Contributing Writers

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.

Earlier this month, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent publicly attacked the former labor secretary under President Clinton, Robert Reich. Reich wrote in a post online that “Trump Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said this week the K-shaped economy — the widening economic gap between the rich and the poor — is ‘dead.’ Hogwash. Not only is the K-shaped economy very much alive, even CEOs are admitting it’s a problem.

Julián Posada’s upcoming book, titled Platform Extractivism: Data Work and the People Powering Artificial Intelligence, is based on extensive fieldwork among data workers in Venezuela. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, amid a hyperinflation crisis, entire communities in Venezuela depended on data work, says Posada, a professor at Yale University.

Despite being branded as autonomous and self-sustaining, artificial intelligence relies heavily on human labor — an army of data workers all over the world, primarily in the Global South. These workers “are purposely hidden by the companies that produce AI because they are the secret ingredient of AI itself,” says sociologist Antonio Casilli, the author of Waiting for Robots: The Hired Hands of Automation and co-writer of the documentary In the Belly of AI.

Prosecutors across 47 states, Washington, D.C., and U.S. territories have announced a groundbreaking legal settlement with technology giant Meta over accusations that the social media company deliberately designed addictive products they knew to be harmful to children. Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, is set to pay at least $12 billion and up to $17.1 billion in financial penalties, in addition to implementing design changes for underage users.

“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.

Earlier this month, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent publicly attacked the former labor secretary under President Clinton, Robert Reich. Reich wrote in a post online that “Trump Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said this week the K-shaped economy — the widening economic gap between the rich and the poor — is ‘dead.’ Hogwash. Not only is the K-shaped economy very much alive, even CEOs are admitting it’s a problem.

The Supreme Court on Monday lifted a lower court’s injunction on President Trump’s executive order seeking to limit mail-in voting ahead of November’s midterm elections. Trump’s order directs the Department of Homeland Security to create state-by-state lists of eligible voters who are citizens. The U.S. Postal Service would then use the lists provided by states to assess whether voters should be allowed to vote by mail.

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.

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.

Progressive state Representative Angie Nixon pulled off a stunning victory in Florida last week, defeating the establishment-backed centrist candidate Alexander Vindman to win the state’s Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate. Vindman, a former Army intelligence officer who testified during Trump’s first impeachment trial, raised more than 16 times as much campaign money as Nixon.

The Montreal City Council is set to debate a controversial motion Monday calling on the Canadian city to suspend all institutional ties with the Israeli government. Avi Lewis, a leading Jewish Canadian politician and head of the progressive New Democratic Party, says it’s a reflection of widespread outrage among Canadians over Israel’s actions across the Middle East.
Pro-Israel forces “are on the defensive now,” says Lewis.

The U.S.-Canada trade war is deepening after talks collapsed without a deal on Friday. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney accused the Trump administration of issuing demands that would compromise Canada’s sovereignty and undermine key industries. On Saturday, the United States slapped 50% tariffs on around $20 billion worth of imports from Canada, and Carney announced retaliatory tariffs on $20 billion of U.S. products set to go into effect on September 8.

Haley Van Erem, a former career attorney in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, has filed a complaint claiming the Trump administration task force charged with investigating antisemitism pushed universities into massive settlements despite turning up little to no evidence of anti-Jewish discrimination on campus.

Loui Ridi, a Palestinian American man who lives in Ohio, traveled to the occupied West Bank on Monday to help relatives defend their family home in the village of Qusra, south of Nablus. Israeli settlers have surrounded the home, which Ridi owns, for more than a week. Settlers have besieged several Palestinian houses in the village, trapping people inside and cutting off water and electricity in some cases.
“I’m not getting no protection here. I still fear for my life.

Israel’s military on Wednesday admitted that its soldiers opened fire in January 2024 on a car trying to flee Gaza City following Israel’s evacuation orders. The car was carrying 5-year-old Palestinian Hind Rajab and six of her relatives. They were all killed, as were Palestine Red Crescent Society medics dispatched to rescue them.

James Muldoon is a sociologist who writes about the changing nature of human-technology relationships. Love Machines: How Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming Our Relationships investigates how people form emotional attachments with large language models, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. Feeding the Machine: The Hidden Human Labor Powering A.I.

Haley Van Erem, a former career attorney in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, has filed a complaint claiming the Trump administration task force charged with investigating antisemitism pushed universities into massive settlements despite turning up little to no evidence of anti-Jewish discrimination on campus.

Loui Ridi, a Palestinian American man who lives in Ohio, traveled to the occupied West Bank on Monday to help relatives defend their family home in the village of Qusra, south of Nablus. Israeli settlers have surrounded the home, which Ridi owns, for more than a week. Settlers have besieged several Palestinian houses in the village, trapping people inside and cutting off water and electricity in some cases.
“I’m not getting no protection here. I still fear for my life.