The Intercept

Less than an hour after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional protection for abortion, Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry crowed on Twitter that abortion was now illegal in the state. “Because of #SCOTUS ruling in #Dobbs, Louisiana’s trigger law banning #abortion is now in effect,” he wrote.

The illness was mysterious. A 25-year-old graduate student had been hospitalized with a high fever, muscle and joint pain, a stiff neck, fatigue, sores in her throat, and a metallic taste in her mouth. She soon developed an angry rash. To make the diagnosis, her doctors had an important data point to consider: Days earlier, the woman had returned to the United States from a field expedition in South Sudan and Uganda, where she had been capturing and collecting the blood and tissue of bats and rodents. That information proved critical — and is newly relevant given concerns that the pandemic may have come from a research accident. Three days after she was admitted to the hospital in 2012, tests determined that the student was infected with a novel virus that infects a type of fruit bat that lives in the rural areas of Uganda.

Small teams of U.S. Special Operations forces are involved in a low-profile proxy war program on a far greater scale than previously known, according to exclusive documents and interviews with more than a dozen current and former government officials. While The Intercept and other outlets have previously reported on the...

Hundreds of protesters marched toward the Supreme Court in Washington on Thursday morning to send a message to President Joe Biden: He is not doing enough. Demonstrators minced no words when it came to the five justices who had voted to overturn Roe v. Wade and issued sharp criticisms of a Republican Party that spent years securing a majority on the court extreme enough to reverse 50 years of precedent. Yet the anger that got many of the activists out on the street was aimed at the Democratic Party that many of the marchers hold partially responsible.

This is it. The moment for President Joe Biden and Congress to challenge the underlying legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court and advance an aggressive climate action agenda. There will be no better moment to take this stand for a transformed court, nor a more fateful one. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is right: “We need to reform or do away with the whole thing, for the sake of the planet.”

Today’s 6-3 Supreme Court decision restricting the ability of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon emissions will benefit power plants and fossil fuel companies throughout the U.S. and profoundly hobble the government’s ability to address the worsening climate catastrophe. The decision, written by Supreme Court Chief Justice...

The death of a French volunteer in Ukraine is the first clear evidence that there are at least some far-right extremists among the foreign fighters who have flocked there to fight Russian forces. Wilfried Bleriot, 32, was killed in action, according to Ukraine’s International Legion in a Facebook post on June 4, 2022. In the photo of Bleriot posted by the International Legion, which was formed after Russia’s February invasion and is open to volunteer fighters from all over the world, he displays front and center on his body armor the black-and-white patch of the so-called Misanthropic Division, said to be an overtly fascist volunteer wing of Ukraine’s ultranationalist Azov Battalion.

For decades, Sen. Joe Manchin has presided over West Virginia’s Democratic Party, crowning candidates and throwing cushy appointments to allies while the state’s jobs, wages, and environment have gradually been ground to dust. But earlier this month, a grassroots slate of over 50 Democrats took control of the West Virginia Democratic Party after winning a majority of seats on the executive committee and ousting party leadership, thus ending Manchin’s de facto control of the state party apparatus.

Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States, is selling Immigrations and Customs Enforcement a suite of features used to track and identify cryptocurrency users, according to contract documents shared with The Intercept. In August 2021, Coinbase sold a single analytics software license to ICE for $29,000, followed by...

In a hotly contested 2020 primary, progressive Marie Newman, the Justice Democrats candidate for Illinois’s 3rd Congressional District, ousted eight-term Rep. Dan Lipinski, one of the last anti-abortion Democrats in Congress. Many House Democrats countered party norms by backing Newman, choosing to stand up for reproductive rights rather than exhibit loyalty to the incumbent. “I think that an anti-choice position is a relic of our past and it is firmly in the Republican ideology, and I do not think that is what our party should be standing for,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the time.

With her surprise testimony at Tuesday’s hearing of the House Jan. 6 committee, former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson broke open the inside story of the coup plotting that was underway at the White House before and during the insurrection and in the process suddenly raised Donald Trump’s legal jeopardy.

The day after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Facebook’s parent company, Meta, internally designated the abortion rights group Jane’s Revenge as a terrorist organization, according to company materials reviewed by The Intercept, subjecting discussion of the group and its actions to the company’s most stringent censorship policies. Experts say the decision, Meta’s first known policy response for the post-Roe era, threatens free expression around abortion rights at a critical moment.

CoreCivic, the first publicly traded prison company in America and the first to operate both private prisons and private immigration detention centers on a for-profit basis, had another first to announce. Damon T. Hininger, the chief executive, paused to share the news on a call with investors last month: CoreCivic Inc. was the first company after the George Floyd protests to proactively conduct a “racial equity audit,” the results of which it was now ready to release.

Jeffery Lamar Williams — the celebrated Atlanta trap recording artist better known as Young Thug — walked into Fulton County Jail in May to a standing ovation. The arrest was an event. The jail, on Rice Street, shut down the intake of other arrestees to process him in. Atlanta’s city-contracted wrecker service diverted all its trucks to haul his many cars out of the rented property in Buckhead where police found him May 9. The entire city paused to take inventory on the massive gang arrest, with 27 other people — including a second superstar rapper, Sergio “Gunna” Kitchens.

Just before the House January 6 committee’s dramatic hearing on Thursday on former President Donald Trump’s efforts to use the Justice Department to overturn the 2020 election, the FBI raided the Virginia home of Jeffrey Clark, the former Justice Department official who worked most closely with Trump to try to keep him in power.

“There is no place to hide,” said U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland during a surprise trip to Ukraine this week, announcing that a veteran prosecutor known for hunting down Nazis would lead American efforts to investigate Russian war crimes. “We will pursue every avenue available to make sure that those who are responsible for these atrocities are held accountable,” he added.

In a stunning, if expected, ruling, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on Friday, ignoring decades of precedent to deny Americans a fundamental human right. The decision cleared the way for states to outlaw abortion and criminalize those who seek one or help others get them. The ruling will...

Given the makeup of the far-right Supreme Court, it has for some years been clear that Roe v. Wade would fall. Following Friday’s 6-3 decision to destroy all constitutional abortion rights, 22 states will enact their readied trigger laws for total or near-total abortion bans, with more expected to follow. Fascistic anti-abortionists have won in the courts, but they are already making clear that a victory in law is nothing to them if the laws are not brutally enforced to forge a Christian-nationalist nation through and through.

Like several members of the Illinois Democratic Party Central Committee, Rep. Danny Davis pulls from two campaign coffers: a state committee and a federal one. But Davis’s state committee has far outspent those of his peers, including on itemized spending for “campaign work” as recently as last quarter.

This in turn will require other states with significant gun regulations — California, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Hawaii — to change their laws. Other restrictions on guns will likely fall to lawsuits. President Joe Biden then released a milquetoast statement: “I am deeply disappointed by the Supreme...