Fearless, Adversarial Journalism – Spoken Edition

President Donald Trump appears increasingly desperate to deflect questions about the flagrant abuse of power he seems to have committed this summer by withholding aid to Ukraine as he pressed that country’s new president to open an investigation into the false claim that Joe Biden abused his power as vice president to protect his son’s business interests in Ukraine in 2015.

At the start of this year, more than 600 environmental groups — including Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and Sunrise Movement — sent a letter to Congress saying they will “vigorously oppose” federal climate legislation that promotes “corporate schemes” like carbon-capture and storage. Congress was not chastened.

The chemical caused lab rats to lose weight. When pregnant rats were exposed to it, their pups lost weight, too, and their pups’ skulls, ribs, and pelvises tended to develop abnormally. The compound, referred to by the number “647-42-7” in Environmental Protection Agency records, also caused discoloration of the teeth, increased liver weights, decreased how much their infants nursed,and lowered the animals’ red blood cell counts.

Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir — On the eve of Eid al-Adha last month, 17-year-old Asrar Khan lay in a vegetative state at Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences, a hospital in downtown Srinagar, Kashmir’s largest city. The unconscious teenager was barely hanging on to life, connected to a ventilator and blinded in one eye — the result, his family says, of pellet injuries at the hands of India’s armed forces.

Over a century before we reached the brink of ecological catastrophe, Rabindranath Tagore had a glimpse of where we might be headed. Tagore, an Indian author and cultural reformer who lived during the period of British colonialism, was among the last of a generation able to examine the industrialized world from the outside.

Mike German, a former FBI special agent, had four years on the job when he took an assignment that would change his life forever. It was 1992. A jury in Simi Valley, California, had just acquitted a group of mostly white Los Angeles police officers for the videotaped beating of a black construction worker named Rodney King.

Asylum officersat U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS,were reeling after John Lafferty, director of the asylum division, wasreplacedon Monday by Andrew Davidson, former deputy associate director for USCIS’s fraud detection and national security directorate.

The Center for Immigration Studies, a far-right, anti-immigrant group, was frequently cited by major U.S. newspapers in the first two years of Donald Trump’s presidency — without mention of the group’s deep ties to the Trump administration, according to a report released Thursday.

In March 2003, in a secret CIA prison cell in Poland, a small frog jumped out of a drain and an interrogator caught it. “No, no,” said Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the accused architect of the 9/11 attacks. “Let it stay.” He asked that the frog be returned to the drain. Later that day, an unnamed observer included the incident in a CIA cable addressed to “IMMEDIATE DIRECTOR,” calling it “a poignant moment.” DV.load('//www.documentcloud.

The Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank that grew out of the party’s pro-business wing in the 1980s and ’90s, received $50,000 from Exxon Mobil in 2018 via its parent organization, the Third Way Foundation, according to the oil giant’s 2018 Worldwide Giving Report. Exxon Mobil did not return The Intercept’s multiple requests for comment.

It’s a hot, humid summer evening in Brooklyn, the kind that would keep most people inside with the air conditioner blasting. But not Isiah James. The towering 32-year-old veteran who’s running for Congress in New York’s 9thDistrict, in the heart of Brooklyn, is walking with me down Flatbush Avenue, talking a mile a minute as he points to the luxury developments that have sprouted up amid the modest row homes and small shops of the Prospect Heights neighborhood.

Asked this week to respond to criticism of his judgement on Iraq, like his senate vote to authorize the use of force in 2002, and his much-derided later proposal to divide the country in three along sectarian lines, Joe Biden laughed and assured Asma Khalid of NPR that “the vast majority of the foreign policy community thinks it’s been very good.

The day afterJoe Biden participates in CNN’s climate forum in New York, the former vice president will head to a high-dollar fundraiser co-hosted by a fossil fuel executive tied to a major natural gas development project. David Solomon ofHildred Capital Partners is hosting the fundraiser. His chief investment officer, Andrew Goldman, is a co-founder of Western LNG, a natural gas production company based in Houston, Texas.Goldman and Biden have deep ties.

U.S. President Donald Trump, right, and Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson speak before a working breakfast at the G7 Summit in Biarritz, France, on Aug. 25, 2019. Photo: Erin Schaff/AFP/Getty Images “Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, brothers in chaos,” read a headline in the Los Angeles Times over the weekend. Chaos, indeed.

House Democrats are woefully behind on dues owed to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, according to an internal party document provided to The Intercept. The rank-and-file’s lagging participation in the party’s money chase is being made up for, however, by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s prolific buckraking. By the end of June, she had raised the DCCC more than $43,000,000.

