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.