Contributing Writers

We speak with Serbian journalist Ljiljana Smajlović as Serbia reels from a pair of mass shootings that left 17 people dead, incidents that spurred mass protests and demands for stronger gun control. In light of the massacres, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić vowed to completely disarm the country. More than 6,000 unregistered guns and weapons were turned in after the government announced a month-long amnesty on illegal weapons. “People are stunned.

We look at the political crisis in Pakistan as the Islamabad High Court on Friday granted two weeks’ bail to former Prime Minister Imran Khan after his arrest sparked mass protests. Paramilitary forces arrested Khan on corruption charges, but Pakistan’s Supreme Court later ruled his arrest was “invalid and unlawful.” Khan served as prime minister from 2018 to 2022, when he was ousted from office in what he called a “U.S.

The number of asylum seekers from Cuba and Venezuela is expected to grow as the Trump-era Title 42 asylum restriction ends. A group of House Democrats are urging the Biden administration to lift sanctions on the countries, which they say are driving people to leave their homes out of economic desperation. We speak with Venezuelan economist Francisco Rodríguez, author of a new report for the Center for Economic Policy and Research, “The Human Consequences of Economic Sanctions.

The Trump-era Title 42 policy has come to an end, but the Biden administration has instituted what human rights advocates say amounts to a new asylum ban. We get an update from the San Ysidro border crossing near San Diego, California, where hundreds of asylum seekers have been sleeping on the ground under trash bags and foil blankets, with many reporting they’ve not eaten in days. Pedro Rios, director of the American Friends Service Committee’s U.S.

As President Biden ends Title 42, the Trump-era policy blocking asylum seekers, and plans stronger enforcement measures on the border, we speak with Salvadoran poet and writer Javier Zamora, whose best-selling memoir, Solito, details his odyssey as a 9-year-old child traveling unaccompanied through Guatemala, Mexico and eventually through the Sonoran Desert, before he makes it to Arizona and reunites with his parents with the aid of other migrants.

One year ago, on May 11, 2022, an Israeli soldier fatally shot the Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in the head as she was reporting on an Israeli military raid just outside the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. She was shot while wearing a blue helmet and blue flak jacket clearly emblazoned with the word “press.” Abu Akleh was one of the most prominent TV journalists in the Arab world and had worked for Al Jazeera for a quarter of a century.

Scandal-plagued New York Republican Congressmember George Santos pleaded not guilty to 13 federal charges at a courthouse on Long Island Wednesday. He is charged with wire fraud, money laundering, lying on federal disclosure forms, and fraudulently collecting unemployment benefits while earning a $120,000 salary.

Under a law passed last year in New York that allows sexual abuse survivors to sue their abusers in civil court even after the criminal statute of limitations has passed, a jury has found former President Donald Trump to be liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll at a department store in the 1990s. After just three hours of deliberations, the jury ordered Trump to pay Carroll $5 million. Following the ruling, Trump appeared in a televised town hall on CNN, where he mocked E.

Eleven people were arrested at a protest in New York on Monday demanding justice for Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old unhoused Black man who was choked to death on a subway car last week by another passenger. Neely was well known as a dancer and Michael Jackson impersonator. He was crying out that he was hungry, when he was fatally attacked on the train by a 24-year-old former marine named Daniel Penny, who was questioned by police but released without charges.