Uvalde, Texas, school district police chief Pete Arredondo has resigned from his new position on Uvalde’s City Council after facing widespread criticism over his handling of the May 24 school massacre when an 18-year-old gunman shot dead 19 fourth graders and two teachers. State authorities say Arredondo was the incident commander who ordered officers to wait in the school’s hallway for over an hour instead of confronting the gunman.

Mass racial justice protests broke out this weekend in Akron, Ohio, after police released multiple body-camera videos showing eight officers chasing and killing 25-year-old Jayland Walker after a minor traffic violation on June 27. Walker was an unarmed Black man. The video ends with the police firing about 90 rounds and shooting Walker about 60 times, according to an autopsy report, and lawyers for the family of Walker say police handcuffed him after the attack before trying to provide aid.

Six people were killed and at least two dozen injured when a rooftop gunman armed with a high-powered rifle attacked a Fourth of July parade in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park on Monday morning. The police eventually arrested Robert Crimo III, a 21-year-old white resident of Highland Park and aspiring musician, whose music videos depicted mass murder and school shootings.

As activists across the U.S. are mobilizing to defend reproductive rights, we speak to the Dutch physician Dr. Rebecca Gomperts, who has dedicated her life to circumventing anti-abortion laws, including providing abortions on ships in international waters and sending abortions pills around the world. She also discusses navigating censorship on social media platforms, telemedicine, the future of contraception and more.

As the Supreme Court strikes down Roe v. Wade, we speak with law professor Michele Goodwin, who has written extensively about how the criminalization of abortion polices motherhood. She discusses how on the eve of the court’s oral arguments in the Dobbs case in November, she wrote about how an abortion saved her life. She describes how the U.S.

As protests continue across the country in response to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, we speak with two leading legal scholars. Kathryn “Kitty” Kolbert is co-founder of the Center for Reproductive Rights and argued the landmark case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1992, which upheld Roe v. Wade. She is the co-author of “Controlling Women: What We Must Do Now to Save Reproductive Freedom.

Amanda Gorman became the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history last year when she spoke at the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. She was 22 years old when she read “The Hill We Climb,” a poem she finished right after the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6. We continue our July Fourth special broadcast with Gorman’s remarkable address.

We begin our July Fourth special broadcast with the words of Frederick Douglass. Born into slavery around 1818, Douglass became a key leader of the abolitionist movement. On July 5, 1852, in Rochester, New York, Douglass gave one of his most famous speeches, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” He was addressing the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society.