Favorite Growing up, Khorry Ramey didn’t speak to her father about the day he would be put to death. “It was too uncomfortable for me,” she said. Her dad, Kevin Johnson, was sent to Missouri’s death row in 2007, when she was only 4 years old. As a child, she went to visit him at…
Favorite The FBI sting had elements of a B-movie production. Federal agents used a car chop shop in Seattle that was an FBI front, placed a prayer rug and a copy of the Quran inside the office, and designated it the scene for the final bust. The FBI’s informant was a registered sex offender named…
Favorite On a rainy Saturday morning in May, Hayanuddin Afghan, a former member of a CIA-backed militia that was once his country’s most brutal and effective anti-Taliban force, welcomed me to his new home in a hilly neighborhood of Pittsburgh. He invited me in through the kitchen, where his wife, who was pregnant with their…
Favorite Murray Hooper just needs more time. He says this over and over again, with an urgency bordering on despair. He is six days away from execution and not ready to give up. But he doesn’t want to delude himself either. “I’m just trying to deal with reality,” he says. “I don’t like that wishful…
Favorite At the moment that the ferret bit him, the researcher was smack in the middle of Manhattan, in a lab one block from Central Park’s East Meadow. It was the Friday afternoon before Labor Day in 2011, and people were rushing out of the city for a long weekend. Three days earlier, the ferret…
Favorite The graduate student was alone in the lab on a Saturday, handling a mouse infected with a debilitating virus, when the needle slipped. She wore two gowns, two pairs of shoe covers, a hair net, a face mask, and two pairs of gloves. Gingerly, she had pointed the needle at the mouse’s abdomen and…
Favorite The Department of Homeland Security is quietly broadening its efforts to curb speech it considers dangerous, an investigation by The Intercept has found. Years of internal DHS memos, emails, and documents — obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as public documents — illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech…
Favorite When Russian forces seized Crimea in 2014, paving the way for President Vladimir Putin’s annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula, a large number of world leaders and international organizations condemned the invasion as illegal. But Putin and other senior Russian officials were never prosecuted in any court of international law for the crime of aggression:…
Favorite No one knows what happened to the lost climate letter. All that is known is this: Alaa Abd El Fattah, arguably Egypt’s highest profile political prisoner, wrote it while on a hunger strike in his Cairo prison cell last month. It was, he explained later, “about global warming because of the news from Pakistan.”…
Favorite Early on the morning of August 15, 2021, Shershah Ahmadi was struggling to find a ride home. In Foroshgah, one of the busiest open-air bazaars in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, crowds swarmed around money-changers and lined up at banks as people scrambled to lay their hands on the cash they would need to escape…
