The new documentary American Doctor tells the story of how the besieged hospitals of Gaza have continued to treat the sick and wounded throughout Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinian territory, with local medical staff risking their own lives in the process. According to Palestinian officials, Israeli attacks have killed about 1,700 healthcare workers in Gaza since October 2023. The documentary follows three U.S. doctors as they volunteer in Gaza hospitals.

Director Poh Si Teng says the film rose out of her “deep despair” over what was happening in Gaza, including deadly Israeli attacks on her former Al Jazeera colleagues. American Doctor is her attempt “to bring Palestine back to the United States,” Teng says.

We also speak with two of the subjects of the film: trauma surgeon Dr. Feroze Sidhwa and emergency physician Dr. Thaer Ahmad, who is Palestinian American.

One of the biggest upsets from Democratic primary elections this month was Donavan McKinney’s defeat of two-term Congressmember Shri Thanedar in the House primary to represent parts of Detroit and Wayne County in Michigan’s 13th District. McKinney, a democratic socialist state lawmaker, won on a platform to get corporate money out of politics, support Medicare for All and end military aid to Israel, among other issues. Like many other insurgent Democrats running for office, he has also proposed strict limits on artificial intelligence data centers. He took no corporate PAC money, and his campaign was supported by the Justice Democrats, Working Families Party, Democratic Socialists of America and major labor unions.

“We built the biggest and baddest coalition in the country,” says McKinney of his win. “People have come together and realized that our district deserves better.”

We speak with Tennessee lawmaker Justin J. Pearson, who just won the Democratic primary to represent part of Memphis in the state’s 9th Congressional District. Pearson’s campaign focused in part on opposing large artificial intelligence data centers, particularly Elon Musk’s Colossus 1 and Colossus 2, which are in the Memphis area.

“People don’t want toxic data centers polluting the air that they breathe,” says Pearson. “It’s not a fight of right versus left; it’s a fight of those who are at the top and the rest of us.”

Pearson is a longtime environmental justice organizer and advocate who first gained national prominence three years ago, when he was expelled from Tennessee’s House of Representatives for protesting Republicans’ inaction on gun violence. He is now running in a congressional district that was recently gerrymandered to dilute Black voting power in the state following a Supreme Court ruling that weakened the Voting Rights Act. His opponent in November is Republican state Senator Brent Taylor, who is endorsed by President Donald Trump.

We speak with Timnit Gebru, a leader in the field of AI ethics, about how artificial intelligence is entrenching societal biases and inequality. Gebru is the founder and executive director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, a group of academics, activists and engineers who produce research rooted in the belief that technology should benefit everyone. She also co-founded Black in AI, a nonprofit that works to increase the inclusion and visibility of Black people in the field of AI. Gebru previously served as co-lead of the Ethical AI research team at Google but was fired in 2020 for writing a paper that warned about the financial and environmental costs of large language models, as well as their propensity to promote racism. The internet, which is what AI uses to train itself, “represents hegemonic views,” says Gebru. “We even know articles like Wikipedia are heavily biased. It’s overwhelmingly Western and male.”

Militaries across the world are in an “AI arms race,” says Heidy Khlaaf, a chief AI scientist at the AI Now Institute, which just released a joint report with Airwars titled “Anatomy of an AI Kill Chain.”

“What it is is a series of different types of AI algorithms that are chained together, each with their own pitfalls, each with their own flaws,” she says. “And these systems build off of each other and feed into one another to, unfortunately, end up resulting in civilian casualties.”

This can lead to faulty targeting because “humans are prone to just accepting recommendations of AI algorithms without corroborating that evidence,” adds Khlaaf.

The Washington Post reported Monday that due to an alleged Iranian threat to assassinate President Trump, he secretly swapped planes before departing the July NATO summit in Turkey — leaving senior administration officials, staff and members of the press corps on board.

“The Israelis passed a tip, a concern, that the plane and potentially the president was under threat,” says Dan Lamothe, one of the Washington Postreporters who broke the story. But it turns out the ”CIA had low confidence” in the Israeli tip, according to a more recent Post story Lamothe co-authored on Thursday. “I think that kind of leaves the Secret Service in a tough spot of assessing: What do you do in this zero-fail mission to keep the president safe?”

