A private arbitrator has ordered The Washington Post to rehire award-winning opinion columnist Karen Attiah with back pay. Attiah was fired last fall over comments she made following the fatal shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Shortly after Kirk was killed last September, Attiah wrote online, “Part of what keeps America so violent is the insistence that people perform care, empty goodness and absolution for white men who espouse hatred and violence.

Progressive California state lawmaker Aisha Wahab made history last week in a special election that will make her the first Afghan American in Congress. Wahab overcame a flood of attack ads from pro-Israel groups to beat her Democratic rival, Melissa Hernandez, in a race to replace disgraced Congressmember Eric Swalwell, who resigned in April amid allegations of sexual misconduct.

“I’m absolutely being imprisoned for a political agenda,” activist Autumn Hill tells Democracy Now! in a phone call from Texas’s Johnson County Correctional Facility, where the 30-year-old trans woman is serving a 50-year prison sentence for protesting outside the Prairieland ICE jail last July. Hill is one of nine protesters convicted of terrorism-related charges after federal prosecutors accused them of being members of an “antifa terror cell.

We speak to journalist Aura Bogado, whose new investigation into Illinois law enforcement and prosecutorial collaboration with ICE has revealed that dozens of immigrants have been arrested and deported with the help of local officials in violation of the state’s sanctuary law. “Those are 150 individuals whose lives were very often changed, communities completely split apart,” says Bogado about her reporting.

The Trump administration has announced unspecified plans to further tighten sanctions on Iran, threatening other countries, including China, in the process. We speak to sanctions expert Nicholas Mulder about what he calls the “rhetorical” and “psychological warfare” of the announcement. For Iran, says Mulder, the announcement was not “really materially all that meaningful. And to the extent that they are, they hurt ordinary Iranians and not the government.” The impact on the U.S.