Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar have been denied entry to Israel ahead of their much-publicized planned visit. Shockingly President Donald Trump tweeted that Israel should deny his own nation’s democratically elected representatives entry. He wrote, “It would show great weakness if Israel allowed Rep. Omar and Rep.Tlaib to visit. They hate Israel & all Jewish people, & there is nothing that can be said or done to change their minds. Minnesota and Michigan will have a hard time putting them back in office. They are a disgrace!” Trump had privately been pressuring Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week to stop the two freshmen members of Congress who became the US’s two first Muslim American lawmakers. According to Axios, which reported on the story, “Trump said that if Omar and Tlaib wanted to boycott Israel, ‘then Israel should boycott them,’ according to a source with direct knowledge.” Presidential candidate and Senator Bernie Sanders condemned the move saying, “Banning Congresswomen Omar and Tlaib from entering Israel and Palestine is a sign of enormous disrespect to these elected leaders, to the United States Congress, and to the principles of democracy.” Earlier this week at a campaign event in New Hampshire Sanders said, “the United States government gives a whole lot of money to Israel and I think we can leverage that money to end some of the racism that we have recently seen in Israel.” A new poll found Sanders leading the candidate field in New Hampshire ahead even of Joe Biden. 

Meanwhile the Wall Street Journal is reporting that the US recently arranged for secret meetings between Israel and the United Arab Emirates in order to coordinate action aimed at Iran. And the US had requested the seizure of an Iranian oil tanker that had been held by authorities in Gibraltar. But Gibraltar decided to release the vessel and its crew back to Iran. Iranian authorities have indicated that if their vessel was released, it might return a British oil tanker that it had seized. 

Here in the US, partial results from Jeffrey Epstein’s autopsy have been released, only deepening the mystery surrounding his apparent suicide. The billionaire sex offender was reported to have hanged himself at the Metropolitan Correctional Center on Saturday morning but now it appears that several of his neck bones were broken. According to the Washington Post, “Such breaks can occur in those who hang themselves, particularly if they are older, according to forensics experts and studies on the subject. But they are more common in victims of homicide by strangulation, the experts said.”

Republican Congressman Steve King of Iowa has revealed his extremist views yet again and drawn widespread condem...

FEATURING CELESTE WATKINS-HAYES – When we think of those afflicted with HIV/AIDS, we usually imagine men. And indeed more men have been infected with the disease than women but that ratio is changing. Globally women may outnumber men who live with HIV/AIDS. Here in the US living with a disease brings many added complexities of wealth inequality, race, and a broken healthcare system. 

Celeste Watkins-Hayes, Professor of Sociology and African American Studies, and Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. She is also the author of The New Welfare Bureaucrats: Entanglements of Race, Class, and Policy Reform. Her new book is called Remaking A Life: How Women Living With HIV/AIDS Confront Inequality.

FEATURING JEET HEER – The New York Times this week published an op-ed entitled, “Jeffrey Epstein and When to Take Conspiracies Seriously.” The lengthy piece attempted to say that, “Sometimes conspiracy theories point toward something worth investigating. A few point toward the truth.” 

In the immediate aftermath of Epstein’s death President Trump himself immediately promoted a conspiracy theory that the Clintons were involved.

Read Jeet Heer’s aticle “Epstein’s Death Demands Investigation, Not Conspiracy Theories,” HERE.

Jeet Heer, national-affairs correspondent at The Nation. His latest article is entitled, “Epstein’s Death Demands Investigation, Not Conspiracy Theories”

FEATURING RACHEL LOUISE SNYDER – Violence against women is an epidemic that we are acknowledging and demanding justice for in larger than ever numbers in the era of #MeToo. But violence that occurs in the home, between domestic partners, the kind that we call “domestic violence,” or “intimate violence,” is still deeply invisibilized. A new and timely book called No Visible Bruises explores in visceral detail the toll of such violence on its victims. 

Find more information about domestic violence at www.DangerAssessment.org.

Rachel Louise Snyder, Associate Professor at American University, award winning author of several books including Fugitive Denim: A Moving Story of People and Pants in the Borderless World of Global Trade. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, New Republic and more. Her latest book is called No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us.