From London, we revisit the Gaza Tribunal, an independent, nongovernmental inquiry into the United Kingdom’s complicity in the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. The tribunal, held nearly one year ago, was chaired by our three guests: former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, Israeli professor of human rights law Neve Gordon and Palestinian legal scholar Shahd Hammouri. Their new book is titled The Gaza Tribunal: Britain’s Complicity in Genocide. We discuss the recent apology from Prime Minister Andy Burnham over the Labour Party’s early support for Israel’s assault on Gaza, the United Kingdom’s crackdown on the Palestine Action protest group under counterterrorism laws, and whether British policymakers will face any accountability for participating in “one of the biggest crimes in humanity.”

We spend the hour with civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative. In 2018, the organization opened the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, to tell the history of millions of enslaved Africans who were abducted and trafficked across the Atlantic to the Americas by European powers, and to chronicle the legacy of slavery, racism, lynchings and segregation in the United States. The Legacy Museum has just opened its first international exhibition as part of the Edinburgh International Festival in Scotland.

“In putting together the content we have at the Legacy Museum, you begin to appreciate just how global the institution of slavery was,” Stevenson tells Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman in Edinburgh. “We were eager to have an opportunity to present this content on this continent, which … hasn’t done very much to acknowledge this history.”

Stevenson details the Equal Justice Initiative’s goal of educating the public about racial iniquities, as well as his own family’s connection to slavery. “My foreparents did not come to this country seeking greater opportunity. They did not come seeking shelter from some distant threat. They came in chains. They were victims of a brutal abduction,” he says.

We continue our coverage from the Edinburgh International Festival, where acclaimed Brazilian actor and filmmaker Wagner Moura stars in the play A Trial — after An Enemy of the People. A sequel to the 1882 Henrik Ibsen play An Enemy of the People, A Trial — after An Enemy of the People interrogates themes of authoritarianism, misinformation and public judgement. It is directed by Brazil’s Christiane Jatahy.

“We in Brazil, we know what a dictatorship is. We know how harmful that is, how horrible that is, how bad that is,” says Moura, referencing the military dictatorship in Brazil that took place from 1964 to 1985. He draws parallels between that period and the leadership of Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro, who is in prison for an attempted coup d’état.

Democracy Now! is broadcasting from Scotland at the Edinburgh International Festival, which features music, opera, theater and dance and is one of Europe’s biggest arts festivals. We are joined by the acclaimed Scottish violinist Nicola Benedetti, one of the most celebrated classical violinists in the world. She became the first woman and first Scottish artist to become director of the Edinburgh International Festival in 2022.

“I think what is quite unusual about the Edinburgh International Festival is the humanitarian mission that is woven into all of its origin rhetoric,” says Benedetti. She explains that this year’s festival focuses on the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution. “We’re not celebrating only dark or dazzling. We’re trying to present these things alongside each other.”

We speak with Keith LaMar, an artist, teacher and writer on death row in Ohio. LaMar, who has spent three decades in solitary confinement, was sentenced to death for the murder of five fellow prisoners during a 1993 prison uprising. He has always maintained his innocence. His trial was held in a remote Ohio community before an all-white jury. LaMar is one of three men on death row for whom Ohio Governor Mike DeWine issued reprieves, pushing back their execution dates to 2030.

“The reprieve, while good in a legal sense in giving us more time, it also increases the pressure, the harassment that I’m undergoing,” says Keith LaMar. “I’ve been undergoing consistent torture since the last reprieve,” explains LaMar, who received a previous reprieve three years ago.

LaMar’s lawyer Keegan Stephan says there is “incredible new evidence” of his client’s innocence, and Amy Gordiejew, campaign manager of Justice for Keith LaMar, says he “was framed.”

We speak with Dr. Abdul El-Sayed after his victory in Michigan’s primary race for U.S. Senate sent shockwaves through the Democratic Party. El-Sayed, a former public health official, ran a progressive campaign focused on affordability, Medicare for All, getting money out of politics, and opposing Israel’s genocide in Gaza. He defeated Congressmember Haley Stevens, who was backed by tens of millions in outside spending including by AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobby group.

“In an era where many of us can’t afford basic things like groceries or rent or healthcare, the idea that your government is sending your tax dollars to buy bombs and tanks for foreign governments seems anathema,” El-Sayed says. “That money could be spent to fix your potholes, rebuild your kid’s school.”

