Contributing Writers

We speak with civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump about two recent cases of anti-Black racism making headlines in the United States: Florida’s new curriculum standards that teach students the “benefits” of transatlantic slavery to enslaved people, and a set of lawsuits against Northwestern University accusing the school’s athletic teams of widespread and institutionalized hazing, including physical, racial and sexual abuse.

This week, a witness to the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965 revealed for the first time that he overheard a New York police officer asking if Malcolm’s assassin was “with us.” The eyewitness, Mustafa Hassan, spoke Tuesday alongside Malcolm X’s daughter Ilyasah Shabazz and civil rights attorney Ben Crump at a press conference at the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center. Democracy Now! spoke to Hassan at the press conference.

North Korea fired two ballistic missiles into the sea Monday, hours after a second American nuclear-armed submarine arrived in South Korea. Meanwhile, peace activists are gathering in Washington, D.C., for a national mobilization to call on President Biden and Congress to officially end the Korean War, 70 years after the signing of the July 27, 1953, Korean Armistice that ended active military conflict.

The movie Oppenheimer about J. Robert Oppenheimer — the “father of the atomic bomb” — focuses on Oppenheimer’s conflicted feelings about the weapons of mass destruction he helped unleash on the world, and how officials ignored those concerns after World War II as the Cold War started an arms race. Journalist Greg Mitchell says that while the film is well made and worth seeing, “the omissions are quite serious.

Kurdish peace activist Kani Xulam is in New York City after his solo 300-mile, 24-day walk from the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., to the United Nations headquarters. His arrival Monday coincided with the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne, which partitioned Kurdistan into four parts — British Iraq, French Syria, Turkey and Iran — which left the Kurdish people without a recognized sovereign state.

Amid a widening crackdown on abortion access, 19 Republican attorneys general in states where abortion is illegal are demanding the right for local governments to access the private medical records of patients in order to see if they obtained abortions out of state. We speak to Tamarra Wieder, state director of Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates in Louisville, Kentucky, where residents are crossing state lines to access abortion care due to the state’s near-total abortion ban.

We speak with two Israeli journalists in Tel Aviv after lawmakers in Israel passed a highly contested bill Monday weakening the power of the Supreme Court by preventing it from blocking government decisions it deems unreasonable. The bill is part of a broader set of judicial reforms pushed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that has sparked months of unprecedented protests, which continued last night.

The movie Oppenheimer about J. Robert Oppenheimer — the “father of the atomic bomb” — focuses on Oppenheimer’s conflicted feelings about the weapons of mass destruction he helped unleash on the world, and how officials ignored those concerns after World War II as the Cold War started an arms race. Journalist Greg Mitchell says that while the film is well made and worth seeing, “the omissions are quite serious.

In a landmark $13 million settlement, New York City has agreed to pay 1,300 people attacked by police while protesting the Minnesota police murder of George Floyd in 2020. Sow v. City of New York yielded the largest total payout to protesters in a class-action suit in U.S. history, totaling about $10,000 per person.

As a record-breaking heat wave continues in Arizona, reporters with The Intercept say they have observed U.S. Border Patrol holding about 50 migrants inside a chain-link pen in the Sonoran Desert, at the Ajo Border Patrol Station. This comes as the group Humane Borders reports the bodies of at least 13 people were found over the past month in the Sonoran Desert where many migrants cross.

The U.S. Justice Department is threatening to sue the state of Texas after Republican Governor Greg Abbott installed barrels wrapped in razor wire in the Rio Grande in an attempt to block migrants from crossing the river. This comes just after a whistleblower state trooper at the Texas Department of Public Safety recently protested the state’s inhumane policies in a letter to superiors.

In an in-depth interview about her work, we speak with Isabel Allende, one of the world’s most celebrated novelists, author of 26 books that have sold more than 77 million copies and have been translated into 42 languages. Her books include The House of the Spirits, Paula and Daughter of Fortune, and her latest novel is The Wind Knows My Name, which looks at the trauma of child-family separation, from Nazi Germany to the U.S.

A damning new investigation by journalists Maria Hinojosa and Zeba Warsi examines how immigration officials have failed to properly address complaints of sexual abuse from people held in detention centers. The report from Futuro Investigates and Latino USA details how women in jails run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, have been sexually abused, often in a medical setting when they are at their most vulnerable.

We speak with first-grade teacher Melissa Tempel, who was fired last week for a viral tweet in which she criticized the Waukesha, Wisconsin, board of education’s decision to ban her students from singing “Rainbowland” during a school concert earlier this year. The hit song about inclusivity by Miley Cyrus and Dolly Parton includes the lyrics “We are rainbows, me and you / Every color, every hue / Let’s shine on through.

As world leaders from the United States to France welcome Prime Minister Narendra Modi, we look at press freedom in India under the leader of the Hindu nationalist party BJP. One of India’s last bastions of free media, NDTV, has been taken over by Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, believed to have close ties to Modi.