Contributing Writers

We speak with Rachel Griffin Accurso, the educator known to millions around the world as Ms. Rachel, who has become a leading advocate for children in Gaza. Her YouTube channel for young children became wildly popular during the COVID-19 pandemic and today has more than 16 million subscribers. Since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza, Accurso has used her social media reach to speak out for Palestinian children facing hunger, disease, injury and death.

Former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe was recently sentenced to 12 years of house arrest after he was found guilty of bribing imprisoned members of paramilitary groups to coax them into retracting damaging testimony exposing Uribe’s ties to U.S.-backed, right-wing paramilitary groups. Uribe was a staunch U.S.

As President Trump threatens to use U.S. special forces against drug cartels abroad, a new book, The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces, reveals some of the most secretive and elite special forces in the Army are heavily involved in narcotrafficking themselves.

Global condemnation is mounting over the assassination of one of the most prominent journalists in Gaza, Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif, along with four of his colleagues at the network and a sixth journalist — the freelance reporter Mohammed al-Khalidi.
The killing of al-Sharif and his colleagues is “really murder,” says Irene Khan, U.N. special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression. “It is not killing in the context of war.

President Trump secretly signed a directive approving the Pentagon’s use of military force on foreign soil to target Latin American drug cartels, according to a New York Times report. The order gives the Pentagon authority to direct military operations at sea and on foreign soil against cartels designated by the Trump administration to be terrorist organizations.

After announcing the federal takeover of law enforcement in D.C. in the White House briefing room, President Trump painted a grim picture of the capital — including “roving mobs of wild youth” — that contrasts with crime figures showing D.C. reached a 30-year low in violent crime last January.

We speak with Rachel Griffin Accurso, the educator known to millions around the world as Ms. Rachel, who has become a leading advocate for children in Gaza. Her YouTube channel for young children became wildly popular during the COVID-19 pandemic and today has more than 16 million subscribers. Since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza, Accurso has used her social media reach to speak out for Palestinian children facing hunger, disease, injury and death.

Global condemnation is mounting over the assassination of one of the most prominent journalists in Gaza, Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif, along with four of his colleagues at the network and a sixth journalist — the freelance reporter Mohammed al-Khalidi.
The killing of al-Sharif and his colleagues is “really murder,” says Irene Khan, U.N. special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression. “It is not killing in the context of war.

President Trump secretly signed a directive approving the Pentagon’s use of military force on foreign soil to target Latin American drug cartels, according to a New York Times report. The order gives the Pentagon authority to direct military operations at sea and on foreign soil against cartels designated by the Trump administration to be terrorist organizations.

After announcing the federal takeover of law enforcement in D.C. in the White House briefing room, President Trump painted a grim picture of the capital — including “roving mobs of wild youth” — that contrasts with crime figures showing D.C. reached a 30-year low in violent crime last January.

President Trump announced Monday that he is taking “historic action” to “take the capital back” by deploying the National Guard in Washington, D.C., and federalizing the city’s police department to “re-establish law and order,” and threatened the homeless population with jail time if they do not leave the city. Monica Hopkins, executive director of the ACLU of the District of Columbia, says there are legal limitations for the federal takeover of police forces.

As immigration raids and arrests continue to terrorize communities across the United States, we look at grassroots efforts to fight back. ICE has faced widespread backlash over the arrest of community advocates swept up while documenting raids across the country, many of them U.S. citizens.

We speak with California Attorney General Rob Bonta ahead of the start of California’s court case challenging the Trump administration’s move to federalize the state’s National Guard to support immigration raids. Bonta argues the use of the military for civilian law enforcement in Los Angeles clearly violated the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878. “This is something that is deeply rooted in our history and our law as something that is prohibited, and Mr.

Doctors Without Borders is demanding the closure of Israeli- and U.S.-backed food distribution centers in Gaza run by the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. About 1,400 Palestinians have been killed trying to get food at GHF sites since May. A new report from Doctors Without Borders — also known as Médecins Sans Frontières, or MSF — gathers testimony from its medics and others about the apparently deliberate targeting of Palestinians seeking food.

We speak with Al Jazeera managing editor Mohamed Moawad after Israel assassinated five of the network’s journalists in Gaza, including veteran correspondent Anas al-Sharif, in an airstrike Sunday on a media tent outside Al-Shifa Hospital. Al Jazeera has condemned the attack as an attempt to silence reporting on Israel’s planned seizure and occupation of Gaza.

Jess Michaels lives with the PTSD from her 1991 assault by the serial sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. She is part of a national chorus of voices calling on the Trump administration to release files related to the federal case against Epstein, who reportedly died by suicide while awaiting trial in 2019.

In a major victory for environmental advocates, chemical giant DuPont and its related companies have agreed to pay $2 billion to clean up four industrial sites in New Jersey that are contaminated with “forever chemicals,” or PFAS, which have been found to persist in everything from rainwater to human breast milk.

Israel’s security cabinet has announced the approval of a plan to occupy Gaza City, moving its ongoing military offensive north and displacing hundreds of thousands of civilians to camps in central Gaza. Middle East analyst Mouin Rabbani emphasizes that the new strategy is simply “the first phase of a larger plan” for the permanent displacement, occupation and annexation of the entire Gaza Strip, as confirmed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a recent interview with Fox News.

Negotiations are underway in Geneva on a legally binding Global Plastics Treaty that has been in the works for several years, as the crisis of pollution from plastics worldwide has grown more acute. An estimated 8 billion metric tons of plastic waste now pollute the planet. Without changes, the production of plastic is expected to triple by 2060 — much of it driven by single-use plastics.

Jess Michaels lives with the PTSD from her 1991 assault by the serial sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. She is part of a national chorus of voices calling on the Trump administration to release files related to the federal case against Epstein, who reportedly died by suicide while awaiting trial in 2019.

In a major victory for environmental advocates, chemical giant DuPont and its related companies have agreed to pay $2 billion to clean up four industrial sites in New Jersey that are contaminated with “forever chemicals,” or PFAS, which have been found to persist in everything from rainwater to human breast milk.

Israel’s security cabinet has announced the approval of a plan to occupy Gaza City, moving its ongoing military offensive north and displacing hundreds of thousands of civilians to camps in central Gaza. Middle East analyst Mouin Rabbani emphasizes that the new strategy is simply “the first phase of a larger plan” for the permanent displacement, occupation and annexation of the entire Gaza Strip, as confirmed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a recent interview with Fox News.

Negotiations are underway in Geneva on a legally binding Global Plastics Treaty that has been in the works for several years, as the crisis of pollution from plastics worldwide has grown more acute. An estimated 8 billion metric tons of plastic waste now pollute the planet. Without changes, the production of plastic is expected to triple by 2060 — much of it driven by single-use plastics.