Contributing Writers

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has announced he will step down as CEO and move into a new role as executive chairman later this year, giving up the reins after nearly three decades during which he grew Amazon from an online book retailer into a sprawling business empire and became one of the world’s richest people in the process.

Hundreds have been deported in the last week, even as President Biden signed several executive orders Tuesday to undo the Trump administration’s hard-line anti-immigration policies.

We speak with a Burmese dissident about the military coup underway in Burma as de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi has been arrested. The coup unfolded hours before lawmakers were to take their seats in the opening of parliament, following a November election in which Aung San Suu Kyi’s party won over 80% of the contested seats in the Burmese parliament and the military made unsubstantiated claims of fraud.

A highly anticipated new feature film, “Judas and the Black Messiah,” tells the story of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton and William O’Neal, the FBI informant who infiltrated the Illinois Black Panther Party to collect information that ultimately led to Hampton’s killing in 1969 by law enforcement officers.

Russian authorities have arrested thousands of people during anti-government protests in support of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who has been held in jail since returning to Russia on January 17 after recovering in Germany from an attempt on his life in August using the nerve agent Novichok. Navalny has accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of being behind the poisoning that nearly killed him.

Russia has been one of the countries hardest hit by the pandemic, recording about 73,000 deaths and over 3.8 million infections over the past year. Meanwhile, there is widespread skepticism over the domestically developed Sputnik V vaccine, with many Russians reluctant to get the shot. Now a peer-reviewed study published in the respected Lancet medical journal has confirmed the vaccine’s 91.6% efficacy, as developers of the shot have long maintained.

Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, Black and Latinx people in the United States have died at higher rates, and new data shows that they are getting vaccinated at much lower rates than white people. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports more than 60% of those vaccinated were white, while just 11.5% were Latinx, 6% were Asian, and just over 5% were Black. The CDC data is based on details gathered during the first month of the U.S.

We spend the hour looking at the life of one of the most pivotal figures in the history of struggle for gender equality and racial justice, Pauli Murray, whose story is told in the new documentary “My Name Is Pauli Murray,” premiering at the Sundance Film Festival.

A highly anticipated new feature film, “Judas and the Black Messiah,” tells the story of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton and William O’Neal, the FBI informant who infiltrated the Illinois Black Panther Party to collect information that ultimately led to Hampton’s killing in 1969 by law enforcement officers.

Newly unearthed documents have shed new light on the FBI’s role in the murder of the 21-year-old Black Panther leader Fred Hampton on December 4, 1969, when Chicago police raided Hampton’s apartment and shot and killed him in his bed, along with fellow Black Panther leader Mark Clark.

Republicans face increasing pressure to strip Georgia Congressmember Marjorie Taylor Greene of her post on the House Education Committee. Greene was elected in November 2020 and is a far-right conspiracy theorist who has promoted QAnon, supported the execution of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and claimed the school shootings in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, and Parkland, Florida, were staged — as was the September 11 attack on the Pentagon.

We spend the hour looking at the life of one of the most pivotal figures in the history of struggle for gender equality and racial justice, Pauli Murray, whose story is told in the new documentary “My Name Is Pauli Murray,” premiering at the Sundance Film Festival.

We speak with Reuters investigative journalist Aram Roston, who has revealed a leader of the extremist hate group the Proud Boys, which played a key role in the Capitol riot on January 6, has a prolific history of cooperating with law enforcement. Court records show Enrique Tarrio was an FBI and police informant in Florida who went undercover in multiple drug and illegal gambling investigations after he was arrested in 2012.

As rich countries race to roll out their vaccination programs, leaders in the Global South and global health advocates are increasingly decrying vaccine hoarding that has pushed poorer countries to the back of the line during the pandemic. Some rich countries have secured enough COVID-19 vaccines to inoculate their populations several times over, while poorer countries struggle to secure enough doses, almost certainly prolonging the pandemic by months or even years.

The Biden administration has vowed to increase the rate of vaccinations as COVID-19 continues to spread uncontrollably across the entire U.S., with 90,000 people predicted to die in the next four weeks. President Biden announced plans to acquire another 200 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines made by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech and is devising ways to allow retired nurses and doctors to administer vaccines. Dr.