Contributing Writers

We speak with Jose Saldaña, director of Release Aging People in Prison, about a wildcat strike by New York prison guards who claim limits on solitary confinement have made their work more dangerous.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has been the public face of the Trump administration’s effort to dismantle many government agencies and slash the size of the federal workforce. On Wednesday, he attended Trump’s first Cabinet meeting, although he is not a Cabinet member.

Thousands gathered in Beirut Sunday to mourn the death of Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s longtime leader who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in September. Under a ceasefire agreement, Israel withdrew its troops from southern Lebanon last week, but it continues to illegally occupy five locations in the country.

An unvaccinated child has died of measles, Texas officials announced Wednesday, the first death from measles in the United States in a decade. The child’s death in a hospital in Lubbock, in West Texas, comes as the largest measles outbreak in the state in over 30 years is now spreading to New Mexico. Since last month, 124 people have contracted the disease, most of them unvaccinated children.

DAWN, a D.C.-based nonprofit organization that supports democracy and human rights in the Middle East and North Africa, is asking the International Criminal Court to investigate former President Joe Biden, former Secretary of State Antony Blinken and former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin for possible complicity in war crimes and crimes against humanity, citing the $17.9 billion worth of U.S. weapons transfers to Israel overseen by the Biden administration.

We speak with Jose Saldaña, director of Release Aging People in Prison, about a wildcat strike by New York prison guards who claim limits on solitary confinement have made their work more dangerous.

We look at a rare victory for a death row prisoner before the U.S. Supreme Court. On Tuesday, three conservative justices joined with the three liberals to overturn the murder conviction and death sentence of Richard Glossip, who has spent nearly 30 years on Oklahoma death row and had exhausted all other appeals to stay his execution. The justices said Glossip was entitled to a new trial after errors in his original prosecution.

We speak with the acclaimed science fiction author, activist and journalist Cory Doctorow, who has spent decades writing and thinking about the impact of technology on our lives. He coined the term “enshittification” to describe how online platforms degrade the user experience over time in search of profits, though it has been widely adopted to describe a larger sense of decline and decay across society.

We speak with death row inmate Keith LaMar live from the Ohio State Penitentiary, after the release of The Injustice of Justice, a short film about his case that just won the grand prize for best animated short film at the Golden State Film Festival. “I had to find out the hard way that in order for my life to be mine, that I had to stand up and claim it,” says LaMar, who has always maintained his innocence.

DAWN, a D.C.-based nonprofit organization that supports democracy and human rights in the Middle East and North Africa, is asking the International Criminal Court to investigate former President Joe Biden, former Secretary of State Antony Blinken and former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin for possible complicity in war crimes and crimes against humanity, citing the $17.9 billion worth of U.S. weapons transfers to Israel overseen by the Biden administration.

The U.S. military transported 17 new immigrant detainees to the Guantánamo Bay military base on Sunday, just before efforts to jail an anticipated 30,000 immigrants in tent camps at the base were halted over concerns the makeshift facilities don’t meet ICE’s detention standards. Now the private federal contractor behind the Guantánamo detention site is under renewed scrutiny.

Reporters, workers and now judges across the country are disputing the cost-cutting claims of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which has targeted federal employees across multiple sectors with firings, forced resignations and threatened layoffs.

We discuss the first month of President Donald Trump’s second term in office — and the response from the Democratic Party — with journalist David Sirota, founder and editor-in-chief of The Lever. He notes that despite Republicans holding all three branches of the federal government, Trump has mainly used executive orders and other decrees to impose his will instead of using legislation.

We speak with death row inmate Keith LaMar live from the Ohio State Penitentiary, after the release of The Injustice of Justice, a short film about his case that just won the grand prize for best animated short film at the Golden State Film Festival. “I had to find out the hard way that in order for my life to be mine, that I had to stand up and claim it,” says LaMar, who has always maintained his innocence.

Israel has sent tanks into the occupied West Bank for the first time in 20 years, as the Israeli military escalates its offensive that has already displaced 40,000 Palestinians. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said Palestinians living in the Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams refugee camps will not be allowed to return to their homes.

Friedrich Merz is poised to become the next German chancellor after his conservative Christian Democratic Union placed first in Sunday’s key election. Social scientist David Bebnowski, speaking from Berlin, tells Democracy Now! that Merz is likely to join with the diminished SPD of outgoing Chancellor Olaf Scholz for another “grand coalition” of establishment parties, which has ruled Germany for much of the last couple decades.

We discuss the first month of President Donald Trump’s second term in office — and the response from the Democratic Party — with journalist David Sirota, founder and editor-in-chief of The Lever. He notes that despite Republicans holding all three branches of the federal government, Trump has mainly used executive orders and other decrees to impose his will instead of using legislation.

As the Trump administration attempts to dismantle higher education in the United States by redefining discrimination in schools, fighting so-called woke ideology, attacking diversity, equity and inclusion programs, gutting the Department of Education, and threatening funding for research and higher education, we speak with Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley, whose latest book is Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future.

The Trump administration has issued a two-week ultimatum for schools and universities across the United States to end all programs related to diversity, equity and inclusion — DEI — or risk losing federal funding. The Department of Education has already canceled some $600 million in grants for teacher training on race, social justice and other topics as part of its crusade against “woke” policies.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the advance of Rwanda-backed M23 insurgents, who have already taken two key cities in the mineral-rich eastern part of the country, is triggering panic. Reports of the surge describe widespread looting, killings, attacks on aid and mass displacement. Thousands of people have fled to neighboring Burundi over the last few days as the U.N. accused M23 of killing children and attacking hospitals.