Contributing Writers

As cities nationwide crack down on unhoused populations and soaring rents force people out of their homes, the Los Angeles City Council faced major protests this week when it voted to ban encampments for unhoused people near schools and daycares. The vote expanded an anti-homeless ordinance to include nearly a quarter of the city.

We speak to Walden Bello, the longtime Filipino activist and former vice-presidential candidate. He was arrested Monday on “cyber libel” charges, which he says was just a tactic by the new administration to suppress his vocal criticism of them. The arrest took place just weeks after the inauguration of Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the son of the former U.S.-backed dictator. Bello says people are “worried that this is a foretaste of things to come.

A jury in California has convicted a former worker at Twitter of spying for Saudi Arabia by providing the kingdom private information about Saudi dissidents. The spying effort led to the arrest, torture and jailing of Abdulrahman al-Sadhan, who ran an anonymous satirical Twitter account. His sister, Areej al-Sadhan, and the lawyer for the family, Jim Walden, are calling on the Biden administration to push for his release.

One year after the Taliban seized power again in Afghanistan, we look at the new government’s crackdown on women’s rights while millions of Afghans go hungry. We speak to journalist Matthieu Aikins, who visited the capital Kabul for the first time since the U.S. evacuation one year ago. He writes the country is being “kept on humanitarian life support” in his recent article for The New York Times Magazine.

As cities nationwide crack down on unhoused populations and soaring rents force people out of their homes, the Los Angeles City Council faced major protests this week when it voted to ban encampments for unhoused people near schools and daycares. The vote expanded an anti-homeless ordinance to include nearly a quarter of the city.

Housing activists are in Washington, D.C., this week to meet with Biden administration officials and urge them to take immediate action to address the rent inflation crisis, as prices soar and the end of eviction moratoriums has caused eviction rates to spike again.

Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott is sending busloads of asylum seekers to New York City and other “liberal” cities to oppose what he calls the Biden administration’s “open borders policies.” About 100 asylum seekers arrived Wednesday at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in a bus chartered by Texas, adding to the thousands of asylum seekers the city claims has strained its shelter system in the past few months.

After months of failure to revive the Iran nuclear deal, European Union negotiators have drafted a “final” text for the U.S. and Iran to sign. An agreement seems more likely, due to Iran backing down on original demands for the U.S. to take the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps off its terrorist blacklist and for future U.S. presidents to not have the authority to pull out of the deal as the Trump administration did.

Two years of right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s text messages have now been turned over to the House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection. The messages were first revealed in court last week in Austin, Texas, just before a jury ordered InfoWars host Alex Jones to pay $4.1 million in compensatory damages and $45.

The Biden administration says it is officially ending the controversial Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy that forces asylum seekers to wait in Mexico as their cases wind through court, often in grueling conditions for months or years. We speak to attorney and activist Efrén Olivares with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Immigrant Justice Project about the impact of this policy, as well as ongoing efforts to reunite families separated at the U.S.

Leaders of the African People’s Socialist Party say the FBI carried out a violent raid on its properties with flash grenades and drones early Friday morning in Missouri and Florida. The pan-Africanist group has been a longtime advocate for reparations for slavery and a vocal critic of U.S. foreign policy. The raid appears to be connected to a separate indictment of a Russian man accused of using U.S.-based groups to spread Russian propaganda and tampering with U.S. elections.

Police say they have arrested a primary suspect in the recent killings of four Muslim men in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Authorities say Muhammad Syed, 51, committed at least two of the killings and may have been motivated by anger that his daughter had married outside of her branch of Islam. The four victims are Mohammad Ahmadi, Muhammed Afzaal Hussain, Aftab Hussein and Naeem Hussain.