El-Sayed says his focus now is on beating Republican nominee Mike Rogers, whom he calls a “bootlicker for Trumpism,” and to present a positive vision for his party that can lead into the next Democratic presidential administration.

Composer and playwright César Alvarez joins Democracy Now! to discuss their new musical, The Potluck. It tells the story of the 1979 Greensboro Massacre, when Klansmen and American Nazis opened fire on an antiracist demonstration in Greensboro, North Carolina, killing five members of the Communist Workers’ Party. In 2020, the Greensboro City Council passed a resolution apologizing for the attack and the police department’s complicity in the killings.

Alvarez tells Democracy Now! the musical is an attempt to grapple with “what it has meant to grow up in the aftermath of this state-sanctioned murder,” as well their personal connection to the massacre. Alvarez’s parents were part of the Communist Workers’ Party, and Alvarez is named in honor of two of their slain comrades.

Kansas state Senator Cindy Holscher won Tuesday’s primary race to become the Democratic nominee in the state’s gubernatorial race, facing Republican Ty Masterson in November. Holscher clinched the nomination over fellow state lawmaker Ethan Corson, who was backed by the outgoing Democratic Kansas Governor Laura Kelly. Holscher’s victory is seen as another resounding defeat for establishment Democrats in Kansas and nationwide. The fight over data centers became a defining issue in the Kansas race.

“We see [data centers] suck up the resources in terms of water. We see energy usage causing utility bills to skyrocket. So, certainly not things that you want to have happen during an affordability crisis,” Holscher tells Democracy Now!

Holscher also celebrates the defeat of a ballot measure to change how state Supreme Court justices are elected, which she calls a “backdoor attempt” to attack abortion rights, voting access and public education.

Reproductive rights activists are alarmed over a pledge by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to institute nationwide abortion restrictions. Blanche, whose confirmation for attorney general is currently before the Senate, made the remarks in a private call with anti-abortion activists that was later posted online. According to the audio recording, Blanche said the Trump administration is pursuing policies “so that the Dobbs decision becomes permanent in every single state,” referring to the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that ended the constitutional right to abortion and left the matter to individual states.

Amy Littlefield, The Nation's abortion access correspondent, says the administration is likely to focus on limiting abortion pills delivered by mail, perhaps by invoking the 1873 Comstock Act, which banned the mailing of “lewd” and “indecent” materials through the mail. Littlefield calls it a “zombie law from the Victorian era” that reflects the frustration of the anti-abortion movement's inability to reduce abortions despite victories at the Supreme Court.

“Abortion bans do not stop abortion. What they do is they kill and harm the people who need them,” she says.

Littlefield is the author of Killers of Roe: My Investigation Into the Mysterious Death of Abortion Rights.

In Pakistan-administered Kashmir, a coalition of local politicians, activists and small-business leaders called the Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC) has been leading mass protests over the soaring cost of living and the limits placed on political autonomy. In response, the Pakistani government banned the group under counterterrorism laws and ordered a communications blackout. Security forces have been accused of indiscriminately firing on nonviolent demonstrators, killing at least 40 people. For more, we speak to Kashmiri writer Mirza Waheed, who grew up in India-administered Kashmir, on the other side of the “Line of Control.”

In the Pakistani-controlled region known locally as Azad Kashmir, the center of the JAAC protests, “the discontent is not recent,” explains Waheed. “It’s been simmering under the surface for a while, and now it’s kind of burst out [in] the open.” He traces the turmoil in the disputed territory to the 1947 Partition of the Indian subcontinent by the departing British colonialists. “All these grievances about increasing prices, unemployment, healthcare, infrastructure, they have coalesced into a larger, broader critique of the political arrangement.”

Is AI superintelligence inevitable? AI safety researcher David Krueger says it doesn’t have to be. Krueger, an assistant professor at the University of Montreal and founder of the nonprofit Evitable, warns that “we need to mitigate the risk of extinction” with regulation and moratoriums to halt the development of AI’s computational power and complexity, which he says is progressing at a rate much faster than current levels of human supervision can manage. Public statements from AI companies that their models have circumvented test constraints and broken into other systems are “what we should expect to happen with the way that we’re building AI, with how little we understand it and how primitive our techniques are for controlling it,” Krueger says. “We just don’t know how to build it safely. End of story.”

