FEATURING TEHAMA LOPEZ BUNYASI – It’s been more than 5 years since the rallying anti-racist cry of “Black Lives Matter” went viral. Focused initially on violent episodes of police brutality and vigilante attacks of black people, the movement broadened as a critique of systematic and institutional racism in America. Today we turn to the co-author of a new book intended as a guide for anti-racists, Stay Woke: A People’s Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter.

Tehama Lopez Bunyasi, Assistant Professor of Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University and author along with Candis Watts Smith of the new book Stay Woke: A People’s Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter.

The US Supreme Court decided to upend a lower court ruling on President Donald Trump’s new asylum rules denying refuge to those who have passed through a third country. The highest court’s ruling allowing the rule to be applied is temporary. However Trump declared victory on Twitter writing triumphantly, “BIG United States Supreme Court WIN for the Border on Asylum!” The ruling means that at least for now, most Central American migrants who have traveled through Mexico to arrive at the US borders would be ineligible for asylum, as would refugees from continents like Asia and Africa. Justice Sonia Sotomayor arguing against the court’s majority wrote in her dissenting opinion that the ruling was, “especially concerning,” because it will impact “some of the most vulnerable people in the Western Hemisphere.”

In other immigration news Congresswomen Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez of New York grilled immigration officials on documented cases of migrant children who are battling serious medical conditions facing deportation. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokespeople at the House subcommittee hearing refused to answer the lawmakers’ questions. Here is Ayanna Pressley pushing officials to respond.

The US has denied Temporary Protective Status (TPS) to climate refugees fleeing the Bahamas after Hurricane Dorian destroyed their communities. In the past the US has routinely offered TPS to the survivors of natural disasters such as Haiti’s devastating earthquake. The official death toll in the Bahamas stands at about 50 but is expected to rise dramatically as 2,500 people have been declared missing. Now, news has emerged of a devastating oil spill triggered by the storm on Grand Bahama island at the Norwegian Equinor facility. There are residents camping right near where the spill took place breathing in toxic fumes and worrying about the quality of the water they are drinking. Meanwhile a new study by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center has found that the number of people displaced by climate-related events in the first half of 2019 was a whopping 7 million – a record high.

Here in the US the Trump Administration is putting its final touches on rolling back the Obama-era provisions of the Clean Water Act. In spite of President Trump claiming time and again that his Presidency has demanded the cleanest water for Americans, his government will now once more allow the use of industrial toxic chemicals upstream from crucial water sources. And a new study by the group Climate Focus has found that the rate of deforestation around the world is so high that every year we lose forestla...

FEATURING JACOB CARTER – It’s been nearly 2 weeks since President Donald Trump erroneously tweeted that the state of Alabama would be in the path of Hurricane Dorian. The President decided to dig his heels in and crudely draw a line on a map of the hurricane in order to make his case for an impact on Alabama, leading to the reference of “SharpieGate” to describe the entire debacle. 

Trump’s apparent mistake has now ballooned into a controversy that has enveloped a major federal agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which contradicted its own National Weather Service in order to appease the President. 

Is “SharpieGate” just a distraction as some in the media have suggested? Or is it indicative of a greater problem within the Trump administration. 

Jacob Carter, research scientist for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. He formerly worked at the US Environmental Protection Agency.

FEATURING DIANE YENTEL – The Trump administration has apparently taken a great interest in California’s crisis of housing and homelessness. The Washington Post this week broke the story of how a number of top level federal government officials quietly toured Los Angeles’ Skid Row and, according to the paper’s headline, they want a “crackdown on homeless camps in California, with aides discussing moving residents to government-backed facilities.” 

It is true that the issue of homelessness has dramatically worsened in California over the past few years. Housing costs continue to rise and the number of Californians living in tents, RVs, or their cars has correspondingly risen. But advocates for the homeless are deeply skeptical about Trump’s plans for regions like Skid Row and other urban centers around the nation, given that the President’s administration has in fact cut federal funds for low-income housing.

Diane Yentel, President and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

North Carolina’s special election for the 9th district yielded a narrow win for Republican Dan Bishop who beat Democrat Dan McCready 50.7% to 48.7%, which amounted to a margin of less than 4,000 votes. President Donald Trump threw his weight behind Bishop and claimed credit for pushing the Republican to victory. Bishop was a state-level senator whose claim to fame involved promoting a state law forcing transgender people into using public restrooms based on their assigned gender at birth. Late on Tuesday Trump tweeted, “Dan Bishop was down 17 points 3 weeks ago. He then asked me for help, we changed his strategy together, and he ran a great race. Big Rally last night. Now it looks like he is going to win.” However, according to AP, “No polling has emerged publicly that showed Bishop with a deficit of that magnitude. Operatives from both parties and analysts had long said the race was too close to call.”

A new Washington Post/ABC News poll pitted Trump in a Presidential election matchup against 5 Democratic contenders and found that all of them would beat the incumbent. Joe Biden would beat Trump by 55-40%, while Senator Bernie Sanders would beat him by 52-43%. Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg were the other three candidates that all fared better than Trump. 

New details have emerged about National Security Advisor John Bolton’s departure from the White House. According to the Washington Post, “Bolton was seen by some in the administration as the source of a media report that Vice President Pence and he were allies in opposing a peace deal with the Taliban, negotiated by [Mike] Pompeo’s State Department.” According to NBC, “The president was angered by what he viewed as Bolton’s positioning himself in the news media as the decision-maker on key issues like Iran and Venezuela.” Mr. Bolton’s resignation letter was extremely brief, reading only the following 2 lines: “I hereby resign, effective immediately, as Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. Thank you for having afforded me the opportunity to serve this country.”

