Fearless, Adversarial Journalism – Spoken Edition

There’s a little-known federal agency whose job is to ensure U.S. spy agencies protect privacy and other civil liberties even as they work to defeat terrorists and criminals, and to blow the whistle when that doesn’t happen. But the agency, known as the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, is down to just a single voting member — which means it has been stripped of nearly all its powers, according to emails obtained by The Intercept.

Members of the Democratic National Committee will meet on Saturday to choose their newChair, replacing the disgraced interim Chair Donna Brazile, who replaced the disgraced five-year Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

The Senate voted to confirm Donald Trump’s pick for administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency today over the objections of Democratic senators, hundreds of former EPA officials, and hundreds of current EPA employees.

Unlike his short-lived predecessor, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, President Trump’s new national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, has no history of openly associating with bigotry. In fact, McMaster has throughout his career emphasized the need to work constructively with foreign Muslim populations. But his presence only calls even more attention to the dramatic divide among Trump’s top foreign policy advisers.

Donald Trump has inherited the most powerful machine for spying ever devised. How this petty, vengefulman might wield and expand the sprawling American spy apparatus, already vulnerable to abuse, is disturbing enough on its own.

Last year, C. paid close attention to a presidential election for the first time in her life. A 31-year-old mother of four, C. was born in Mexico and has lived in Los Angeles since she was two-years-old. After Donald Trump won the Republican nomination, C., who asked me not to use her name because she fears being deported, watched with alarm as his nativist message swelled the defiant movement behind him like a steroid.

One of the first things Donald Trump did when he took office was temporarily gag several federal agencies, forbidding them from tweeting. In response, self-described government workers created a wave of rogue Twitter accounts that share real facts (not to be confused with “alternative facts,” otherwise known as “lies”) about climate change and science.

Under orders from President Donald Trump, the Army Corps of Engineers on February 7 approved a final easement allowing Energy Transfer Partners to drill under the Missouri River near theStanding Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota. Construction has re-started, and lawyers for the company say it could take as little as 30 days for oil to flow through the Dakota Access pipeline.

Almost every small town in Brazil — especially those in the interior state of Minas Gerais — has its town eccentric, that person the whole town knows, takes care of, and looks after like a sort of patrimony. Ibiá, where I was born, had Zé Tem Dó. With him, I learned about the symbolic value of certain objects. I was aboutfour or five years old. My mother was a seamstress and Zé collected spools of thread.

Donald Trump launched a surprise attack on the news media on Thursday at a press conference in which he mocked and harried the White House press corps for more than an hour. Trump, ranting and raving about how he's not ranting and raving. I can't even. pic.twitter.

A senior official on President Trump’s embattled National Security Council warned in previously unreported comments that it is “inevitable” an Islamic terrorist group will carry out a successful nuclear attack against the United States, and that in its aftermath, the world “will regress hundreds of years politically.

For the past year and a half, the FBI has been using a secret scoring system to judgethe likelihood that someone will carryout a violent attack. The survey, called “Indicators of Mobilization to Violence,” assigns points based on factors like religious observance, travel history, financial transactions, and physical appearance. A copy of the survey in a classified FBI document was obtained by The Intercept.

Lawmakers representing Hispanic communities across the country are demanding answers from the Department of Homeland Security following a series of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations that led to hundreds of arrests in multiple states last week — so far, the elected officials say, they aren’t getting them.

President Trump’s National Security Advisor, Gen. Michael Flynn, was forced to resign on Monday night as a result of getting caught lying about whether he discussed sanctions in a December telephone call with a Russian diplomat. The only reason the public learnedabout Flynn’s lie is because someone inside the U.S. Government violated the criminal law by leaking the contents of Flynn’s intercepted communications.

Immigrant communities acrossthe country are coping with the fallout from the Trump administration’s first immigration crackdown — a series of operations last week in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, New York, and San Antonio that led to more than 680 arrests, according to figures released by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.