Contributing Writers

Porcha Woodruff was eight months pregnant when Detroit police mistakenly arrested her for robbery and carjacking based on a faulty facial recognition match. She was held in jail for 11 hours, where she started having contractions, and had to be taken to the hospital upon her release on a $100,000 bond. “Being under that type of stress could have ultimately led me to lose my child,” says Woodruff.

Six white former police officers in Mississippi who called themselves the “Goon Squad” have pleaded guilty to raiding a home on false drug charges and torturing two Black men while yelling racist slurs at them, and then trying to cover it up. We speak with Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker about how, on January 24, six deputies in Braxton, Mississippi, raided the home they were staying in and attacked them, and how they are speaking out to demand justice.

Voters in Ohio overwhelmingly rejected a Republican attempt to restrict abortion rights on Tuesday. The supermajority of Republicans in the Ohio Legislature had pushed for a ballot initiative that would have made it harder to amend the state constitution ahead of the November election, when voters will decide if the right to an abortion should be enshrined in the Ohio Constitution. A majority of Ohio voters support the right to abortion.

A federal lawsuit brought by Iraqi torture survivors appears finally headed to trial after a federal judge refused to dismiss the case last week. The Iraqis are suing the U.S. military contractor CACI, which provided interrogators at Abu Ghraib, the notorious Iraqi prison where the men were tortured by U.S. guards. The lawsuit, which alleges CACI was complicit in that torture, was first filed in 2008. Since then, CACI has attempted 18 times to have the case dismissed.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams has announced a plan to house as many as 2,000 asylum seekers at a tent complex on Randalls Island in the East River. Tens of thousands of asylum seekers have been sent to New York since last year and must wait 150 days to file for a work permit, leaving them no options to make a stable living.

We get an update from the Texas border, where human rights advocates are condemning Republican Governor Greg Abbott’s “Operation Lone Star” for its human rights abuses. Texas troopers have reportedly separated over two dozen migrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border in a major change of policy.

In an escalation of tensions, the Biden administration has deployed thousands of U.S. Marines and sailors to the Middle East in order to deter Iran from seizing oil tankers and other commercial ships near the Strait of Hormuz. The move comes after the Navy said Iran tried to seize two commercial oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman last month, after seizing dozens more since 2019. Iran responded by equipping its Navy with drones and missiles.

We speak with acclaimed scholar and activist Kimberlé Crenshaw about her new book #SayHerName, which honors the stories of 177 Black women and girls killed by police between 1975 and 2022 whose deaths received little media coverage or other attention.

A shocking story of wrongful arrest in Detroit has renewed scrutiny of how facial recognition software is being deployed by police departments, despite major flaws in the technology. Porcha Woodruff was arrested in February when police showed up at her house accusing her of robbery and carjacking. Woodruff, who was eight months pregnant at the time, insisted she had nothing to do with the crime, but police detained her for 11 hours, during which time she had contractions.

The family of Henrietta Lacks, a Black cancer patient whose cells were taken by Johns Hopkins University Hospital without her consent in 1951, has reached a deal over the unethical use of her cells with pharmaceutical company Thermo Fisher Scientific.

We look at the fight for reproductive rights in the United States with Dorothy Roberts, director of the University of Pennsylvania Program on Race, Science and Society, who has long warned against the criminalization of pregnancy and has been hailed as a pioneer in the reproductive justice movement.

Last Wednesday, Nigerien military officers announced they had overthrown President Mohamed Bazoum, a close ally of the United States and France. ECOWAS, an economic bloc of West African countries, has threatened to take military action unless the coup is reversed by Sunday.

On Thursday, former President Donald Trump pleaded not guilty to trying to overturn the results of his 2020 election loss. Trump appeared before a magistrate judge in Washington’s federal courthouse two days after he was indicted. A key part of the election interference charges Trump faces relates to a Civil War-era rights law that protects the right of citizens to have their vote counted.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado has sued the FBI, the Colorado Springs Police Department and local officers for illegally spying on local activist Jacqueline “Jax” Armendariz Unzueta and the Chinook Center, a community organizing hub in Colorado Springs. “This was one of the worst moments of my life,” says Unzueta, who describes the investigation by law enforcement as “incredibly invasive.

After the Center for Countering Digital Hate reported that hate speech has soared on the website formerly known as Twitter, now rebranded as “X,” Elon Musk responded by filing a lawsuit against the center over the research, calling the group “evil” and its CEO Imran Ahmed a “rat.” X accuses the watchdog group of unlawfully accessing data to “falsely claim it had statistical support showing the platform is overwhelmed with harmful content.