Contributing Writers

On the eve of his 100th day in office, President Joe Biden gave his first speech to a joint session of Congress and proposed trillions of dollars in new economic measures. He unveiled his $1.8 trillion American Families Plan, which includes $1 trillion in new spending and $800 billion in tax credits aimed at expanding access to education and child care.

As new coronavirus cases surge across India, overwhelming hospitals and crematories, calls are growing louder for wealthy countries to stop hoarding excess supply of COVID-19 vaccines and to loosen intellectual property restrictions preventing more countries from making their own vaccines. We speak with economist Jayati Ghosh and Congressmember Ro Khanna of California.

As India faces 1 million new COVID-19 infections every three days, we look at how more infectious variants have been linked to a spread in cases. The so-called India variant has now been detected in at least 19 countries. “This virus behaves differently now, in that it’s much more infectious,” says Dr. Priya Sampathkumar, an infectious disease physician at the Mayo Clinic.

India has topped 18.3 million COVID-19 cases, after adding 1 million cases in just the past three days amid shortages in vital supplies and overwhelmed hospitals across the country. Makeshift mass cremation facilities have been set up in parks and parking lots, with rows of bodies being burned on funeral pyres. With hospitals overflowing, some patients have been turned away and left to deal with their infections on their own.

Outrage is growing in Philadelphia after explosive revelations that the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University have been in possession of remains thought to belong to two children who were among 11 people killed in the 1985 police bombing of the Philadelphia home of the radical, Black liberation and anti-police-brutality group MOVE.

We continue our conversation with The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill, who just published a groundbreaking new project on Joe Biden’s decades-long foreign policy record. Scahill says that during his years in the U.S. Senate, Biden “almost never meets a war he doesn’t support,” becoming one of the most hawkish figures in Washington in the 1990s and 2000s.

An investigation into President Joe Biden’s foreign policy record reveals “the history of the evolution of the American empire, from the Vietnam War to the present,” says Jeremy Scahill, award-winning journalist and co-founder of The Intercept, which recently published a project titled “Empire Politician” that examines Biden’s stances on war and militarism.

As President Joe Biden nears his 100th day in the White House, we look at his foreign policy record, both as president and over the past five decades. A new project created by Jeremy Scahill, award-winning journalist and senior correspondent at The Intercept, examines Biden’s stances on war, militarism and the CIA going back to the early 1970s, when he was first elected as a senator in Delaware.

As President Joe Biden makes history by explicitly describing the 1915 massacre of Armenians by Ottoman Turks as a “genocide,” we speak with Peter Balakian, Pulitzer Prize-winning Armenian American poet and professor at Colgate University. On April 24, 1915, the Ottoman Empire began a systematic, premeditated campaign targeting the Armenian people, an unarmed Christian minority living under Turkish rule.

Many of the anti-protest laws pushed by Republicans include measures that provide civil or criminal immunity to drivers who hit demonstrators with their vehicles. A pending Oklahoma measure would offer both. “It’s declaring open season,” says Susan Bro, whose daughter Heather Heyer was killed in 2017 when a white supremacist plowed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville.

Outrage is growing in Philadelphia after explosive revelations that the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University have been in possession of remains thought to belong to two children who were among 11 people killed in the 1985 police bombing of the Philadelphia home of the radical, Black liberation and anti-police-brutality group MOVE.

Hundreds of demonstrators have taken to the streets of Elizabeth City, North Carolina, to protest the police killing of Andrew Brown Jr., a 42-year-old Black father shot dead in his car on April 21. On Monday, authorities allowed Brown’s family and attorney to watch a 20-second video clip of the shooting. The family says it shows Brown was shot in the back of the head while his hands were on the steering wheel of a car, calling it an “execution.