2+ hour, 52+ min ago (1209+ words) The raid on humanitarian aid providers on the U.S.Mexico divide late last month was the first where Border Patrol entered structures without a warrant. U.S. Border Patrol agents raided a humanitarian aid station in the Arizona desert late last month, taking three people into custody and breaking into a trailer without a warrant. Video taken by No More Deaths, a faith-based aid group out of Tucson that operates the site, shows agents with flashlights prying open a trailer door and entering the structure. The camp, located just miles from the U.S.Mexico border, has long been used to provide medical care to migrants crossing one of the world's deadliest stretches of desert. Monica Ruiz House, a No More Deaths volunteer who'd recently been involved in deportation defense work in Chicago, said the warrantless raid spoke to a rising culture of lawlessness among…...

12+ hour, 11+ min ago (747+ words) Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's actions could spark investigations for war crimes or outright murder, sources told The Intercept. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is under increasing fire for a double-tap strike, first reported by The Intercept in early September, in which the U.S. military killed two survivors of the Trump administration's initial boat strike in the Caribbean on September 2. The Washington Post recently reported that Hegseth personally ordered the follow-up attack, giving a spoken order "to kill everybody." Multiple military legal experts, lawmakers, and now confidential sources within the government who spoke with The Intercept say Hegseth's actions could result in the entire chain of command being investigated for a war crime or outright murder. This fundamental tenet stretches back to the 1863 "Lieber Code," the first modern codification of the laws of war, promulgated by President Abraham Lincoln, which held that…...

1+ day, 6+ hour ago (702+ words) Juan Orlando Hern'ndez has been promised a pardon for drug trafficking. Trump is threatening to oust Nicol's Maduro over similar allegations. In a 26th floor courtroom overlooking Manhattan's frigid winter skyline, dozens of immigrants sat in on the trial of their former president, the once untouchable symbol of a "narco-dictatorship" that reorganized of the government's judicial, police, and military leadership to collude with drug traffickers. "He was the president of the country, and they basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country," Trump told reporters on Air Force One on Sunday. He claimed to have spoken to Hondurans, who "said it was a Biden administration setup, and I looked at the facts and I agreed with them." "They basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country." Hern'ndez…...

1+ day, 8+ hour ago (740+ words) By the first World AIDS Day of his second term, Trump gutted LGBTQ+ employment globally and put humanity at greater risk of AIDS. On World AIDS Day 2025, humanity should be celebrating that there is a new shot available which offers six months of protection against the transmission of HIV, the virus which has already infected approximately 40 million living people and taken the lives of 44 million more. Instead, public health workers are reeling from how President Donald Trump has helped HIV to circulate in more humans this year than last. The lethal ways the current U.S. health policy is harming the health and wealth of LGBTQ+ people worldwide will be felt for years, if not decades. That's because on the first day of his second term, Trump issued a stop-work order for all foreign aid and several orders that jeopardized the health…...

1+ day, 18+ hour ago (891+ words) An aid agreement template would require countries to share vast amounts of health data, including on abortion, to receive funds to combat HIV and other infectious diseases. The Trump administration plans to condition global health assistance on foreign countries sharing significant amounts of health data with the United States, including on abortion, according to a template for an aid agreement obtained by The Intercept. The template agreement, which references the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR " but also applies funding to fight malaria, tuberculosis, and other pathogens " would require countries that receive global health assistance to share a broad range of health care and pathogen data for the next 25 years. The model document would also require foreign governments to provide the United States with "any data access or information needed to monitor compliance" with the Helms Amendment, which…...

2+ day, 12+ hour ago (570+ words) The war on drugs has failed, and Trump's deadly boat strikes are only doubling down on decades of failed policy. I was never that into cocaine " preferring the euphoria promised by MDMA or the relaxation offered by cannabis " but back in 2015, a cocaine-serving lounge bar, Route 36, in La Paz, Bolivia, was the talk of the backpacking circuit, and the scarcely-believable novelty of the place was alluring. In the international waters around the U.S., the "legally indefensible" and "barbarian" campaign the Trump administration is waging against boats suspected of trafficking drugs from Latin America has killed at least 83 people in 21 extrajudicial airstrikes. Pope Leo XIII was such a fan of one cocaine-infused tonic wine as a mental fortifier, "when prayer was insufficient," that he awarded its creator a Vatican gold medal. President Ulysses S. Grant, Thomas Edison, and Queen Victoria were also partial....

3+ day, 17+ hour ago (255+ words) After J. Edgar Hoover cast the civil rights leader as a "liar," NYPD's spy unit heeded the call. Joshua Clark Davis is a historian at the University of Baltimore. On their face, the images are mundane. King emerges from a car, greeted by two men in suits. In another, King stands with family and confidants, including his wife, the activist Coretta Scott King; his mother, Alberta Williams King; and his friend and adviser Bayard Rustin, organizer of the March on Washington. In a third shot, Coretta shakes hands with Wagner. These surveillance tactics are of more than just historical significance. Local police continue to deploy weapons of political espionage against movements for justice to this day. In Trump's first term, police in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Portland, and Chicago surveilled the same racial justice activists disparaged by the president. Words matter. Federal…...

4+ day, 17+ hour ago (1504+ words) Members of Gaza's Civil Defense force describe pulling decomposing bodies from collapsed buildings, and digging in hopes that someone remains alive. The mission that haunts Nooh al-Shaghnobi most took place on September 17, near the al-Saha area of eastern Gaza City. Israeli forces had bombed a home, killing more than 30 members of one extended family. Most of their bodies were trapped under the rubble. Al-Shaghnobi's Gaza Civil Defense force team pulled two dead young girls from the bombed house and kept digging, crawling under collapsed floors. "We don't go under unless someone is alive," he told The Intercept. "Otherwise, we dig from above " ceiling by ceiling." What followed was a descent into something dreamlike and horrifying. "We walked 12 meters under the rubble," he said. "Every meter, the air grew less. I crawled past legs, arms, the body of a child hugging…...

5+ day, 19+ hour ago (480+ words) The so-called ceasefire might seem like a good excuse to bury the hatchet and enjoy a quieter family dinner, but it's not. To be clear, if two years of livestreamed annihilation have failed to shift your loved ones' support away from the Israeli ethnostate, I doubt there is anything a dinner table argument could do to persuade them. There can be no reasoning with a worldview that forecloses seeing Palestinians as fully human. I navigate this with pro-Israel members of my own British Jewish family. It's painful, and I don't have any good advice. Whatever your approach with your family, there can be no pretense that the genocide in Gaza is over. I'll be thinking of another family this Thanksgiving: that of my student from Gaza. Families like mine, divided over Israel, are not the important ones here. For my…...

6+ day, 10+ hour ago (1035+ words) Mike Selig had dozens of crypto clients. Now he will be a key industry regulator. Republicans in the Senate are racing to confirm a lawyer with a long list of crypto industry clients as the next Commodity Futures Trading Commission chair, a position that will hold wide sway over the industry. CFTC nominee Mike Selig has served dozens of crypto clients ranging from venture capital firms to a bear-themed blockchain company based in the Cayman Islands, according to ethics records obtained by The Intercept. Those records show the breadth of potential conflicts of interest for Selig, who, if confirmed, will serve on the CFTC alone due to an exodus of other commissioners. With a Bitcoin crash wiping out a trillion dollars of value in the past few weeks, the industry is counting on friendly regulators in Washington to give it…...