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. A United Nations fact-finding mission recently concluded that the U.S. strike was a war crime, but the Trump administration has not yet even acknowledged U.S. responsibility.

“This was not a single bombing or collateral damage,” says Drop Site News’s Jeremy Scahill, lead author of the investigation. “There were at least two direct hits on a school packed with children … and a couple of hours after those initial hits, as first responders came, as parents came, the U.S. launches more strikes.”

Scahill points out that until 2013, the area where the school is was a facility operated by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps. But in satellite photos from just weeks before the strike, “You could see the murals on the wall. You could see the soccer field. Some of the satellite photos show shadows of tiny people playing outside.”

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. Prior to the scheduled execution, Pike and her lawyers argued a single-dose lethal injection could be tantamount to torture due to Pike’s small veins. Pike was sentenced to death for a 1995 murder she committed when she was 18. Now in the hospital in critical condition, she is the first person to ever survive lethal injection in the United States.

“I have seen five executions in Tennessee,” says Steven Hale, a criminal justice reporter for the Nashville Banner, who witnessed Christa Pike’s botched execution. “And I’ve never seen anything like what we saw Wednesday night.”

Christa Pike “has just experienced the most agonizing attempt at lethal injection in the country’s history,” says Sandra Babcock, director of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide. Babcock says Pike should have never been sentenced to death, because she was an “immature 18-year-old” with a history of severe childhood and sexual trauma who “was not receiving medication for post-traumatic stress disorder and bipolar disorder at the time of [the murder], which she committed with her abusive boyfriend at the time.”

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. Judith calls the historic wins — won by margins not seen in German elections since the Nazi era — “deeply concerning for everyone who cares about our democracy,” and says that the growing influence of the AfD’s anti-immigration stance over the German political landscape poses grave risks to refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants and ethnic minorities in the country.

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.

“Germany’s guilt regarding the Holocaust” has been “abused to justify the support of the genocidal war of Israel against the population in Gaza,” says Berlin-based lawyer Alexander Gorski, who recently represented the “Berlin Four,” three European Union citizens and one United States citizen whom Germany attempted to deport for participating in pro-Palestine campus protest. Gorski, who also represented the British Palestinian surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sittah and the leftist Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis when they were denied entry into Germany ahead of a pro-Palestine conference in Berlin, discusses Germany’s use of immigration law to crack down on anti-Zionist activism, which he says the state wholly conflates with antisemitism.

“Germany has a historic responsibility for challenging antisemitism, but at the same time, what we should learn — especially as Germans — from the Holocaust, that 'never again' means never again for anyone,” says Gorski.

We speak to the prominent AI researcher and leading critic of the AI industry, Timnit Gebru, who was recently awarded a 2026 Right Livelihood Award for her work investigating the harms and hype behind the global buildup of artificial intelligence.

“Instead of discussing faulty, unreliable systems,” Gebru says tech leaders like SpaceXAI’s Elon Musk, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei are “marketing their systems as all-knowing, superpowerful, superintelligent,” and lobbying for “self-policing and self-regulation” to avoid being held “liable through existing laws.” Gebru expresses skepticism over increasingly widespread claims that AI algorithms pose an existential risk to humanity, warning that such claims are overblown and that “what is actually happening is regulatory capture.”

Eight decades after the Nuremberg trials against Nazi war criminals, the Trump administration has launched an all-out assault on the International Criminal Court, primarily over the tribunal’s pursuit of Israeli leaders for war crimes committed in Gaza. In his recent address to the United Nations, President Donald Trump called the ICC a “rogue institution” and urged other states to abandon it, and his administration has vowed to dismantle it through sanctions and other pressure tactics.

“It’s so sad to remember that the core group behind the Nuremberg trials were Robert Jackson, Telford Taylor and Benjamin Ferencz, the U.S. prosecutors,” says Wolfgang Kaleck, lawyer and founder of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights. His new book is The Power of Law: Reconciling Legality and International Justice.

We speak with Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil about his new memoir, No Land to Stand On: Notes from Detention. It details his 104 days of detention inside a Louisiana ICE jail after he was targeted for arrest and deportation by the Trump administration over his pro-Palestine campus advocacy at Columbia University. Khalil missed the birth of his first child, Deen, while he was separated from his wife, Noor Abdalla, who is a U.S. citizen. The administration is still trying to deport Khalil, who has launched civil rights lawsuits against the government and Columbia University over his treatment.

