Fearless, Adversarial Journalism – Spoken Edition

The Oklahoma Death Penalty Review Commission after more than a yearof work has recommended that a moratorium on carrying out capital punishment in the state be continued indefinitely. “It is undeniable that innocent people have been sentenced to death in Oklahoma,” the report concludes. The bipartisan commission’s findings span nearly 300 pages, covering every stage of the state’s death penalty system.

Growing up in Toledo, Ohio, Gina Grimm always wondered who her biological parents were. “You know, you go to the supermarket and think, ‘That lady kinda has my nose.’ Or, you know, ‘that man kinda has a resemblance to my face.’” Her adoptive parents never discouraged her from acting on her curiosity. “I made very clear since I was young that eventually one day I would find them,” she says.

Before the final votes were counted in the first round of France’s presidential election on Sunday, projections made it clear that the final round run-off in two weeks will feature the pro-European centrist Emmanuel Macron against the anti-European candidate of the far-right, Marine Le Pen. #Presidentielle2017 ???????? – @EmmanuelMacron en tête avec 23,7% et @MLP_officiel, 21,7% s’affronteront au second tour https://t.co/SHi2kHjW70 pic.twitter.

Boston Police Capt. Robert Ciccolo was one of the first responders to the Boston Marathon bombings. When his 23-year-old son, Alexander, who had converted to Islam and given himself the name Ali Al Amriki, began telling his father he was “not afraid to die for the cause,” Ciccolo became alarmed. Alexander hada history of mental illness, and his interest in Islam had become anobsession. In October 2014, Ciccolocontacted the FBI about his son.

Three years after the 9/11 attacks, a frustrated NSA employee complained that Osama bin Laden was alive and well, and yet the surveillance agency still had no automated way to search the Arabic language PDFs it had intercepted. This is just one of many complaints and observations included in SIDtoday, the internal newsletter of the NSA’s signals intelligence division.

When I published “The Shock Doctrine” a decade ago, a few people told me that it was missing a key chapter in the evolution of the tactic I was reporting on. That tactic involved using periods of crisis to impose a radical pro-corporate agenda. They said that in the United States that story doesn’t start with Reagan in the 1980s, as I had told it, but rather in New York City in the mid-1970s.

It began as routinely as any other passenger flight. At gate 15 of New York City’s JFK Airport, more than 200 men, women, and children stood in line as they waited to board a Boeing 747. They were on their way to Seoul, South Korea’s capital city. But none would ever make it to their destination. About 14 hours after its departure, the plane was cruising at around 35,000 feet not far from the north of Japan when it was shot out of the sky.

Since the 9/11 attacks, at least 30 people convicted ofinternational terrorism-related offenses have become informants and/or cooperating witnesses in exchange for leniency in sentencing, according to an analysis by The Intercept of federal terrorism prosecutions. Using the threat of criminal prosecution to encourage someone to cooperate is a well-worn tactic that long predates the war on terror.

Damien Echols neverplanned to come back to Arkansas. “These days, I try to look forward,” he wrote in his 2012 memoir, Life After Death.“I’m tired of looking back.” After spending half his life on Arkansas’s death row – he was finally released in 2011 – Echols was “sick to death” of his claim to fame as one of the West Memphis Three. “It’s a title I’d prefer never to hear again,” he wrote.

President Trump’s cruise missile strike against Syria was celebrated by establishment politicians and media, their glee at striking a blow against Bashar al-Assad swamping any rational discussion of what happens next. Assad is undoubtedly themost despicable war criminal in power today. His forces have ruthlessly starved and bombed hundreds of thousands of his own people, and tortured and executed thousands more.

Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, suggested in an interview broadcast on Thursday that social media evidence of a deadly chemical weapons attack on a rebel-held town in northern Syria last week was fake. The images that shocked the world, he said, were most likely of “a play,” staged by Islamist rebels affiliated with both Al Qaeda and the United States.

A high-level adviser and operative for the 2016 Sanders campaign was Vitali Shkliarov, a Soviet-born citizen of Belarus. Shkliarov, who had previously worked on the 2012 Obama re-election campaign and for several other successful Democratic Party campaigns, has also become increasingly in demand as a political adviser and campaign manager in Russia, working for liberal candidates in opposition to President Vladimir Putin.

Prime Minister Theresa May, who was actually against Brexit before she was for it, made another dramatic U-turn on Tuesday, declaring that Britain needs to elect a new Parliament in June, three years ahead of schedule, despite her clear promise not to call an election when she campaigned to succeed David Cameron last year. June 30, 2016 – 'There should be no general election until 2020' – watch Theresa May's election U-turn #GE2017 pic.twitter.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, an insurgent left-wing candidate for France’s presidency, is surging. His candidacy, organized under the newly-established party LaFrance Insoumise (“Unsubmissive France”) has gonefrom a quixotic bid to a viable challenge in just a few months.

Few things transform us into frustrated baboons like navigating Turbotax each year. It’s incredible any computers physically survive April. First there’s the maddening fact, when all is said and done, that the U.S. has something approaching a flat tax system. It’s true that, as right-wing think tanks constantly bleat, the top 1 percent pay a much higher rate than everyone else in federal income tax.