In the latest on the #SharpieGate controversy, the New York Times reported that, “The White House was directly involved in pressing a federal scientific agency to repudiate the weather forecasters who contradicted President Trump’s claim that Hurricane Dorian would probably strike Alabama.” The report comes a day after Commerce Department head Wilbur Ross was identified as having threatened NOAA staff with firings if they did not comply with the President’s misinformation. Now, it appears that Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney was the one who directed Ross to make the threat. The House Committee on Science,

President Donald Trump has fired his National Security Advisor John Bolton via Twitter saying, “I informed John Bolton last night that his services are no longer needed at the White House. I disagreed strongly with many of his suggestions, as did others in the Administration.” He says he plans to announce a new Advisor next week. Mr. Bolton said he had offered his resignation to the President the night before. Bolton’s departure come just as the US withdrew from peace talks with Afghanistan’s Taliban forces. On Monday Mr. Trump responded to a reporter’s question about the status of the talks and said this. PLAY VIDEO. Mr. Bolton had been among the strongest naysayers against the deal with the Taliban. According to the New York Times, “Mr. Bolton saw his job as stopping Mr. Trump from making unwise agreements with America’s enemies.” But Trump, eager to show himself off as a deal-maker has been enthusiastic about meeting leaders of rival nations including North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, and Iran’s Hassan Rouhani. Mr. Bolton’s departure is part of an unprecedented exodus of White House staff under Trump. 

A Russian official in a high position in the Kremlin has been revealed to be a US spy according to CNN which broke the story. Numerous officials from the Trump administration spoke to the media outlet and described how the US “extracted” the spy from Russia in 2017. Apparently, “the removal of the Russian was driven, in part, by concerns that President Donald Trump and his administration repeatedly mishandled classified intelligence and could contribute to exposing the covert source as a spy.” Intelligence officials were reportedly deeply concerned about Trump revealing highly classified Israeli information on Syria to Russian officials during a meeting in the Oval office. They quickly moved to remove their spy. The Russian government admitted that the spy worked there but denied that they had access to President Vladimir Putin. 

Upon returning from recess Senate Democrats are making a second attempt at vetoing Trump’s emergency declaration on the US-Mexico border – which he has used to justify appropriating billions of dollars of military funding. This is minority leader Chuck Schumer addressing the Senate. PLAY VIDEO. That’s Senate Minority leader Chuck Schumer, who will force a second vote on vetoing Trump’s border wall emergency declaration. Schumer hopes that some of Trump’s Republican supporters in the Senate will change their vote after seeing their districts stripped of funding. Schumer also addressed the issue of gun control in the Senate. PLAY VIDEO. Mr. Schumer, along with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wrote Trump a letter earlier this week asking for his “urgent personal intervention” on the issue of gun violence. New polls show overwhelming majority public support for curbing access to guns. But the White House has instead focused on a controversial idea to monitor people with mental health challenges as a solution for gun violence.

FEATURING ROBERT WEISSMAN – President Donald Trump on Tuesday unleashed a series of tweets aimed at Google and its CEO Sundar Pichai accusing his company of suppressing information in a politically biased way and citing the words of conservative figures. 

The nation’s biggest tech companies, Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, have had a tenuous relationship with the 45th President. 

Now, a new report shows that they are not taking any chances that lawmakers will regulate them, flooding Capitol Hill with donations and lobbyists. 

Robert Weissman, a public interest advocate and activist and the President of Public Citizen.

*This segment was originally broadcast on August 6, 2019.

FEATURING ALEXANDRA MINNA STERN – The mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, have catapulted into the national consciousness just how deadly the spread of online white nationalism, racist hatred, misogyny, and anti-immigrant sentiment is. President Donald Trump’s scripted speech about denouncing bigotry and white supremacy did little to distance him from the supercharged spread of hate. 

Today we’ll examine the so-called Alt Right and what underpins its dangerous ideology. 

Alexandra Minna Stern, professor of American Culture, History and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, where she leads the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab. She is the award-winning author of Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America, and Telling Genes: The Story of Genetic Counseling in America. Her new book is called Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right Is Warping the American Imagination.

*This segment was originally broadcast on August 6, 2019.

FEATURING RAHUL MAHAJAN – Donald Trump’s desire for a foreign policy triumph to end the longest running war in US history came to a grinding halt on Saturday when the President tweeted that he had secretly invited the Afghan Taliban and President Ashraf Ghani to Camp David and then canceled the talks. 

For years, talks between US and Taliban representatives came tantalizingly close to a deal. But in the lead up to this past weekend, Taliban-linked bombings in Afghanistan spiked. Trump explained his decision to cancel the Camp David meeting after the Taliban took credit for a suicide bombing that claimed the lives of a US soldier and 11 others. 

While some observers of the war expressed relief over what they saw as a very flawed deal now ending, others here in the US were aghast at the timing of a Camp David meeting so close to the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

Rahul Mahajan is the US Foreign Policy and Empire Correspondent for Rising Up With Sonali. He’s the author of two books on the Iraq war: Full Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond and The New Crusade: America’s War on Terrorism. He also teaches at University of Wisconsin, River Falls.

FEATURING SUSAN ROMANSKI – A week after the strongest hurricane ever to hit the Atlantic made landfall on the Bahamas, the bodies of victims are still emerging from the wreckage. The scale of devastation wrought by Hurricane Dorian is unprecedented as the storm battered the Caribbean island nation for two whole days uprooting trees, obliterating structures and flooding the coast. Observers described the storm’s aftermath as visually similar to the result of a nuclear war. 

Anger and impatience is now building up as aid is slow to reach many parts of the islands. There has been a collaborative international aid effort as well as a number of private aid organizations pouring supplies into the Bahamas. But so far they are struggling to meet the needs of survivors. 

Susan Romanski, Senior Director for Capacity Building and Global Engagement at Mercy Corps.