“Eighteen months after my arrest, this administration has never charged me with any crime or even presented any evidence that I committed any crimes, yet they are able to get away with this because I’m Palestinian,” Mahmoud tells Democracy Now!

Khalil’s memoir also looks beyond his own case, recounting the people he met behind bars and what their stories taught him about the broader human cost of the U.S. immigration detention system. “This book is about a story of so many incredible men, fathers and workers who came here seeking safety and a better future, only to be snatched off the street,” he says.

Award-winning Danish Afghan journalist and filmmaker Nagieb Khaja’s most recent documentary, Winning Heart and Minds, is an investigation into what went wrong in the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan. In the film, Khaja travels to Musa Qala, the capital of the southern Helmand province. Danish and British troops had been deployed to Musa Qala in 2006 to defend their allies, the local police, against Taliban insurgents.

While urban areas benefited from U.S. occupation during the war, “Western forces allied themselves with forces that in rural Afghanistan were considered worse than the Taliban,” says Khaja. “The police forces and the warlords that were fighting side by side with American, Danish and British forces, they were drug cartels, they were ruthless criminals, they were rapists.”

The Palestinian death toll from Israel’s war on Gaza has surpassed 74,000, according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza. While this figure represents the official death toll as confirmed by local authorities, the true number could be much higher when missing people and indirect deaths are taken into account, such as from disease, exposure, denial of medical treatment and the destruction of civic infrastructure. And since the so-called ceasefire brokered by Trump last October, nearly 1,400 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks.

“The [ceasefire] plan ended up just buying more time for the genocide,” says Muhammad Shehada, a writer and analyst from Gaza speaking to Democracy Now! in Copenhagen. “Instead of suspending attacks on Gaza, Israel has been bombing Gaza every day.”

“The idea of the plan was to divide the reconstruction, rehabilitation, Israeli withdrawal, decommissioning of Hamas and Palestinian statehood into three phases,” says Shehada. “So far, only one item of the 20 items on the Trump plan has been fulfilled, and that is the release of every single Israeli hostage in Gaza.”

After months of threatening to take over Greenland by force, President Trump last week signed a 10-page agreement with Greenland and Denmark that bolsters the U.S. military presence on the mineral-rich and strategically located island but falls short of his earlier demands to make it American territory. Under the 1951 Defense of Greenland Treaty, the United States already has wide latitude to station forces and build military bases in Greenland. The U.S. currently has one active military base and around 160 troops on the ground. Under the new agreement, signed shortly after President Trump’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly last week, the U.S. can build two new bases. The deal keeps Greenland as part of Denmark and would still apply if Greenland chooses independence.

“In many ways, the deal is good, because the right for self-determination is approved,” says Julie Rademacher, chair of Uagut, the national organization for Greenlanders in Denmark. At the same time, “after threats [for] one-and-a-half years to annex Greenland, we don’t have the same faith or the same trust in Americans and the U.S. president.”

Longtime national security reporter Sharon Weinberger’s new book, Valley of Death: How Big Tech Is Fueling the Future of War, follows the rise of the military-industrial complex in Silicon Valley, where defense technology companies, like Palantir, Anduril and SpaceX, and their billionaire founders, are increasingly shaping U.S. foreign policy. Weinberger explains that because “the government doesn’t own the underlying technology” peddled by “this new class of entrepreneurs,” these companies have upended the traditional procurement relationship between the U.S. government and older defense firms, and now unilaterally control access to the new weapons and systems — including drones and artificial intelligence — used in modern warfare.

A new documentary titled Britain’s Gaza Secrets Exposed reveals new details about the U.K. government’s internal response to alleged Israeli war crimes in Gaza. Presented by journalist Ramita Navai and produced by Ben De Pear for Channel 4’s investigative program Dispatches, the documentary examines government records, some newly publicized, to show how the United Kingdom ignored or concealed mounting evidence of Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza after the October 7 attacks.

“We were looking at how our country, which prides itself on having an ethical foreign policy and as being one of the supporting members of the United Nations on human rights, was able to keep selling arms,” says De Pear. “And basically, what we found was a doctored process … It’s quite extraordinary the level of duplicity that was going on in order for us to keep selling Israel arms.” Ben De Pear also produced the 2025 BAFTA-winning documentary Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, which the British Broadcasting Corporation, or BBC, initially commissioned but later refused to air. Gaza: Doctors Under Attack was broadcast instead by Channel 4.