The Pacific Northwest is facing its worst fire season in more than 30 years. Scientists say drought, extreme heat and climate change are making wildfire seasons longer, more frequent and more destructive across the western United States.

“The homes, the communities, they’re just not simply prepared for fire,” says Paul Hessburg, former senior research ecologist at the U.S. Forest Service and professor of fire and landscape ecology at the University of Washington. Hessburg walks us through the history of the region, from the controlled fires practiced by Indigenous peoples before European settlement to present-day ecologically unsound factors including “accidental ignitions, dense forests, the wrong kinds of fuels on the ground [and] rapidly changing climate.”

In the wake of a third ICE death at the Delaney Hall ICE jail in Newark, New Jersey, we speak with Gabriela Soto, whose husband Martín was one of the leaders of the May hunger strike at the immigration jail. Martín was transferred to Elizabeth Detention Center, New Jersey’s other ICE facility, during the hunger strike at Delaney. Gabriela is calling for the closure of both facilities.

“At first, I was fighting for my husband, but then I started to meet all of these people who are just innocent, and they are the people that make this country great,” says Soto, who blames her recent miscarriage on the stress of her husband being detained. “I am still grieving,” she says. “To me, this is an ICE murder, too.”

This comes as Edwin Lopez-Cornejo, a Salvadoran immigrant, died Saturday after being held for six weeks at Delaney Hall. He is the third immigrant to die at the ICE jail, which has been open since May 2025. Lopez-Cornejo’s mother, Maria Cornejo, says her son took medicine to manage diabetes, seizures and his blood pressure, but had not received his medications regularly since being detained. ICE said in a statement that Lopez-Conejo experienced a “medical emergency” on Saturday and was transported to University Hospital in Newark, but Maria Cornejo says her son died at Delaney Hall.

More than 70 people inside the ICE jail have filed lawsuits alleging medical neglect. That neglect was one of the factors that led to the hunger strike. “Individuals are not receiving the kind of healthcare that they in fact need, particularly for chronic health conditions, for pregnancies, for cancers,” says Analilia Mejía, Democratic congressmember from New Jersey. “Being undocumented should not be a death sentence.”

Voters went to the polls in Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, Virginia and Washington state on Tuesday. We continue to look at the results of those primary elections, with The Nation’s John Nichols calling it “a very good night for insurgent candidacies and for outsiders,” especially for candidates that campaigned around the fight against AI data centers.

Progressive candidate Abdul El-Sayed has been declared the winner of Michigan’s closely watched Democratic Senate primary, narrowly beating out Congressmember Haley Stevens, according to the Associated Press and other news agencies. AIPAC and its affiliated groups spent as much as $46 million to help Stevens in what has become the most expensive Democratic Senate primary contest in U.S. history. El-Sayed will face former Republican Congressman Mike Rogers in November to fill the seat now held by Democratic Senator Gary Peters, who is retiring. If El-Sayed wins the general election, he would become the first Muslim senator in U.S. history. His key supporters included Senator Bernie Sanders, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the United Auto Workers.

“Dr. Abdul El-Sayed worked unbelievably hard in this race,” says John Nichols, executive editor of The Nation, pointing out that El-Sayed campaigned in rural counties across Michigan. “It was literally about physically going to the people early, and then again and again and again, and talking to them about issues.”

We also speak with Andy Levin, a former Democratic congressmember from Michigan who lost to Stevens in 2022 after AIPAC spent $4.3 million on her campaign. El-Sayed’s rise represents “a movement of Americans who are saying, 'Enough of politics as usual,'” says Levin. “’We’re done with the parties as they are. We need some way more active effort for us to be able to have living wages and healthcare and education and childcare and retirement.’”

We look at the life and legacy of Dominican American historian, activist and prison abolitionist Dr. Johanna Fernández, who died on July 30 after a long battle with cancer. She was 55 years old. As a professor of history at Baruch College and the CUNY Graduate Center, Fernández was a leading scholar of the Young Lords, the radical 1960s civil rights organization founded in Chicago and New York and modeled on the Black Panthers. Fernández also created the Latinx Freedom Movement Archive and Exhibition Project, alongside historian Felipe Hinojosa. The exhibition is currently on view at The Shed in New York City, as well as in Chicago and Los Angeles. Iterations will also be presented in Houston and Washington, D.C.

