9 Big Stories You Can't Miss This Week: Twitter, Terror, And Tides

This week for BuzzFeed News, Albert Samaha chronicles a modern-day lynching in Mississippi. Read that and these other great stories from BuzzFeed and around the web.

1. "This Is What They Did for Fun" — BuzzFeed News

Rogelio V. Solis / AP Photo

Craig Anderson was headed home to celebrate his birthday with his partner. Instead, he became the victim of a brutal and violent form of racism that many in Mississippi had thought long gone. "This was not simply a murder. This was a lynching." Read it at BuzzFeed News.

2. Did the FBI Transform This Teenager Into a Terrorist After Reading His Emails? — BuzzFeed News

Illustration by Marc Aspinall for BuzzFeed News

Mohamed Mohamud was a conflicted teenager when undercover FBI operatives convinced him he would bomb a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Oregon. Five years later, Nicolás Medina Mora and Mike Hayes investigate how Mohamud's case could determine whether the American government is allowed to spy wholesale on its citizens. Read it at BuzzFeed News.

3. Unfollow — The New Yorker

Photograph by Katy Grannan for The New Yorker

Adrian Chen discovers how Twitter led Megan Phelps-Roper, the granddaughter of infamous pastor Fred Phelps, to leave the incendiary Westboro Baptist Church. "By following her opponents’ feeds, she absorbed their thoughts on the world, learned what food they ate, and saw photographs of their babies. 'I was beginning to see them as human,' she said." Read it at The New Yorker.

4. Why Are so Many Black Transgender Women Getting Killed in Detroit? — BuzzFeed News

Photograph by Laura McDermott for BuzzFeed News

More trans women were killed in the United States in the past 12 months than any year on record — and nowhere do the violence and homicides appear as concentrated as the Palmer Park area in Detroit. Dominic Holden went to ask trans women who live there what they think is happening. Read it at BuzzFeed News.

5. Landlocked Islanders — Hakai Magazine

Photograph by Krista Langlois for Hakai Magazine

Krista Langlois learns how Marshall Islanders, increasingly forced out of their homeland by the effects of global warming, are coping with life far from the sea. "Can Marshallese traditions and language survive...will climate change amount to cultural genocide?" Read it at Hakai Magazine.

6. The Anti-Immigration Activist Who Set the Stage for Donald Trump — BuzzFeed News

AP Images (2); Courtesy Remembrance Project

David Noriega explains how Maria Espinoza’s Remembrance Project uses the stories of Americans killed by undocumented immigrants to argue for restrictions on immigration. "We have uncovered the fact that Americans are under assault." Read it at BuzzFeed News.

7. June Millington's Lifelong Journey in Rock — NPR

Photograph by Audrey Spillman for NPR

Ann Powers visits Fanny's House of Music, the East Nashville outpost of guitarist June Millington. She's 67, a rock pioneer, and a badass biracial woman who was once the face of a beloved all-female rock band — so why don't more people know about her? Read it at NPR.

8. Why One Man Sold His Kidney to Escape Iran — BuzzFeed News

Photograph by Bradley Secker for BuzzFeed News

Danial risked his life to get to Turkey, trusting that the refugee system would look after him when he got there. Instead, as Lester Feder finds, it was just the beginning of his problems. Read it at BuzzFeed News.

9. Da Art of Storytellin' (A Prequel) — Oxford American

Illustration by Adam Shaw for Oxford American

A moving meditation by Kiese Laymon on the validation Outkast's ATLiens brought to black Southern life, labor, and love. "I’d heard that moan in the presence of older Southern black folk my entire life, but I’d never heard it connecting two rhymed verses. Art couldn’t get any fresher than that." Read it at Oxford American.

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