakota winter had already driven away most of the pipeline opponents. With protesters’ numbers dwindling, along with nationwide attention to their cause, it would have been a natural time for the private security company in charge of monitoring the pipeline to head home as well.

After months of employing military-style counterinsurgency tactics to subvert opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota, Iowa, Illinois, and South Dakota, the private security firm TigerSwan is monitoring resistance to another project — the controversial Mariner East 2 pipeline. Like DAPL, Mariner East 2 is owned by Energy Transfer Partners.

How do military leaders persuade their soldiers to fight an insane war? Here’s one way. The setting is a bitter outpost of the American war in Afghanistan. The years-long nightmare has no prospect of ending so long as American troops stay in a country that has a nearly unblemished record of grinding foreign armies to ashes. A bullish general is trying to generate a dose of enthusiasm in the hearts and minds of his unenthusiastic men.

Even the harshest critics of the late Syrian President Hafez al-Assad should appreciate him for his treatment of Richard Nixon’s vainglorious secretary of state, Henry Kissinger. When Kissinger flew into Damascus on the evening of February 26, 1974, Assad made him wait for hours while he hosted dinner for Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. Only after midnight did he grant the American an audience.

Up until the 2016 election, Brandi Calvert, a real estate agent in Wichita, Kansas, hadn’t gotten involved in national politics. She dutifully voted in presidential cycles, and had liberal leanings, but wasn’t affiliated with either party. “I’ve always been very involved in [my son’s] school, a small-town school right outside of Wichita — did a lot of organizing for class field trips or parties, but nothing political up until the election,” she said.

A persistent andtoxic industrial chemical known as GenX has been detected in the drinking water in Wilmington, North Carolina, and in surface waters in Ohio and West Virginia. DuPont introduced GenX in 2009 to replacePFOA, a compound it used to manufacture Teflon and coatings for stain-resistant carpeting, waterproof clothing, and many other consumer products.

A three-day showdown in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert between Border Patrol agents and a humanitarian group, which culminated in a raid and the arrests of four undocumented immigrants, has aid workers raising questions about government surveillance and operational practices.

When Mary Shields was first sent to prison, her daughter was too young to understand why their phone calls wouldcut off mid-conversation and why she wouldnot hear from her mother again for days. Shields was amongthe many incarcerated people who had their contact with loved ones curtailed by the high rates for making prison phone calls. During her 21 years in a California state prison, she spoke with her family for 15 minutes twice a month. Each call cost $15.