Contributing Writers

The second witness who testified live in the first primetime hearing of the House select January 6 committee was Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards, who suffered a traumatic brain injury as she tried to hold the line outside the Capitol with fellow officers. She was with officer Brian Sicknick, who she said appeared to have been sprayed in the face and was extremely pale. Sicknick died the next day. Sicknick’s fiancee sat behind Edwards as she testified.

The white supremacist Proud Boys group and the far-right, anti-government Oath Keepers militia played an instrumental role in planning for a violent insurrection on the Capitol, according to the January 6 House committee, which aired new testimony from witnesses and the groups’ leaders in its first public hearing Thursday night. British filmmaker Nick Quested was embedded with the Proud Boys and shared his footage with the committee.

The January 6 committee released new footage Thursday night showing a detailed timeline of the day of the insurrection.

Donald Trump “engaged in a massive effort to spread false and fraudulent information to convince huge portions of the U.S. population that fraud had stolen the election from him,” Congressmember Liz Cheney, vice chair of the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack, said during Thursday’s primetime hearing. “This was not true.

The House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection held its first public hearing Thursday night, televised in primetime by all major networks except Fox News. We spend the hour featuring excerpts from the hearing, starting with Committee Chair Bennie Thompson’s opening statement, in which he argued January 6 was the “culmination of an attempted coup” by Donald Trump, comparing the insurrection to the ransacking of Washington, D.C.

British journalist Dom Phillips and Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira have still not been found, after being reported missing Sunday in one of Brazil’s most remote areas of the Amazon. The pair were traveling across the region to interview Indigenous leaders patrolling the area for illegal miners and fishers for Phillips’s upcoming book. “We know that they had been receiving threats.

The House committee investigating Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election and the deadly January 6 insurrection at the Capitol holds its first public hearing Thursday night in primetime, as five members of the far-right Proud Boys are indicted for seditious conspiracy.

The House of Representatives on Wednesday approved new gun control measures, including raising the minimum age for the purchase of most semiautomatic rifles to 21 and banning high-capacity magazines. The new rules passed the House in a 223-204 vote, but are doomed in the Senate, where a bipartisan group is working on passing a much more limited set of reforms.

The United Nations is demanding an independent investigation into charges of rape and sexual assault committed by Russian soldiers in Ukraine since the start of the invasion. We speak with Pramila Patten, the U.N.’s special representative on sexual violence in conflict, who is just back from Ukraine and told the Security Council Monday about multiple shocking reports of rape and assault — all of which Russia has since denied.

British journalist Dom Phillips and Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira have still not been found, after being reported missing Sunday in one of Brazil’s most remote areas of the Amazon. The pair were traveling across the region to interview Indigenous leaders patrolling the area for illegal miners and fishers for Phillips’s upcoming book. “We know that they had been receiving threats.

The Biden administration has denied members of an Indigenous delegation from the Amazon rainforest entry at this week’s U.S.-hosted Summit of the Americas. Meanwhile, President Biden agreed to meet with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who told Biden he would only attend the conference if he was guaranteed immunity from criticism on his systematic destruction of the Amazon rainforest, among other policies.

Top leaders from Mexico, Bolivia, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador are all absent from the ninth Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced he would boycott the conference after the U.S. said it would not invite Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.

Progressive San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin was ousted by voters Tuesday in a special recall election, after facing well-funded tough-on-crime attacks by the real estate industry. “He made enemies with very, very deep pockets,” says Lara Bazelon, professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law and chair of Boudin’s Innocence Commission, who describes the primary challenge as a “perfect storm” to take down Boudin.