Fearless, Adversarial Journalism – Spoken Edition

The messages arrived suddenly and then he went quiet. “My identity is leaked,” he said. “I am worried about my safety.” The Chinese dissident artist Badiucao had been busy preparing an exhibition in Hong Kong to celebrate Free Expression Week, a series of events organized by rights groups. His show was partly inspired by Google’s plan to build a censored search engine in China, and was set to include work that the artist had created skewering the U.S.

One year ago, the Queens Democratic machine, which has controlled the politics of the borough in one form or another for decades, was stunned by the surprise loss of longtime party boss Joe Crowley to 28-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The borg quickly reformed itself. Crowley was subsequently reelected chair of the county party, became a powerhouse lobbyist, and his Brooklyn-based protege, Rep.

The vans started coming on May 14, depositing their passengers into an alley by the Greyhound station in San Bernardino, California, and then taking off. The first night, the station’s small lobby quickly filled with migrants from Guatemala and elsewhere who had been abruptly dropped off there by the U.S. Border Patrol. The manager of the station ended up getting many of them tickets to Los Angeles that night, said Luis Suarez, of the Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice.

As a new counselor at Morrison Child and Family Services, Sarah DeYoreo would get to her office around 7 a.m. Though Morrison provides a range of services in Portland, including long-term foster care, the teens DeYoreo worked with presented unique challenges. Ranging in age from 15 to 17, they had crossed the border alone and undocumented. Most were from Central America and lacked a U.S.-based sponsor to take them in.

In a world altered by climate change, flood-prone communities are facing disaster piled on disaster, and the pathway of floodwaters is determined by the built environment. For decades, developers have built under assumptions about flooding that are now irrelevant due to climate change.

For nearly a year and a half, U.S. government prosecutors in Arizona have sought to make an example out of Scott Warren. The 36-year-old geographer and border-based humanitarian aid volunteer was arrested with two undocumented migrants on January 17, 2018, and accused of providing the men with food, water, and a place to sleep over three days.

One of the firstimagesin the opening episode of the new History Channel show “Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation” is a 2017 headline from the New York Times projected on a flickering screen: “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious UFO Program.

On the afternoon of April 19, 2018, a group of Texas Republicans received an email confirming their upcoming all-expenses-paid trips to Israel. An orientation packet filled with background on their destination “for reading on the flight,” the message said, was forthcoming. The May 2018 trip to Israel would not be Texas politicians’ first — Gov. Greg Abbott, for one, flew to Israel on casino magnate Sheldon Adelson’s private jet in 2016.

As Eric Alexander entered the Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola, he found himself transported back 25 years, to a place he had never wished to revisit. “All these things that I observed upon walking into prison for the first time as a teenager, I began to experience again in there,” he said. “The smell. The sound. It reminded me of what it was like. And I guess I had never thought about it since I came home. I made it my business not to think about it.

Earlier this month, the Trump administration announced a new rule barring home health care workers from paying union dues through their Medicaid-funded wages. The new Department of Health and Human Services rule, which will impact more than 800,000 workers and was immediately met with a legal challenge, followed years of planning by anti-union activists to promote such measures in states across the country, and, more recently, on the federal level.

People in the El Paso area were stunned to learn on Memorial Day that a new segment of border wall had just sprung up in their midst, seemingly out of nowhere. Though it is already hundreds of feet long and snakes up a high mountain, it was initiated secretly, in just a few days, on private property that for long has been so off-limits to the public that even reporters have feared going near. The massive, imposing barrier is planned to be about a half-mile long.

The political earthquake precipitated by the 2014 police murder of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald left a crater at the center of Chicago’s civic life. In the years since, that space has been the site of efforts to rebuild, amid the ruins of discredited institutions, a sound police accountability infrastructure. A key structural component of that ongoing project is the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, or COPA.

The problem had been brewing for nearly a decade, intelligence sources had warned, as the National Security Agency vacuumed up more and more surveillance information into computer systems at its Ford Meade, Maryland, headquarters: There just wasn’t enough power coming through the local electric grid to support the rate at which the agency was hoarding other people’s communications.

Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, a Democrat who grew his personal fortune through the telecommunications industry, is stonewalling a bill that would establish Connecticut as the first state in the nation to make phone calls from prison free for incarcerated people and their families.

Focusing on breath and gratitude, Dahr Jamail’s latest book, “The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption,” stitches together personal introspection and gut-wrenching interviews with leading climate experts. The rapidly receding glaciers of Denali National Park, home to the highest peak in North America, inspired the book’s title.