Contributing Writers

Trump’s speech to a joint session of Congress discussed the Middle East without any mention of Palestinians. This comes as Trump has called for ethnic cleansing of Gaza and posted an AI-generated video depicting Gaza as a resort town with a golden statue of Trump. Congressmember Bonnie Watson Coleman attended the speech with her guest Dr. Adam Hamawy, an Army veteran and reconstructive surgeon who recently volunteered at a Gaza hospital.

Amid ongoing chaos and outrage stemming from the Trump administration’s gutting of the U.S. Agency for International Development, we hear a critique of USAID and the “humanitarian-industrial complex” from South African anthropologist Kathryn Mathers. ”USAID is very much a part of a system and industry that not only depends on global inequality … but in many ways produces it,” she says.

“They cut everything at once.” ProPublica reporter Brett Murphy is tracking the aftermath of the “haphazard” and “draconian” dismantling of USAID, which experts warn will lead to a dangerous rise in disease epidemics around the world, including risking the resurgence of Ebola and tuberculosis. Despite the administration’s claims in court, says Murphy, “this is the opposite of a careful review,” and has left in its wake wasted resources, unpaid workers and an end to “literally lifesaving work.

The Supreme Court has rejected a request by the Trump administration to continue refusing to pay out nearly $2 billion for work completed by USAID, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joining the court’s three liberal justices in the majority. However, the court’s decision did not specify when the money must be released, allowing Trump’s team to further dispute the issue in lower courts.

Trump’s speech to a joint session of Congress discussed the Middle East without any mention of Palestinians. This comes as Trump has called for ethnic cleansing of Gaza and posted an AI-generated video depicting Gaza as a resort town with a golden statue of Trump. Congressmember Bonnie Watson Coleman attended the speech with her guest Dr. Adam Hamawy, an Army veteran and reconstructive surgeon who recently volunteered at a Gaza hospital.

President Trump has signed a number of anti-trans executive orders in the first month of his second term. He has attempted to ban trans women from sports, declared that there are only two sexes, and placed restrictions on gender-affirming care for trans youth. Trump continues to target trans people with hateful rhetoric, leaving trans people uncertain of their futures.

As stiff new tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China took effect on Tuesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warned that Trump’s moves are aimed at “a total collapse of the Canadian economy, because that’ll make it easier to annex us.” Canada relies on the U.S. for 75% of exports and a third of its imports. For more, we speak with a senior researcher at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood. “If there’s one feeling in Canada right now, it’s probably betrayal.

President Trump on Tuesday once again focused on the importance of securing the U.S. border and criticized former President Biden’s so-called open border policies. He accused Biden of allowing migrants to “overwhelm” towns like Aurora, Colorado, and Springfield, Ohio, and pushed for even more funding to implement his campaign promise of mass deportations.

In his first speech to a joint session of Congress in his second term, Trump once again threatened to annex the Panama Canal. Juan González, co-host of Democracy Now!, fact-checks some of the lies that Trump used to justify U.S. control of the Panama Canal. In his address, Trump claimed 38,000 Americans were killed during the creation of the Panama Canal. In reality, the vast majority of the labor force that built the canal was from the West Indies, largely Barbados.

We remember Aaron Bushnell, the U.S. Air Force member who died last year in an act of protest outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. On a live-streamed video, Bushnell said he could not be “complicit in genocide” while the United States continued to support Israel’s war on Gaza; he then set himself on fire, screaming “Free Palestine” until he collapsed.

We speak with Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, the co-directors of the Oscar-nominated documentary Sugarcane, which examines the legacy of Indian residential schools in Canada. For over 150 years, these government-funded and church-run boarding schools forcibly separated First Nations, Métis and Inuit children from their families in an effort to destroy Indigenous languages, cultures and communities.

As the oil company Energy Transfer sues Greenpeace over the 2016 Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, we speak with Indigenous activist Winona LaDuke, who took part in that historic uprising.

A closely watched civil trial that began in North Dakota last week could bankrupt Greenpeace and chill environmental activism as the climate crisis continues to deepen. The multimillion-dollar lawsuit by Energy Transfer, the oil corporation behind the Dakota Access Pipeline, claims Greenpeace organized the mass protests and encampment at Standing Rock between 2016 and 2017 aimed at stopping construction of the project.

We continue our conversation with Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch and the author of the new book, Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments. Roth discusses the fragile ceasefire in Gaza amid news that Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu is refusing to withdraw Israeli troops as per his government’s agreement with Hamas, as well as withholding food and humanitarian aid from Gaza.

Kenneth Roth, visiting professor at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and former executive director of Human Rights Watch, responds to the shocking Oval Office meeting between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, U.S. President Donald Trump and U.S. Vice President JD Vance, in which Vance and Trump publicly admonished Zelensky over the Russia-Ukraine war and accused him of not being grateful for the U.S.’s military support.

A public clash at the White House between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, U.S. President Donald Trump and U.S. Vice President JD Vance has left the future of U.S. foreign policy uncertain. Zelensky had traveled to the White House last week to sign a deal giving the United States partial control over Ukraine’s raw earth minerals in exchange for continued military aid for its war against Russia.

The Palestinian-Israeli film No Other Land won for best documentary feature at Sunday’s Academy Awards. The film follows the struggles of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank community of Masafer Yatta to stay on their land amid home demolitions by the Israeli military and violent attacks by Jewish settlers aimed at expelling them.

Thousands of informational government webpages have been taken down so far in the second Trump administration, including on public health, scientific research and LGBTQ rights. Amid this mass erasure of public information, the Internet Archive is racing to save copies of those deleted resources.

We continue to look at Israeli torture of Palestinian detainees with Naji Abbas from Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, which has just released a new report detailing the mistreatment of medical workers from Gaza. Hundreds of doctors, nurses, paramedics and other essential medical staff were arrested by Israeli forces in Gaza since October 2023 and held under brutal conditions, with many describing physical, psychological and sexual abuse, starvation, medical neglect and more.

Dr. Khaled Alser, a renowned Palestinian surgeon at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, describes how Israeli forces abducted him from Gaza last year before transferring him to Israeli prisons rife with abuse. He was held by Israel for seven months last year, during which time he says he was beaten, humiliated, denied medical treatment and tortured.

We speak with foreign policy analyst Matt Duss about increasingly fraught relations between the United States and Ukraine, which have undergone a seismic shift under the second Trump administration. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is meeting with President Trump at the White House on Friday and is expected to sign an agreement giving the U.S. access to his country’s rare earth minerals, which are key components in mobile phones and other advanced technology.

Thousands of informational government webpages have been taken down so far in the second Trump administration, including on public health, scientific research and LGBTQ rights. Amid this mass erasure of public information, the Internet Archive is racing to save copies of those deleted resources.