“Official Secrets,” which opened Friday in New York and Los Angeles, is the best movie ever made about how the Iraq War happened. It’s startlingly accurate, and because of that, it’s equally inspiring, demoralizing, hopeful, and enraging. Please go see it.

Larry Fink, the influential chief executive of BlackRock, which manages more than $6 trillion in investments, wants the public to know that he is using his enormous power to press companies to “serve a social purpose.” Fink — a Democratic donor who reportedly promised to help Joe Biden get elected president — wrote to businesses his firm invests in last year to urge them to consider their “impact on the environment” and the threat of climate change.

Before the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee endorsed former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper in a 2020 Senate race, it pressured consultants from at least five firms not to work with a leading progressivein the race, the candidate told The Intercept. Andrew Romanoff, who is one of more than a dozen candidates vying for Republican Sen. Cory Gardner’s seat, told The Intercept that multiple consultants turned down jobs with his campaign citing pressure from the DSCC.

Rep. Ilhan Omar participates in a panel discussion during the Muslim Collective For Equitable Democracy Conference and Presidential Forum at the The National Housing Center in Washington, D.C., on July 23, 2019. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images “It’s all about the Benjamins baby.” That is, of course, what Rep. Ilhan Omar famously tweeted on Feb. 10, in response to a tweet from my colleague Glenn Greenwald decrying “how much time U.S.

Two Brazilian firms owned by a top donor to President Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are significantly responsible for the ongoing destruction of the Amazon rainforest, carnage that has developed into raging fires that have captivated global attention. The companies have wrested control of land, deforested it, and helped build a controversial highway to their new terminal in the one-time jungle, all to facilitate the cultivation and export of grain and soybeans.

In 2015, the World Health Organization’s cancer researcharm,the International Agency for Research on Cancer, classifiedglyphosate,an active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup,as a “probable carcinogen,” setting off a global debate about the world’s most popular weedkiller.

If you tried to design a program with the aim of offending the top brass of the world’s most powerful corporations and the politicians whose careers they bankroll, you’d get something like what Bernie Sanders unveiled today in his $16.3 trillion Green New Deal platform. That’s part of the point.

After spending 14 years in prison on charges that he attended a terrorist training camp in Pakistan, Hamid Hayat was freed on August 9 following a California judge’s decision to overturn the conviction. From the start, Hayat’s case had been controversial. The government’s star witness, Naseem Khan, was a fast-food worker earning $7 per hour before the FBI enlisted him as an informant and paid him nearly $230,000 over three years.

A girl holds a sign that reads “pull the emergency brake” at a ceremony to commemorate the Okjökull glacier in Iceland, on Aug. 18, 2019. Photo: Felipe Dana/AP Dear Members of the DNC: Your meeting in San Francisco this weekend takes place against a backdrop that is literally on fire. You are gathering one month after the hottest month ever recorded in human history.

Google is set to re-staff its Cairo office, which more or less went dormant in 2014, following the military coup that brought President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to power in Egypt. The move comes against the backdrop of well-documented abuses by the Sisi government against dissidents and activists, which it facilitates using mass and targeted internet surveillance, and by blocking news, human rights, and blogging websites.

Under pressure from President Donald Trump, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, announced on Thursday thatReps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar would be barred entry to the Israeli-occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, Palestinian territories that the Muslim-American lawmakers planned to visit this weekend. Reports from Israel suggested that the decision was an abrupt reversal, taken only after theU.S.

In 2018, Democrats were able to not only take back the House but also bring in a wave of outspoken progressives by taking full advantage of safely blue seats. Those new freshmen representatives have helped reshape the political conversation in Washington. Until now, themobilization has been largely House-specific, but an open Senate seat from New Mexico has given the left a new opportunity.

Portland, Oregon is bracing for a storm of far-right violence. In July, Joe Biggs, a former staffer at the far-right conspiracist site Infowars announced an “End Domestic Terrorism” rally in Portland this Saturday. Its aim: the local antifa movement.

On the Saturday before Tennessee killed Stephen Michael West, the fifth man to be executed in the state’s death chamber since August 2018, some 20 people gathered in a parking lot just down the road from Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. It was not yet 7 a.m., and the air was already thick with humidity. People wore hats and comfortable shoes and passed around sunscreen.

Nearly 1,500 miles from the Menlo Park headquarters of Facebook, at a company outpost in Austin, Texas, moderators toil around the clock to screen and scrub some the most gruesome, hateful, and heinous posts that make their way onto the social network and its photo-sharing subsidiary, Instagram.