Contributing Writers

This week, protests were held across the United States against right-wing efforts to ban books and antiracism education in schools.

Former President Donald Trump’s legal team rested its case Thursday in the rape, battery and defamation trial brought by writer E. Jean Carroll without calling a single witness. Carroll has accused Trump of raping her in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman in the 1990s. Carroll was able to file the case against Trump decades later because New York opened a one-year window on the statute of limitations for adult survivors of sexual assault.

Four members of the far-right Proud Boys organization, including former leader Enrique Tarrio, were convicted Thursday of seditious conspiracy for trying to keep Donald Trump in office by force after his 2020 election defeat to Joe Biden. The men could face decades in prison for their actions. A fifth defendant was found not guilty of seditious conspiracy but convicted on other charges. We look at the Proud Boys, their role in the January 6 attack on the U.S.

A judge in California has dismissed a seven-year $100 million lawsuit against Greenpeace USA that threatened the group’s existence. Canadian logging giant Resolute Forest Products sued Greenpeace in the United States and Canada for defamation after the group exposed the company’s irresponsible practices, part of a pattern of corporations attempting to use the burdens of the legal process to intimidate, exhaust and censor activists.

We speak with Jumana Abo Oxa, project manager at the Greek refugee project, Elpida Home, who is in Washington, D.C., where she is meeting with Biden administration officials and lawmakers in an effort to seek help for 82 families, including many women parliamentarians, who evacuated from Afghanistan but have been stuck in Greece for over a year and a half.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned this week that Afghanistan continues to face the largest humanitarian crisis in the world today, with a two-day summit in Doha ending without formal recognition of the Taliban government that has ruled the country since August 2021. Since their return to power, the Taliban have cracked down on women’s rights, including restricting access to education and banning women from working with international aid groups.

A new report by Amnesty International documents how the Israeli government is using an experimental facial recognition system to track Palestinians and control their movements. The findings are part of “Automated Apartheid,” which reveals an ever-growing surveillance network of cameras in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron and in East Jerusalem — two places in the Occupied Territories where Israeli settlements are expanding within Palestinian areas.

Sixty years ago today is known as “D-Day” in Birmingham, Alabama, when thousands of children began a 10-week-long series of protests against segregation that became known as the Children’s Crusade. Hundreds were arrested. The next day, “Double D-Day,” the local head of the police, Bull Connor, ordered his white police force to begin using high-pressure fire hoses and dogs to attack the children.

Texas authorities have arrested the suspect in last week’s mass shooting in the town of Cleveland and are charging him with five counts of murder. Police say Francisco Oropesa killed five neighbors in the home next door, including a 9-year-old child, after the family asked him to stop firing his AR-15-style rifle in his yard because it was keeping a baby awake.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has warned Congress that the United States could run out of money to pay its bills by June 1 unless lawmakers raise the debt ceiling. House Republicans last week narrowly passed a bill to raise the debt ceiling, but only in exchange for sweeping spending cuts to numerous programs, including student debt relief, food assistance, Medicaid and renewable energy.