1. I've been waiting for @StejarelO's book on the legendary Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci to come out in English and it's finally out. So many scoops between these covers: 2. What @StejarelO did is he mined the kilometers of archive left behind by Romania's feared secret police to put together the story of the girl who got the sport's first Perfect 10. It's a gripping and also disturbing account of the violence she was subjected to, and the… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

1. The discovery of ~1,000 graves at schools for indigenous children in Canada has cast a spotlight on a dark past. But long before those discoveries, Native American activists have been asking the US to provide an accounting of how many children died on this side of the border: 2. Along with Navajo photographer @Schischillyy, I set out to Colorado to one campus, Fort Lewis College, which was built on the bones of a former boarding school known as the Fort Lewis Indian School and which has been wrestling with its complicated past since 2019:

1. More than 400 universities in America have instituted vaccine mandates. But the rules were devised with domestic students in mind who have access to the three vaccines available in the US. What about international students who can't get those vaccines?nytimes.com/2021/06/03/us/… 2. In the US, students are considered vaccinated if they received the Pfizer, Moderna or Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Most universities are telling international students they will accept those three plus any others vetted by the WHO. That leaves out students like Milloni Doshi:

1. More than 400 universities have announced students will not be able to enroll next fall if they haven't been vaccinated for Covid-19. A look at a map of where they are located shows that 92% of these colleges are in states that voted for Biden:
nytimes.com/2021/05/22/us/… 2. A tracker compiled by @chronicle, which is updated every day, shows that just 34 colleges out of 404 are in states that voted for Donald Trump in the last election: chronicle.com/blogs/live-cor…

1/ Three million. That's the estimate of how many children have dropped out of school as a result of the pandemic. To see in slow motion what it's like when a child falls behind, @tamirbenkalifa & I spent a week with 11-year-old Jordyn as he tried to learn nytimes.com/2021/05/05/us/… 2/ Jordyn's single mom, Precious, earns $12-an-hour as a security guard at a casino in Tunica, Miss. She is just below the cutoff for government assistance, and on her salary all she can afford is a $400-a-month apartment. It has no stove, no fridge - and crucially, no internet

In Year 2 of the pandemic, more colleges than not are doing some version of an in-person commencement, albeit with restrictions. That has sown frustration at the minority of schools sticking to a virtual-only ceremony: nytimes.com/2021/04/30/us/… At the University of Tampa, a group of seniors took matters into their own hands. @allilark11_ turned to Instagram to ask classmates: If we were to put on our own in-person event, would you attend? Overwhelmed by the support, they rented a convention center for a DIY graduation:

1. Last night, a juror in the Breonna Taylor case who claims the attorney general mischaracterized the panel’s deliberation came forward via his attorney. It’s the latest ripple in this complicated case which has left the community in Louisville frayed: nytimes.com/2020/09/28/us/… 2. The juror, who remains unidentified, is asking in a court motion to be allowed to speak publicly in order to set the record straight. He’s also asking for the attorney general to release the transcripts of last week’s proceedings so that the public can judge for themselves

1. Big news out of Canada: Abu Huzayfah has been arrested on a terrorist “hoax” charge. The narrative tension of our podcast “Caliphate” is the question of whether his account is true. In Chapter 6 we explain the conflicting strands of his story, and what we can and can’t confirm

https://twitter.com/amaramarasingam/status/1309601081387888644

2. Below is a link to Chapter 6, which exposes both what we know he lied about, explores the conundrum of what to do when you discover that a source has lied, and lays out for readers what we know to be fact and equally the many things we still don’t know
nytimes.com/2018/09/20/pod…

1. Curfew has just been announced in Louisville. Alert came screaming across my phone. A few dozen protestors have taken refuge inside a church. Streets are surrounded by police. Demonstrators rolled a dump truck in front of church: 2. Last night, two officers were shot by a protestor, one in stomach, one in thigh. News outlet covered the shooting. Perhaps for that reason mood tonight is different. Last night media was welcomed inside church. Tonight reporters told “you’re telling the wrong narrative”

1. Things are getting heated in Louisville. Officers have been shot. Curfew of 9 pm came and went. A few dozen people are still in the square protesting today’s decision by a grand jury not to indict officers who shot Breonna Taylor: nytimes.com/2020/09/23/us/… 2. Police have given order to disperse. Helicopters overhead. Police on horses nearby:

1. A big day in Kentucky: I'm in Frankfort, the state capitol, where any minute now the attorney general will announce whether the three officers who opened fire killing Breonna Taylor will be charged. My investigation into what we know so far is here: nytimes.com/2020/08/30/us/… 2. High security in building where reporters were told to come. We got barely 1h40 minutes heads up that press conference would be in Frankfort, a 50 min drive from Louisville, where reporters were stationed. Streets blocked off. My bag was searched by hand and by a police dog.