The eviction of 87-year-old María del Carmen Abascal Martín in Madrid, after an investment fund bought her apartment building and more than tripled her rent, has become a symbol of Spain’s rising cost of living and sparked nationwide protests against corporate greed and wealth inequality. Over 600 protesters are now camped outside Madrid’s regional government headquarters demanding new tenant protections.

“What we have is a lot of furious people, enraged people, that are demanding from the government and from the public institutions that they give us give us some sort of solution,” says Sabina Carrau, a spokesperson for the Madrid Tenants’ Union, which is supporting the “Maricarmen decree” named after Abascal, set to be debated by Spain’s government this week.

Housing in Spain, as in much of the world, “is really connected to tourism, really connected to having and buying a house to make a speculation,” says socialist parliamentarian Tesh Sidi, who is calling instead for the guaranteed right to housing and “the right to have an affordable life.” Sidi, the only Sahrawi member of the Spanish parliament, also comments on Spain’s colonial relationship to Western Sahara and the state of Sahrawi rights and self-determination.

We speak with journalist Akbar Shahid Ahmed, whose new book, Crossing the Red Line, looks at how President Joe Biden and top figures in his administration supported Israel’s brutal war in Gaza despite the soaring death toll and growing alarm over widespread war crimes committed by the Israeli military.

“The policies that we’ve seen entrenched and, frankly, worsened and become more dangerous and deadly under Donald Trump were really established by Biden’s team,” says Ahmed, who says there is “bipartisan continuity” on Israel-Palestine between the two presidents.

At the United Nations this week, President Trump repeated his attacks on the International Criminal Court and urged other nations to pull out of the global tribunal. The United States earlier this year imposed sanctions on the president of the ICC and a senior prosecutor who was part of the team that issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for crimes against humanity in Gaza, and the Trump administration is reportedly preparing more sanctions against the institution itself. Meanwhile, a coalition of nations has formed to defend international law in solidarity with the people of Palestine under the banner of the Hague Group, which was established last year by Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Honduras, Malaysia, Namibia, Senegal and South Africa.

“It’s an absolute low point for the sacred grounds of the United Nations that President Trump has shown up here and attacked the international legal order,” says Varsha Gandikota, executive secretary of the Hague Group.

We also air remarks from South African Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola, who spoke earlier this week at the historic Riverside Church in New York City to urge respect for international law.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a half-empty chamber at the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, after dozens of delegations walked out in protest at the start of his speech. Netanyahu assailed his critics as “antisemites,” defended his country’s conduct in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Syria, and lavished praise on President Trump for joining Israel’s strikes on Iran.

Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator under Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin, says Israel’s growing diplomatic isolation “needs to be translated into action” like sanctions, arms embargoes and other forms of accountability.

Over 100 protesters were arrested near the United Nations in New York on Thursday ahead of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the General Assembly. The sit-in, organized by Jewish Voice for Peace, denounced Netanyahu for perpetrating a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, building more illegal settlements in the West Bank, occupying parts of Lebanon and bombing Iran alongside the United States. Democracy Now! spoke with participants, including some congressional candidates and other prominent figures.

“One of the features we see in … a lot of the billionaire tech elites is a real kind of anger,” says Jacob Silverman, author of Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley. “They’re angry at what they see as the excesses of woke culture and liberal and lefty politics. … And they’re angry that they don’t have free rein to enact the world they want to enact, and that includes areas like AI.” Silverman also discusses how tech elites like Peter Thiel and David Sacks are shaping the Trump administration’s approach to technology.

Seydina Moussa Ndiaye is a member of the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, working on a strategy with the African Union to address the risks and benefits of AI for the continent. African countries face the threat of “colonial AI,” says Ndiaye. “When we talk about colonialism historically, that involves the control of resources, the control of knowledge and the control of terms of exchange, and we see that in Africa when we talk about AI.”

Leaders of top artificial intelligence firms, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, testified to the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday, urging nations to adopt international standards on the development of AI. This comes after AI agents at OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and Google have gone rogue in recent months, hacking into other companies’ corporate systems and, in the case of OpenAI, into the portal of Australia’s public health insurance program.

“I think we’re headed in the right direction,” says Malo Bourgon, CEO of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, who has participated in several AI-related meetings on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly this week. “I do think that the CEOs, while there’s a bunch of reason to be cynical about them, are sincere that they think that the progress with this technology is moving too quickly and that they risk losing control of it, and that that could lead to permanent disempowerment or human extinction.”

