Contributing Writers

As President Biden officially announces his reelection bid for 2024, we look at his recent executive order establishing a new Office of Environmental Justice within the White House and requiring all federal agencies to weigh the environmental impact of policies on marginalized communities.

In a surprise announcement, Fox News said Monday it was cutting ties with its top-rated host Tucker Carlson, effective immediately. Although a precise reason wasn’t given, the move came just days after the cable network settled a $787.5 million defamation suit brought by Dominion Voting Systems over lies propagated by the cable network about the 2020 presidential election.

China is taking an increasingly assertive role in world affairs, helping to broker a restoration of relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia, offering a 12-point peace plan for Ukraine, and strengthening its relationships with European and Latin American powers. Last week, China continued its diplomatic outreach by offering to hold talks between Israel and Palestine. “China doesn’t want the United States to be the preeminent power.

We continue our conversation with Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, who has just returned from Honduras. He calls on the international community to do more to help in Central America, where one in three people are in urgent need of humanitarian aid, and gangs, drug trafficking and violence are forcing many to flee north.

As fighting continues in Sudan between the military and the paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces, we speak with Norwegian Refugee Council head Jan Egeland, who says humanitarian work in the country has been paralyzed as a result of the power struggle. “There is hardly any humanitarian work in large parts of Sudan,” says Egeland, who adds that the conflict has already devolved into a war that “will be impossible to stop if it lasts for much longer.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday halted a ban and other restrictions on the abortion medication mifepristone, keeping the nation’s most popular abortion method available for now as an appeal of the nationwide ban on the pill plays out. The ban was issued earlier this month by the Trump-appointed Texas Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, who ruled the Food and Drug Administration’s 23-year-old approval of the drug was invalid.

The United States and other countries moved to evacuate diplomats and citizens from Sudan over the weekend amid fighting between rival military factions that’s killed at least 420 people and injured over 3,700 more, in a crisis that began on April 15 when the Sudanese military and the paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces began exchanging fire in the capital Khartoum, further dashing hopes of a return of civilian rule in the country.

In Yemen, at least 79 people were killed and over 300 injured in a stampede on Wednesday in the capital city of Sana’a. The crowd crush began after armed Houthis fired into the air to control the crowd, striking electrical equipment and causing it to explode. The tragic deaths come as Yemen continues to face one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises following years of fighting between U.S.-backed Saudi forces and the Houthi rebels.

We get an update from South Texas, where Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket blew up four minutes after launch Friday and residents reported particulates or ash rained down on their neighborhoods near the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge. We speak with Bekah Hinojosa of Another Gulf Is Possible, who has been targeted for participating in protests against SpaceX. She says, “We’re clearly being exploited by a billionaire and his pet project.

We discuss the U.S. gun violence epidemic with historian Andrew McKevitt, who says, “We ought to conceive of our gun problem as a problem of gun capitalism.” He covers the history of the proliferation of individual gun ownership since World War II in his forthcoming book, Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture & Control in Cold War America.