Democracy Now! co-host Juan González, who was a founding member of the Young Lords before his career in journalism, remembers Fernández as “a consummate historian,” as well as a committed activist who devoted herself to advancing social justice. “She was an amazing person with enormous energy and spirit, and we are all better people for having known her,” he says.

More than 70 years after the kidnapping, torture and lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi, a major new photography exhibit and companion book ask how the world would be different “If Emmett Till Lived.” The Black teenager’s brutal murder, as well as his open-casket funeral that displayed his mutilated body, shocked the United States in 1955 and became a galvanizing moment in the civil rights movement. If Till had lived, he would be just over 85 years old today.

“Art really is one of the critical modes of creating an appeal to the moral imagination,” says historian Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, the curator behind “If Emmett Till Lived” and editor of the book.

Lewis collaborated on the project with Till’s surviving cousin, Reverend Wheeler Parker Jr., the last living witness to see Till alive. The exhibit opens at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago on September 10.

Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general cleared a major hurdle this week after two Republican senators who had raised concerns agreed to back him. Blanche gave written assurances that a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” designed to pay Trump allies would not be resurrected, and that a settlement between Trump and the Internal Revenue Service only gave the president retroactive immunity from audits rather than perpetual protection. The Senate Judiciary Committee votes on Blanche’s nomination Tuesday, with the full Senate expected to vote later in the week. Blanche, President Donald Trump’s former personal attorney and acting attorney general since April, has been central in many of the administration’s most controversial episodes, including prosecutions of Trump opponents and the botched rollout of files related to Jeffrey Epstein.

If confirmed, Blanche would entrench a culture of corruption at the Justice Department, warns legal expert Norm Eisen. “There have been a series of offenses against the rule of law, miscarriages of justice,” he tells Democracy Now!

Eisen is co-founder and executive chair of Democracy Defenders Fund. He previously served as White House special counsel for ethics and government reform in the Obama administration. The Justice Department recently dropped charges against his client, former Olympic athlete Davey Hearn, who had been accused of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

We speak to Dave Zirin, author and sports editor at The Nation, about his new book, The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn, chronicling the life and activism of the legendary historian Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States. For Zinn, says Zirin, “being an academic was always secondary to being in the streets and making history, not just studying history.”

One year ago, an Israeli settler shot and killed the Palestinian activist Awdah Hathaleen in the occupied West Bank. Hathaleen, an English teacher and father of three young children, played a key role in the production of the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, which follows Palestinians in the community of Masafer Yatta as they struggle to stay on their land amid violent attacks by Israeli settlers. A new report from the Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq looks closely at the circumstances of his death and the culpability of his killer, Yinon Levi, who has yet to face any legal consequences for Hathaleen’s death. Since October 7, 2023, about 1,100 Palestinians have been killed by Israelis in the West Bank, says Al-Haq’s Tahseen Elayyan. “None of these [deaths have] been held accountable by the Israeli legal system, which tells us a lot. It tells us that the Israeli occupying forces and the Israeli government are involved in these crimes, and this reflects a state policy … that aims at entrenching Israel’s settler-colonial project in the occupied Palestinian territory.”

An estimated 60,000 people from Morocco crossed into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, on the African side of the Strait of Gibraltar, in an unprecedented mass movement last week. At least 72 people died during the attempt. The sudden influx of migrants overwhelmed the city’s residents, leading to a humanitarian crisis while border police deployed water cannons, tear gas and warning shots to deter people from crossing. According to Spain’s Interior Ministry, nearly all of the migrants returned to Morocco just a day later.

Miriyam Aouragh, an anthropologist and the daughter of Moroccan immigrants to Europe, says the driving factors for the mass movement are a combination of shifting entry policies to Spain and increasing economic inequality in Morocco that “has given a sort of empowering incentive to people to try to go to Spain” via Ceuta. The city, which is surrounded by Morocco along a five-mile-long border, dates back to the Phoenician era and has been under Portuguese or Spanish control since 1415. The Moroccan government claims that Ceuta is occupied and colonized territory, while Spain considers it an integral part of the Spanish state.