October 10, 2019
By Casey Michel
Last month, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), one of America’s leading think tanks, announced that it had received a substantial donation that would help round out the organization’s upcoming budget. As a statement on the CFR’s website detailed, a CFR member had graciously decided to help facilitate funding for CFR’s intern program. The donation,…
October 1, 2019
By Nick Waters
Iran says it can hack American drones operating in the Middle East and take control of them — and it has released a video purporting to back up its claims. Back in February 2019, Iran’s semi-official Fars News claimed that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) intercepted the broadcasts of U.S. UAVs above Iraq and…
September 10, 2019
By Aric Toler
On September 10, 2019, CNN reported that the United States helped a Russian government official flee after working as a spy for American intelligence in 2017 — all reportedly due to concerns regarding President Trump and his administration’s handling of “classified intelligence”. The CNN report was sparse on details, but it was enough to identify…
September 6, 2019
By Bellingcat Investigation Team
Miroslava Breach lived under constant threat starting in March 2016, when she began to feel pressure over her publications regarding links between drug cartels and politics. She brought this to the attention of her old friend, the recently elected governor of Chihuahua state Javier Corral, as well as those in charge of the mechanisms at…
September 5, 2019
By Bellingcat Investigation Team
Two women who were taking a selfie at an airstrip in Chihuahua highlands died, it seemed, accidentally; a pilot who flew o the Tarahumara highlands and a retired martial arts teacher were murdered in 2017. Before the end of that year, a mysterious man was shot to death in the north of the country. All…
September 4, 2019
By Bellingcat Investigation Team
Over the past 10 years, at least 82 journalists have been killed in Mexico for exercising their profession. This gruesome death toll makes Mexico one of the most dangerous countries for journalists in the world. One victim of this violence was Miroslava Breach, an investigative journalist who had been reporting on “narco-politicians”, members of drug…
August 15, 2019
By Aric Toler
On August 14, a Twitter thread that included a small army of “Amazon FC Ambassadors” went viral, bringing to light Amazon’s year-long social media brand ambassador program. What exactly are these “Amazon FC Ambassadors”, how many of them are there, and are they actually real people? The Amazon Research Agency These “Amazon FC Ambassadors” all…
August 4, 2019
By Robert Evans
On August 3, 2019, at around 11am local time, initial police reports indicated that a gunman had walked into an El Paso Wal-Mart and opened fire. As of the publication of this article, at least eighteen people have died and several others have been injured. One victim was a four-month old infant. As we’ve seen…
June 7, 2019
By Eric Woods
Individual U.S. states such as Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Arizona, and others have exported hundreds of millions of dollars in weapons to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates since the Saudi-led war in Yemen began. Altogether, per publicly available data released by the U.S. government, 11 states plus the District of Columbia have each exported over…
May 2, 2019
All times appear as local time UTC-4. Venezuelans awoke to a tumultuous morning on April 30, 2019. Leopoldo López, the leader of the Voluntad Popular [Popular Will, VP] party — under arrest since 2014 — had been freed. In a pair of messages shared on his Twitter account, López appeared beside National Assembly president Juan…
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