A 60-year U.S. embargo that prevents U.S.-made products from being exported to Cuba has forced the small island nation to develop its own COVID-19 vaccines and rely on open source designs for life-saving medical equipment such as ventilators. We speak to leading Cuban scientist Dr. Mitchell Valdés-Sosa about how massive mobilization helped produce three original vaccines that have proven highly effective against the coronavirus.

Liberal Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer is retiring after nearly three decades on the bench, giving President Biden a chance to fulfill a campaign promise to nominate the first Black woman in history to serve on the high court. Those worried that identity politics will hinder the most qualified candidate should consider that 108 of 115 justices since the nation’s founding have been white men, says Elie Mystal, justice correspondent for The Nation.

In memory of Thich Nhat Hanh, the world-renowned Buddhist monk, antiwar activist, poet and teacher who died Saturday, we reair a speech Hanh gave at Riverside Church in New York in 2001. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, Hanh urged the audience to embrace peace in the face of anger, citing his experience of witnessing suffering on both sides during the war in his native Vietnam. “The real enemy of man is not man,” says Hanh.

The documentary “Takeover,” which chronicles the radical actions of the Young Lords, was recently shortlisted for an Academy Award. In 1970, the Puerto Rican collective took over a condemned hospital in the South Bronx to demand the construction of a new hospital, free healthcare for all, and more.

We speak to award-winning journalist Jonathan Katz about his new book “Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire.” The book follows the life of the Marines officer Smedley Butler and the trail of U.S. imperialism from Cuba and the Philippines to Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Panama. The book also describes an effort by banking and business leaders to topple Franklin D.

As new cases of the highly infectious Omicron variant continue to climb in undervaccinated parts of the world, we speak to the head of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about how vaccine inequity could lead to even more variants of the coronavirus. Dr. John Nkengasong says only 10% of the population is fully immunized in Africa, a continent of 1.3 billion people, and millions of vaccines donated by COVAX went unused because of their short shelf life.