Photographs by Alexandra Howland
Updated at 7:35 p.m. ET on August 31, 2026
On one of the final days of the trial, dozens of women streamed into the back of a Plymouth, Massachusetts, courtroom, filling two long rows of wooden benches. They stood and watched the judge and jury take their seats.
It’s inspired robberies, counterfeits, and multimillion-dollar sales.
Tributes continue to pour in for Dolly Parton after the iconic country singer, actor and philanthropist’s death on August 25 at age 80. Her former co-star Jane Fonda tells Democracy Now! how they made the classic workplace comedy 9 to 5, for which Parton wrote the accompanying hit song. “She could see through people to their essence,” Fonda says of Parton. “She loved everyone.
As Gary, Indiana, recovers from flooding and a two-week power outage, we also speak with Ron Daniels, president of the Institute of the Black World 21st Century, who discusses the city’s history as a site of Black struggle and organizing. In 1972, the city hosted the National Black Political Convention, which brought together thousands of activists to plan for increasing African American political power.
Thousands of residents recently spent two weeks without power in Gary, Indiana, following a storm that ripped through the majority-Black city. The blackout ground the city to a halt, trapping residents in their apartments, forcing the closure of many businesses and leading to fuel shortages at gas stations. Officials in Indiana estimate the storm might have caused up to $5 billion in damage in Gary and other communities.
Top U.S. military leaders have reportedly advised Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth against extending the war in Iran because ongoing operations in the Middle East have degraded the Pentagon’s ability to confront threats elsewhere. According to The Washington Post, the warnings appeared in a classified assessment for Hegseth prepared by the heads of the Army, Navy and Air Force and the four-star commanders overseeing U.S. operations throughout Europe, Asia and Latin America.
More than 900 people in Nepal are confirmed dead after a massive wall of water, mud and debris crashed through a Himalayan river valley on the border with Tibet. More than 4,200 people are missing in Nepal and hundreds more in Tibet. Families are searching hospitals for loved ones, and crews have buried hundreds of unidentified bodies in shallow graves.
The U.S.-Canada trade talks fell spectacularly apart after Donald Trump made wild demands of our neighbors to the north.
We ask an A.I. consultant all our burning questions, like “Is China winning the A.I.
People will fly 16 hours to try it—and leave true converts.
RIP to one of air travel’s most cursed features.
Political roles are way up. Career staffing is way down, despite a push to hire after last year’s downsizing.
The Health secretary suggested the Pennsylvania governor is hiding something about the deaths’ cause. Shapiro says he can’t say more.
The U.S. has reported more than 2,700 measles cases this year, the highest annual count since 1991.
The head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services was asked three times to clarify claims made by President Donald Trump earlier this month.
Blue and red states say accepting federal help to expand access to drugs like Wegovy for America’s poorest patients is too much of a drain on their budgets.
Outward’s hosts sit down with the host and co-creator of When We All Get to Heaven.
The neighborhood changes, the church moves, people forget and remember “the AIDS years,” but AIDS isn’t over.
The AIDS cocktail opens new possibilities. And MCC San Francisco tries to use the experience of AIDS to make bigger social change.
The church’s minister gets sick and everyone knows it.
The church’s “it couple” faces AIDS, caregiving, and loss as part of a pair, part of families, and part of a community.
The new Fed chair will have the spotlight at the central bank’s high-profile conference in Jackson Hole. He should use it.
Vice President JD Vance’s visit marked his second to Maine’s 2nd Congressional District in four months.
Experts estimate that a language is lost every two weeks — and that half of the world’s 7,000 spoken languages could be lost by the end of the century. Quechua is the most widely spoken Indigenous language in the Americas, with approximately 7 to 10 million speakers living primarily in Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador. But like so many Indigenous languages, Qechua is vulnerable due to cultural pressures and discrimination.
A team of researchers led by Democracy Now!’s Juan González at the University of Illinois Chicago recently released an in-depth study on how, through a program called Tax Increment Financing (TIF), Chicago has spent some $16 billion in property taxes it collected over the past 40 years to fund downtown development. The money was supposed to be used to eliminate urban blight.
Amy Goodman is back to hosting Democracy Now! after taking time off following a medical procedure to remove skin cells on her nose that tested positive for squamous cell cancer. “I think it’s important that … we don’t have to be picture-perfect on TV or video. We are not plastic; we are people. And people get by in all sorts of ways around the world,” says Goodman.
We get a report from Nepal, where at least 547 people are confirmed to have died and over 1,500 are still missing after a glacial collapse on Wednesday sent a wall of ice, mud and rock into a Himalayan river, triggering catastrophic flooding in the Nepal-Tibet border region that swept away entire communities. Nepali authorities say they have rescued more than 3,700 people so far.
Calls to shut down the ICE jail known as the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in South Texas continue to grow following the detention and deportation of 5-year-old Liam Tadeo and his father Victor Martinez Nieto to Mexico. According to the family’s lawyer, Nieto had begged officers to let his son go as they were arrested on their way to soccer practice in Austin last week. Nieto wanted Liam released to his mother, but ICE reportedly refused.
When the Amish man emerged from his barn to greet me, he had no idea that his newborn son’s death had become national news. The man wore a straw hat, black trousers, and suspenders over a long-sleeved blue shirt; one of his similarly dressed sons was guiding a horse-drawn plow in a nearby field.
The man told me that, like most Amish people, he and his family don’t watch TV or use the internet. They don’t read the newspaper either.