1. Looking forward to catching up with @allinwithchris, to discuss the @nytimes reporting identifying the Taliban middlemen who conspired with Russia and the financial transaction traced by American officials which convinced them that GRU had paid a bounty to kill US troops. 2. One of the middlemen, Rahmatullah Azizi, was at one point a contractor who got a slice of the billions in funding that the American-led Coalition funneled into Afghanistan, as reported by @MujMash @EricSchmittNYT @NajimRah and I: nytimes.com/2020/07/01/wor…

1. Two years ago, when we published our story on how ISIS governs, we made a promise to readers: We would find a way to make the more than 15,000 pages of internal ISIS records we found available to the general public. Today we made good on that promise: isisfiles.gwu.edu 2. Over five different trips to Iraq, my team collected 1000s of pages of ISIS records on embeds with the Iraqi military. With the permission of the officers, we brought them back to NY to write about them. But only a fraction of them appeared in my story: nytimes.com/interactive/20…

1. Salons are open & I just got my first highlights in months. I share this to point out that my stylist was issued a license to practice her profession, one she can lose for something as minor as singeing my hair. Follow along to discuss the lack of a licenses for cops in NJ. 2. As the United States wrestles with how to reform its police forces, I spent the last few weeks looking at one specific problem: States, like New Jersey, which have no mechanism for revoking the accreditation of officers accused of misconduct: nytimes.com/2020/06/24/nyr…

1. Happy Mother's Day. For the past two weeks, I turned my attention to the extreme measures paramedics have been forced to take in the coronavirus hot zone, where some units have instituted a no-CPR rule in an effort to protect their first responders nytimes.com/2020/05/10/nyr… 2. Along with @rcjonesphoto, I embedded with the ambulance crews shuttling patients to @UnivHospNewark in Newark, one of the hardest-hit areas in the country. Seven of the hospital's employees have died of Covid and 1/5th of its 270 first responders are out sick or in quarantine

1. Last month, I was about to get on a flight to Africa for an ISIS story when our world fell apart. Now I've been asked to cover another kind of war - the one on COVID. My first story looks at the backlog in testing which in some parts of the country is getting worse not better: 2. With the second highest caseload in the country, New Jersey is suffering. I began hearing stories of desperately sick patients spending all night in their cars, waiting for one of the limited tests at a drive-thru testing site. We showed up at 6:30 am. Here's what we found:

1. I admit that it was mildly amusing when family members, who don’t understand where to get verified news, fell for wacko conspiracies. Like the idea 9/11 was an inside job or that the moon landing was fake. We’re now at a point where misinformation may cost ppl their lives. 2. I spent an hour speaking to a dear friend who was getting her Coronavirus updates from Facebook, including a doctor whose YouTube intervention I caught a snippet of. He was stressing that 2/3rds of people with the virus who are in hospitals near 5G towers are dying.

1. Welcome to Rukmini’s On-Again Off-Again Book Club. Since the arrival of bébé, I’ve not been reading as much as I used to, so I’ve started my own Twitter book club to get myself to read more & share what I’ve learned. First up, ⁦@azelin⁩’s book about Tunisian jihadists: 2. Those little pieces of paper are all the places I marked because I didn’t want to lose the spot. @azelin’s book took 9 yrs to write, and it’s rich in detail for those studying the phenomenon of jihadi terrorism. Here are my some my favorite takeaways:

1. Adventures in American parenting: My son’s daycare sent him home with a list of the other babies in his class entitled “For Valentine’s Day.” My son can’t yet speak much less write so the implication is that I, his mom, will fill out cards for a bunch of babies all under age 1 2. My first reaction was awwww, how cute. My second was the revolted immigrant Rukmini, one whose mom never helped me with homework, and who once came to my cross-country meet, embarrassing me so thoroughly by running after me with a liter of Evian, I asked her not to come again

1. ISIS has claimed the stabbing that occurred in South London this weekend, describing the attacker as one of their “fighters” and adding that he was responding to calls to target Coalition countries: 2. That phrase (“responding to calls to target citizens of allied countries”) is a quote from a speech by the former ISIS spokesman who called for sympathizers to carry out revenge against the Coalition fighting ISIS wherever they may be in the world and through whatever means:

1. Some news: Last November, an on-the-ground informant in Yemen shared a key piece of information with the United States: The location of Qassim al-Rimi, the head of al-Qaeda’s affiliate in the region. This week, a CIA drone took aim at him: nytimes.com/2020/01/31/wor… via @NYTimes 2. The United States has not yet confirmed whether the strike they took killed al-Rimi, the head of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. But in Yemen, local news outlets reported that a strike in Wadi Abedah, a known hotbed of al-Qaeda killed two, unidentified militants.