Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general cleared a major hurdle this week after two Republican senators who had raised concerns agreed to back him. Blanche gave written assurances that a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” designed to pay Trump allies would not be resurrected, and that a settlement between Trump and the Internal Revenue Service only gave the president retroactive immunity from audits rather than perpetual protection.

During Thursday’s segment about the risks of artificial intelligence, we shared a quote from author Naomi Klein that we later discovered was AI-generated. Klein has written about the proliferation of the fake quote on her Substack and joins Democracy Now! to discuss the growing difficulty of verifying online information.
“These companies are creating digital doppelgangers of us, trying to monetize our identities,” says Klein.

We speak to Dave Zirin, author and sports editor at The Nation, about his new book, The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn, chronicling the life and activism of the legendary historian Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States. For Zinn, says Zirin, “being an academic was always secondary to being in the streets and making history, not just studying history.

One year ago, an Israeli settler shot and killed the Palestinian activist Awdah Hathaleen in the occupied West Bank. Hathaleen, an English teacher and father of three young children, played a key role in the production of the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, which follows Palestinians in the community of Masafer Yatta as they struggle to stay on their land amid violent attacks by Israeli settlers.

An estimated 60,000 people from Morocco crossed into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, on the African side of the Strait of Gibraltar, in an unprecedented mass movement last week. At least 72 people died during the attempt. The sudden influx of migrants overwhelmed the city’s residents, leading to a humanitarian crisis while border police deployed water cannons, tear gas and warning shots to deter people from crossing.