We speak with Palestinian human rights defender Issa Amro after he was detained at an Israeli military base for seven hours on Friday. Amro, the founder of the Hebron-based group Youth Against Settlements, was helping a Palestinian family that he says had been attacked by armed Israeli settlers at their farmhouse outside Hebron in the occupied West Bank. Amro says when Israeli soldiers arrived, they ignored the settlers and instead targeted the Palestinians, including him.

Revelations of sexual assault at a Cornell University fraternity in 2024 and how the university responded have sparked national outrage, reigniting a public debate about “the extent to which fraternities, the extent to which athletics really support this kind of culture that allows perpetrators to escape with little or no accountability,” says law professor Deborah Tuerkheimer.

Brazil’s presidential election is headed to a runoff between leftist incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and far-right Senator Flávio Bolsonaro after neither candidate cleared 50% in Sunday’s vote, in which the right made gains in Congress and in governor races across the country. Bolsonaro received 47% of the vote compared to Lula’s 45%. The second round of voting is on October 25.

Drop Site News released a major investigation this week into the U.S. bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh children’s school in the Iranian city of Minab on February 28, the first day of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. Drop Site spoke to survivors, first responders, parents and witnesses in one of the most in-depth reports on the massacre to date. The bombing killed at least 156 people — 120 of the victims were children, 26 were teachers, and the rest were parents.

Tennessee’s Governor Bill Lee has halted executions for the remainder of the year after a death row prisoner survived two lethal injections on Wednesday. According to her lawyers, Christa Pike was still breathing after she was strapped to a gurney and injected with two syringes of pentobarbital in a botched execution that spanned more than two hours.

As we continue our coverage on the rise of right-wing political parties across Europe, we speak to Wiebke Judith from the German organization for asylum seekers’ rights, PRO ASYL, about Germany’s far-right party Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD, and its recent wins in September’s state elections.

Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman is in Berlin, Germany, this week, where the crackdown on pro-Palestine speech is shaped by the German policy of Staatsräson, or “reason of state.” The concept refers to Germany’s commitment to the existence of the Israeli state in light of the Holocaust. Since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza in 2023, Staatsräson has manifested itself as German military aid to Israel and heavy policing of Palestine activism inside Germany.