A federal judge has temporarily blocked President Trump’s ban on CNN, MS NOW and Politico, ordering the administration to restore their White House access for two weeks. CBS, Fox News and NBC had suspended their coverage of President Trump Monday after he expelled CNN from the White House TV press pool. “People are standing up for press freedom,” says Filipino American journalist Maria Ressa, who won the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize. “There are costs to standing up, but there are greater costs to giving up.”

Ressa is also co-chair of the United Nations Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence. “A small group of countries and companies should not be determining the fate of the world,” says Ressa about the current state of AI.

2026 is already the deadliest year for measles in the United States since the virus was declared eliminated in 2000. Four people died over the last month in Pennsylvania amid an ongoing outbreak in the state, which had not seen a measles-related death in at least 35 years. All four victims, including two infants, were unvaccinated (children do not receive their first dose of the measles vaccine until they have reached a year old). The deaths come as President Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continue to defund public vaccination programs and push debunked claims that vaccines cause autism.

Pediatrician and vaccine expert Dr. Paul Offit warns that the four reported measles deaths — which were reported by Pennsylvania health officials but have not yet been acknowledged by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — are likely a vast undercount. He estimates that there could be “closer to 4,000” cases in the Pennsylvania outbreak. “I don’t think people realize how contagious this virus is,” Offit says. “You don’t have to have direct contact with somebody who has measles. You just have to be within their airspace within two hours of them being there.”

We also speak to Offit about the COVID-19 virus, which he says is now affecting the United States “like flu” by causing “hundreds of thousands of people to be hospitalized and tens of thousands to die, just like influenza does, every year.” Yearly flu and COVID-19 vaccinations, he explains, are “effective at keeping people out of the hospital, effective at keeping them out of the intensive care unit, and effective at keeping them out of the morgue.”

In the wake of devastating flash floods triggered by glacial collapse in the Himalayas, Nepal is demanding climate reparations from polluter countries as it embarks upon the grueling process of rebuilding. Over 1,400 bodies have been recovered from the disaster, with around 6,000 others still missing. Nepal’s government estimates that the cost of infrastructure reconstruction is likely to exceed $4 billion. Nepal contributes less than 0.1% of global carbon emissions, yet as a mountainous country surrounded by glaciers, continues to be vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Recent studies estimate that global surface temperatures will likely exceed 1.5°C above preindustrial levels by the end of the decade.

We go to a rally outside of United Nations headquarters, where Nepali activists, including our guest Anisha Buda, are demanding climate justice, reparations and a just transition out of fossil fuels. Buda, a member of the region’s ethnic minority Kaike-speaking Magar community, says that almost 90% of the victims impacted by August’s flash flooding were part of Nepal’s Indigenous communities. “It is not just the lives of the people lost. It’s not just the houses swept, but it’s their culture, tradition and their very identity that is being lost by the floods, by the climate-induced disasters.”

On Monday, the South African delegation to the United Nations, in collaboration with Progressive International and the Hague Group, hosted an event in honor of the U.N. Charter at the historic Riverside Church in New York City, less than a day before the U.N. General Assembly convened for its 81st annual session. We play excerpts of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’s address at the event, in which he denounced the military-industrial complex fueling the U.S. war on Iran, Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the UAE-backed RSF paramilitary in Sudan, called for the end of corporate oligarchy and wealth inequality in the United States and warned about the risks of the unchecked buildup of artificial intelligence.

The annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly opened this week in New York City. On its opening day, President Trump in his address to all 193 U.N. member states threatened to annihilate Iran. “This is probably a new low in U.N. history,” says Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, joining us in our New York City studio ahead of the second day of the General Assembly. As Trump pushes for even more sanctions on Iran, “what you’re most likely to see in that scenario is that the Iranians will counter-escalate” in what threatens to become an “endless war.” Parsi also comments on the U.S. military’s growing reliance on artificial intelligence for strategic and targeting decisions, Trump’s upcoming meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping and the Trump administration’s flouting of international law.

Reading the World is a remarkable new documentary about Paulo Freire, the acclaimed Brazilian educator whose revolutionary approach to teaching connected literacy to critical thinking and democratic participation. It draws on rare archival footage of 1960s Brazil and weaves together the memories of farmers, students and educators who took part in Freire’s culture circles, his method of teaching adults to read in as little as 40 hours by drawing on their own lives, communities and experiences. At the time, Brazil’s illiterate population was barred from voting, so education also opened the door to political participation. The experiment was abruptly halted in 1964 when Brazil’s military overthrew President João Goulart in a U.S.-backed coup that led to Freire’s imprisonment and exile.

