On Wednesday, 4,000 Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga, Tennessee, begin voting in a closely watched election on whether to organize with the United Auto Workers in what could be the union’s first big victory as they try to expand into the southern United States after huge contract wins in 2023 with Detroit companies General Motors, Ford and Stellantis.
Democracy Now! speaks with two of the Google employees who were arrested staging sit-ins on Tuesday at the company’s offices in New York City and in Sunnyvale, California, to protest the tech giant’s work with the Israeli government. Organized by the group No Tech for Apartheid, the protesters are demanding Google withdraw from Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract to provide cloud computing services to the Israeli military.
One year ago this week, a devastating conflict erupted in Sudan when a fragile alliance between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces collapsed. The war initially began around the capital city of Khartoum but quickly spread to other parts of Sudan, including Darfur, Port Sudan and the Gezira state, situated in the country’s agricultural heartland.
The three liberal justices dissented as the high court dramatically narrowed a district court judge’s sweeping ruling barring enforcement of the state’s attempt to block treatment for transgender youth.
The gulf between what Trump said and what anti-abortion groups want underscores divisions that have dogged conservatives for two years.
Trump’s Monday announcement that abortion should be left to the states was supposed to neutralize an issue that has dogged Republican candidates. But by Tuesday it was clear that it was futile to try.
“I think it’ll be straightened out,” the former president said.
By any measure, it amounted to a strong month of hiring.
The concern is that higher rates are putting pressure on households and businesses looking to borrow, weighing on hiring, investment and the housing market.
Last month’s job growth was up from a revised gain of 229,000 jobs in January.
The president’s team thinks it’s had a historically successful first term, delivering victories on the economy, climate, drug pricing and more. But many Americans aren’t feeling it.
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Updated at 6:17 p.m. ET on April 16, 2024
Donald Trump is among the most famous and most polarizing people alive. The task of selecting 12 impartial jurors who can render a fair verdict in the criminal trial of a former president is a first for America’s court system.
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The Iranian attack on Israel has heightened the fierce cross-pressures shaping President Joe Biden’s conflicted approach to the war in Gaza.
Throughout Israel’s military engagement, Biden has struggled to square his historic inclination to support Israel almost unreservedly with growing hostility in his party toward Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct of the war.
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“I JUST STORMED OUT OF BIDEN’S KANGAROO COURT!” Donald Trump wrote in an email to supporters late yesterday afternoon, shortly after the end of the first day of his trial on charges of hiding hush-money payments during the 2016 campaign.
The statement led off a fundraising appeal, and it was, somewhat predictably, a lie.
We speak with veteran journalist Peter Maass about the Israeli war on Gaza and his new opinion piece for The Washington Post headlined “I’m Jewish, and I’ve covered wars. I know war crimes when I see them.” Maass, who was a senior editor at The Intercept until earlier this year, has spent decades covering wars, including the Bosnian genocide in the 1990s that killed about 100,000 people over nearly four years.
The Western corporate media is failing in its coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza, says Palestinian independent journalist Dalia Hatuqa. “A lot of what’s missing from the bigger portrait … is the Palestinian voice,” says Hatuqa, who applauds local journalists in Gaza for providing the world a crucial window into what’s happening there while international reporters are blocked by Israel from entering the territory. “Nobody knows Gaza better than the Gazan journalists on the ground.
Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, one of the most vocal supporters of Julian Assange, says the United States must drop its espionage case against the jailed WikiLeaks founder. He faults the Australian government for pushing for a plea deal that would allow Assange to walk free from Belmarsh Prison in London in exchange for an admission of guilt. “Julian is never going to plead guilty as if journalism is a crime,” says Varoufakis.
As Germany intensifies its crackdown on pro-Palestinian voices, we speak with Greek economist and politician Yanis Varoufakis, one of the planned speakers at a conference in Berlin last weekend that was forcibly shut down by police. The Palestine Congress was scheduled to be held for three days, but police stormed the venue as the first panelist spoke.
Salman Rushdie tells us that he wrote Knife, his account of his near-murder at the hands of a 24-year-old Shia Muslim man from New Jersey, for two reasons: because he had to deal with “the elephant-in-the-room” before he could return to writing about anything else, and to understand what the attack was about. The first reason suggests something admirable, even remarkable, in Rushdie’s character, a determination to persist as a novelist and a man in the face of terror.
When I brought my new dog, a 4-year-old Cavalier King Charles spaniel named Grace, home for the holidays last year, I was nervous. I didn’t know how she’d react to the unfamiliar environment, so I kept scanning the floor for items she might swallow. She wasn’t perfectly house-trained yet, so I was constantly watching to see if she started to walk in circles—a sign that she has to go to the bathroom.
After a week with no trouble, my mom gently called me out.
The gulf between what Trump said and what anti-abortion groups want underscores divisions that have dogged conservatives for two years.
Trump’s Monday announcement that abortion should be left to the states was supposed to neutralize an issue that has dogged Republican candidates. But by Tuesday it was clear that it was futile to try.
“I think it’ll be straightened out,” the former president said.
By any measure, it amounted to a strong month of hiring.
The concern is that higher rates are putting pressure on households and businesses looking to borrow, weighing on hiring, investment and the housing market.
Last month’s job growth was up from a revised gain of 229,000 jobs in January.
The president’s team thinks it’s had a historically successful first term, delivering victories on the economy, climate, drug pricing and more. But many Americans aren’t feeling it.
Policymakers were determined to avoid the mistakes of the Great Recession — and they succeeded. But now they are in a mood of “fear and introspection.
We go to Part 2 of our conversation with Israeli scholar Neve Gordon, professor of international law and human rights at Queen Mary University of London and chair of the Committee on Academic Freedom for British Society of Middle East Studies.
We speak with The New Yorker war correspondent Luke Mogelson about the war in Ukraine, where the government has just passed a controversial bill that expands military conscription and cracks down on draft dodgers in an effort to replenish the depleted ranks of the army, more than two years since Russia launched its invasion. Military leaders have warned that Russian forces outnumber Ukrainian troops tenfold in the east.