Contributing Writers

We speak to Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío about U.S.-Cuba relations, sanctions and more. He is in New York for the United Nations General Assembly, where countries are expected to vote again in favor of lifting the 60-year economic blockade imposed by the U.S. on Cuba.

An attack by Azerbaijan on Armenia left more than 200 people dead before a ceasefire was called last Wednesday. It was the latest round of fighting between the two neighbors in the South Caucasus, which have fought a series of wars over territory. For more, we speak with Armenia-based reporter Roubina Margossian, who has reported from the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh that is at the center of the conflict.

Protests in Iran continue after the death of a 22-year-old Kurdish woman in custody of the so-called morality police. Mahsa Amini died last week after being detained for allegedly leaving some of her hair visible in violation of an Iranian law requiring women to cover their heads. Witnesses said Amini was severely beaten by police, but authorities claim she died of natural causes.

Former President Donald Trump is facing his greatest legal peril yet, as New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a civil lawsuit Wednesday against Trump, three of his children and his family business for widespread financial fraud. The suit alleges they overvalued assets by billions of dollars in order to secure more favorable financial arrangements, then deflated those values to pay less in taxes.

As human rights advocates denounce efforts by Republicans to send dozens of buses full of asylum seekers to sanctuary cities across the United States, we look at the related history of the Reverse Freedom Rides of 1962, when Southern segregationists bused Black families to the North to antagonize Northern liberals and civil rights activists.

Half of full-time workers in the United States cannot make ends meet. Thousands of them work for the Walt Disney Company. One of them reached out to the dissident heiress Abigail Disney, whose grandfather Roy Disney built what is often called the “happiest place on Earth.” Now she’s made a documentary about how the family business exploits its workers: “The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales.

Adnan Syed, the subject of the popular podcast “Serial,” was released Monday after a Maryland judge vacated his murder conviction due to evidence withheld during the trial that might have helped exonerate him. Syed spent 23 years in prison after being convicted of murdering his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee as a teenager in 1999. He has not been declared legally innocent, and prosecutors could decide to retry the case, but that appears unlikely.

An open letter signed by over 200 humanitarian groups calls on world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly to urgently take action on world hunger, citing that one person dies of hunger every four seconds. We speak with Abby Maxman, president and CEO of Oxfam America, one of the letter’s signatories, who just returned from Somaliland, where a famine may be declared as early as next month.

As Monday’s state funeral for Queen Elizabeth II marks the end of a national period of mourning in Britain, we speak with the U.K.’s first professor of Black studies, Kehinde Andrews, about the generational difference in perceptions of the queen within his Jamaican family, which he lays out in his recent essay, “I Don’t Mourn the Queen.

As human rights advocates denounce efforts by Republicans to send dozens of buses full of asylum seekers to sanctuary cities across the United States, we look at the related history of the Reverse Freedom Rides of 1962, when Southern segregationists bused Black families to the North to antagonize Northern liberals and civil rights activists.

President Biden declared that “the pandemic is over” during an interview on “60 Minutes” Sunday, despite data collected by Johns Hopkins showing COVID-19 killed 13,000 people across the U.S. over the past month as 2.2 million new infections were reported.

Democracy Now! co-host Juan González says people are showing resilience in the face of Hurricane Fiona in his native Puerto Rico, where the power grid crashed across the entire island due to the storm. Many who learned from 2017’s Hurricane Maria are dipping into their personal water reserves and using power generators, he says.

In an extended interview, acclaimed physician and author Dr. Gabor Maté discusses his new book, just out, called “The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture.” “The very values of a society are traumatizing for a lot of people,” says Maté, who argues in his book that “psychological trauma, woundedness, underlies much of what we call disease.