Politics

The U.S. military has announced the sale of billions of dollars of missiles, bombs, and other weapons to Israel in the past year, as the campaign in Gaza grinds on. Now, the Department of Defense is also building aircraft facilities in Israel to accommodate American-made refueling tanker planes, according to newly issued public contracting documents…

A St. Louis County, Missouri, judge upheld the murder conviction of Marcellus Williams, ruling that a prosecutor who contaminated key evidence by handling it without wearing gloves before Williams’s trial had not acted in “bad faith,” but instead was merely following his normal procedure. The ruling, issued on Thursday by Circuit Court Judge Bruce Hilton,…

Attendees at a panel following a U.S. Supreme Court decision that found that the Muscogee Nation had remained a reservation after Oklahoma became a state on July 13, 2021, in Tulsa, Okla. Photo: Michael Noble Jr./Tulsa World via AP Below is an excerpt from Rebecca Nagle’s book, “By the Fire We Carry,” published by HarperCollins…

Nikki was unconscious and her lips were blue when her father Robert Roberson found her in bed the morning of January 31, 2002.  The 2-year-old had been ill the previous week, coughing, vomiting, and running a high fever. Roberson had taken her to the doctor twice and both times was sent home with drugs that,…

In late August, the top-ranking U.S. military commander in Africa toured Libya — and had a cordial meeting in Benghazi with a notorious warlord: Field Marshal Khalifa Hifter. U.S. Marine Corps Gen. Michael Langley, the chief of U.S. Africa Command, called on Hifter, the leader of the Libyan National Army, during his series of meetings…

Columbia University’s school year began this week with New York Police Department officers arresting two students in front of campus at a pro-Palestine demonstration.  At the rally on Tuesday, dozens of students marched along a metal barricade in front of the Morningside campus, continuing their calls from the prior year for the school to divest…

The ongoing Israeli assault on Gaza has triggered tense, at times hostile, reckonings across American tech companies over their role in the killing. Since October 7, tech workers have agitated for greater transparency about their employers’ work for the Israeli military and at times vehemently protested those contracts. IBM, which has worked with the Israeli…

Long before the 2001 trial started, then-St. Louis County Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Keith Larner decided the butcher knife used to kill Felicia Anne Gayle Picus was “worthless” as a piece of evidence. On Wednesday, Larner testified in court that he had concluded there was no additional forensic testing that needed to be done on the…

The Department of Homeland Security is soliciting help from the U.S. private sector to run face recognition scans against drivers and passengers approaching the southern border, according to an agency document reviewed by The Intercept. Despite the mixed track record and ongoing deficiencies of face recognition technology, DHS is hoping to devise a means of capturing the likenesses of travelers while vehicles are…

Matthew Jacober stood to address the judge inside the small, packed courtroom on the third floor of the St. Louis County Courthouse in Clayton, Missouri. Jacober, a special counsel representing the county’s elected prosecutor, had a confession to make: The knife used to kill Felicia Anne Gayle Picus inside her home in August 1998 had…