Contributing Writers

We remember the legendary historian, author, professor, playwright and activist Howard Zinn, who was born 100 years ago today. Zinn was a regular guest on Democracy Now! from the start of the program in 1996 up until his death in 2010 at age 87. After witnessing the horrors of World War II as a bombardier, Zinn became a peace and justice activist who picketed with his students at Spelman College during the civil rights movement and joined in actions such as opposing the Vietnam War.

We speak with one of the more than 650 workers calling on Google’s parent company Alphabet to protect the location and browser history of people searching for information on abortion. A petition led by the Alphabet Workers Union also demands the company block advertisements that misleadingly direct users to so-called crisis pregnancy centers, a tactic employed by anti-abortion activists to lure patients to discourage them from seeking abortions.

Primaries in New York’s redrawn congressional districts have led to heated battles within the Democratic Party that could have national implications. In the newly created 10th Congressional District, Dan Goldman, a conservative Democrat and heir to a multimillion-dollar Levi Strauss fortune, is running against a diverse field of candidates that includes Mondaire Jones, Yuh-Line Niou, Carlina Rivera and Elizabeth Holtzman.

We speak to the Pakistani British historian and writer Tariq Ali about new anti-terrorism charges brought against former Prime Minister Imran Khan after he spoke out against the country’s police and a judge who presided over the arrest of one of his aides. His rivals have pressed for severe charges against Khan to keep him out of the next elections as his popularity grows across the country, says Ali.

Mexican authorities arrested former Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam on Friday for his failure to conduct a thorough investigation into the disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in 2014. This came a day after a truth commission formed by current President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said the students’ disappearance was a “crime of the state.

We speak with one of the more than 650 workers calling on Google’s parent company Alphabet to protect the location and browser history of people searching for information on abortion. A petition led by the Alphabet Workers Union also demands the company block advertisements that misleadingly direct users to so-called crisis pregnancy centers, a tactic employed by anti-abortion activists to lure patients to discourage them from seeking abortions.

A federal judge has blocked key portions of Florida’s new “Stop WOKE Act” that attempts to block discussions of racism and white privilege in workplaces and public schools. The preliminary injunction comes as the law is being challenged by business owners, students, educators and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Ahead of Tuesday’s primary election in Florida, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis’s new Office of Election Crimes and Security made its first arrests of people it alleged engaged in voter fraud in the 2020 election. Almost all those charged were people who were formerly incarcerated and mistakenly thought they were eligible to vote.

A landmark ruling orders pharmacy chains Walmart, CVS and Walgreens to pay a combined $650 million for their role in fueling the opioid crisis, as other cases have focused on opioid makers and wholesalers that distribute the addictive painkillers. A federal judge in Ohio found the pharmacy chains accountable for filling prescriptions even after suspecting doctors were operating pill mills.

A coalition of immigrant rights organizations have sued the data broker LexisNexis for collecting detailed personal information on millions of people and then selling it to governmental entities, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The lawsuit alleges LexisNexis has helped create “a massive surveillance state with files on almost every adult U.S. consumer,” and accuses ICE of using information collected by LexisNexis to circumvent local policies in sanctuary cities.

Israeli forces raided and closed the offices of seven Palestinian civil society rights groups in the occupied West Bank on Thursday, six of which Israeli authorities had designated as terrorist groups last year. The raid came as the United Nations condemned Israel for killing 19 Palestinian children in recent weeks, and 100 days after Israeli forces shot dead Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh while covering an Israeli military raid in the Jenin refugee camp.

Kenya is facing a political crisis following last week’s presidential election, with the apparent runner-up rejecting the results of the vote and the apparent president-elect announcing plans to form a new government. We speak with Nairobi-based writer and political analyst Nanjala Nyabola, who says the Kenyan elections yield “terrible candidates,” with the most recent election results following a decades-long tradition of election interference and miscommunication.

As Brazil approaches presidential elections, “The Territory” documents the struggle of the Indigenous Uru-eu-wau-wau people in the Brazilian Amazon against the deforestation and destruction of their land by farmers and others illegally extracting resources, which has expanded under far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.