“Paulo Freire was one of the most influential educators of the past century and is still widely studied all around the world. But the studies often focus on his ideas, his philosophies, his books, and much less is known about his original praxis,” says co-director Catherine Murphy.

“One of the most important points of his philosophy is that everyone has knowledge,” says Maria Luisa Mendonça, director of the Network for Social Justice and Human Rights in Brazil and a consulting producer.

As the United Nations General Assembly opens in New York, we speak with senior Cuban diplomat Carlos Fernández de Cossío, who says the Trump administration is seeking to “asphyxiate the people of Cuba into submission.” On Friday, millions in Cuba lost power in what was at least the sixth major blackout since President Trump cut off fuel shipments to the island in January. The fuel blockade comes on top of the six-decade-long U.S. economic embargo and countless attempts to topple the communist government.

“We will do all we can to stop any nation, the U.S. or any nation, from taking over Cuba,” says Fernández de Cossío, who has served as deputy Cuban foreign minister since 2022.

Ahead of the midterm elections, activist and writer Bill McKibben says he has been traveling across the United States with Third Act, the environmental group he founded to harness the power of seniors who care about the climate and democracy. “These elections are also starting to set the groundwork for 2028,” says McKibben, who calls the next U.S. presidential vote “maybe the last election that happens in a timeframe when we still really have an opportunity to affect some of the outcomes of these things.”

World leaders are in New York this week for the United Nations General Assembly, which coincides with Climate Week. It comes after months of climate-fueled extreme weather around the world, including heat waves in North America and Europe, wildfires in Africa, flash flooding in Asia and a record-breaking El Niño.

Climate campaigner Bill McKibben says that while it’s too late to prevent the climate crisis from unfolding, solar and wind energy are now cheap enough “to blunt its worst excesses.”

We also speak with Kavita Sthanumurthy, a former software engineer at Amazon and a member of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice. She says the artificial intelligence boom is largely being powered by dirty fossil fuel, even as companies like Amazon claim they use 100% renewable energy. “We did our own independent research and found that it was closer to 22%,” says Sthanumurthy.

Sarah Jones has been described as “a one-woman global village” for her remarkable one-person, multi-character shows. The Tony- and Obie Award-winning writer and performer is best known for her Broadway hit Bridge and Tunnel. She is back in New York with her latest solo performance, America, Who Hurt You?, which is being presented by the National Black Theatre and the Theatre for a New Audience at Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn.

America, Who Hurt You? “starts with our history of genocide as a country, our history of enslaving African people, our history of indentured servitude,” says Jones. “This show … is about restoring the history that has intentionally been erased.”

Two men deported from the United States to Equatorial Guinea were arrested by local police forces and transferred to a prison earlier this month, in apparent retaliation for speaking out about conditions they faced in the Central African country. Samson Birhane, who is from Eritrea, and Ahmed Soliman, a gay asylum seeker from Egypt, were both deported by the Trump administration despite U.S. immigration courts granting them protections.

On September 11, police forces arrived at Hotel Bamy in the city of Malabo, where more than two dozen people have been confined after their deportation from the United States to Equatorial Guinea, a country they have no ties to, as part of President Trump’s secretive “third-country” agreements. Birhane and Soliman say they were arrested and taken to prison for speaking out about the inhumane conditions endured by U.S. deportees at the hotel and threats by armed forces. While confined at the hotel, U.S. deportees have decried denial of medical care and legal assistance, and abuses they’ve described as psychological torture.

“Starting in November 2025, … the United States started this horrendous policy of sending immigrants not from Equatorial Guinea to Equatorial Guinea, a country that the U.S. knows very, very well that is a human rights violator,” says human rights lawyer Tutu Alicante. “The State Department reports that the U.S. has been putting out for the last three decades are consistent about the fact that Equatorial Guinea uses torture, uses incommunicado detentions, and often extrajudicial killings of people that it keeps in prison.”

News organizations CNN, MS NOW and Politico are suing the Trump administration over the banning of their reporters from the White House on Friday. Their credentials were confiscated or deactivated when they attempted to enter White House grounds over the weekend. Trump’s decision is “sending the message that if you write stories that are critical of the president, you’re going to lose your access,” says Katie Fallow, a deputy litigation director at Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute, where she focuses on threats to freedom of speech and of the press. “The real victims of this war on the press are members of the public, which are entitled to know about what their government is doing.”

Fallow says the White House press briefing room is a “public forum” and that “the courts have said repeatedly the government is not allowed to kick people out of that forum based on their viewpoint.”