The Intercept

Williston, a small Vermont town of 10,000 people, is best known as a bucolic suburb of Burlington laden with historic buildings and farmland. Like the rest of the state, the hamlet is about 90 percent white. Williston has seen few of the sorts of large-scale Trump administration immigration operations that have sparked raucous protests. Aside from a few raids against migrant farm workers, there has been little in the way of detentions by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In the spring of 2023, on a partly sunny day where the temperature flirted with 70 degrees, an Army veteran of the Afghanistan War walked into the unique Prairie-style police headquarters in Banning, California. In a private room in the detective bureau, the former specialist, who served with the storied 82nd Airborne Division, sat down with a special agent from the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division — better known as CID — to make a confession.

An Iranian exile group colluded with university officials and a state lawmaker in Arkansas in a relentless, ultimately successful campaign to get an Iranian American professor fired, according to a new lawsuit.

The U.S. military is struggling to protect its overseas bases amid a conflict with Iran that has spun out of self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth’s control. After a string of damaging attacks on bases throughout the Middle East, U.S. long-range bombers stationed in the United Kingdom fled back to their American home bases on Sunday amid fears of an impending Iranian strike.

When the elevator doors opened, the reporters waiting in the hallway immediately crowded around the gaunt, orange-clad man who emerged, escorted by his public defender and a sheriff’s deputy. The three men made their way toward the seventh-floor courtroom of Oklahoma County District Court Judge Natalie Mai, as reporters shouted questions. “Why did you kill Barry Van Treese?” one asked. Justin Sneed, 49, didn’t answer, his handcuffs and waist chain clanging as he walked.

The U.S. Army announced last year that it had enough of a specific model of armored vehicle and that any more deliveries would be “excess.” But even so, Congress found a way to keep funding alive for the vehicle — and executives at the company that produces the vehicle found a way to flood key members of Congress with campaign donations.

Seth Stern is the director of advocacy for Freedom of the Press Foundation. Clayton Weimers is the executive director for Reporters Without Borders (RSF) North America. Donald Trump received Chinese President Xi Jinping and the visiting Chinese press pool last week as reporters from news outlets he had banished stood outside the White House gates.

Three years into Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the U.S. government is still targeting pro-Palestine student activists. Even before federal immigration agents descended on communities around the country, killing immigrants and protesters, unmarked agents were abducting students who had voiced criticisms of Israel. Mahmoud Khalil was the first.

Lauren Harper is Freedom of the Press Foundation’s first Daniel Ellsberg Chair on Government Secrecy. How much does it cost to get more information about a cop who punched someone in the face? If you guessed anything lower than $2.5 million, you’d be wrong — at least according to the city of Eugene, Oregon. In August, the local news outlet Double Sided Media filed a public records request for records about police officer Justin Peckels, which focused on potential misconduct between 2018 and 2026.

No one can tell you exactly what’s in the bloated Pentagon budget and what it costs. After all, the Defense Department has never passed an audit. Still, we know it’s larded up with terrible, lethal, wasteful expenditures. There are $2.2 million Tomahawk missiles — the type that killed more than 150 Iranian civilians, most of them school children. And the Zumwalt class of naval destroyers that were billed as a $1.5 billion per ship bargain, but now cost taxpayers $10 billion each.