** This segment was originally broadcast on July 12, 2019.

The Acting Director of Citizenship and Immigration Services Ken Cuccinelli dug his heels in even harder after being confronted about his rewrite of Emma Lazarus’s poem on the Statue of Liberty. After claiming on NPR’s Morning Edition that the poem asserted that only those who could be independent of government services should emigrate, he said this on CNN a day later. Media Matters for America reported that, “Cuccinelli then ran to Fox News, where he complained to a sympathetic audience that the media outlets were unfairly treating him over his comments on CNN. He lamented, ‘If I open my mouth, you know, they will scream something awful came out no matter what.’ He insisted that media reports are ‘completely and totally untrue,’ despite video footage showing exactly what he said.” The hashtag #CuccinelliResign has now begun trending on Twitter.

An 18-year old white man named Justin Olsen was found to have been planning a mass shooting of federal agents. Going by the handle name ArmyofChrist, Olsen posted violent fantasies online including a call to “Shoot every federal agent on sight.” Earlier this month when FBI agents raided his home, according to the Washington Post, they found, “10,000 rounds of ammunition and a vault full of assault-type weapons and shotguns.” Meanwhile the Guardian newspaper reported that Republican state lawmaker from Washington named Matt Shea has been closely working with an organization “offering training to young men in ‘biblical warfare’ that includes how to use knives, pistols and rifles, with lessons based in part on the teachings of a Georgia-based neo-Confederate pastor.” And the New Zealand shooter who went on a killing rampage against Muslims and murdered more than 50 people has been found to be circulating a handwritten letter on 4chan. The online forum 4chan is favored by mass shooters and hate groups. 

In the latest news from the Jeffrey Epstein controversy, victims of the billionaire sex offender are now suing his close accomplice and girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell. Jennifer Araoz who has accused Epstein of repeatedly raping her when she was 14 and 15 years old, is joined by 3 other unnamed women in suing Maxwell. In an op-ed in the New York Times Araoz wrote that in spite of Epstein’s death, “my quest for justice is just getting started.” Meanwhile there are now reports that the guards at Metropolitan Correctional Center where Epstein was found dead had fallen asleep and no...

FEATURING JASMEET SIDHU – Amnesty International has issued a travel warning for visitors planning trips to the United States. The warning says that, “Depending on the traveler’s gender identity, race, country of origin, ethnic background, or sexual orientation, they may be at higher risk of being targeted by gun violence and should plan accordingly.”

The Amnesty warning came at about the same time as several nations, Japan, Germany, Ireland, The Bahamas and New Zealand issued similar cautionary notices to US-bound travelers. When asked about the warnings last Friday Trump said flippantly, “Well, I can’t imagine that…But if they did that, we’d just reciprocate. We are a very reciprocal nation with me as the head. When somebody does something negative to us in terms of a country, we do it to them.”

Tens of thousands of people lose their lives to gun violence each year in the US and mass shootings as well as hate crimes are spiking under Trump.

Read the advisory and report HERE.

Jasmeet Sidhu is the Research Manager for the End Gun Violence Campaign at Amnesty International USA. She led AIUSA’s research into the United States’ obligations to prevent gun violence and its impact on human rights for AIUSA’s End Gun Violence report: In the Line of Fire- Human Rights and the US Gun Violence Crisis.

FEATURING MICKEY HUFF – A former reality television star is President of the United States and has declared war on the media. The relationship between Presidents and the press has always been fraught with political pitfalls. A free press is enshrined in our constitution, and is intended to be a bulwark against abuses of power, shining a light on wrongdoing and holding politicians’ feet to the fire. 

But today corporate controlled media dominate the journalistic landscape and a handful of media outlets enjoy such a cozy relationship with the White House that they are little more than mouthpieces of propaganda. How did we get here? 

Mickey Huff, director of Project Censored and president of the Media Freedom Foundation. He is also the co-author with Nolan Higdon of the new book United States of Distraction: Media Manipulation in Post-Truth America.

President Donald Trump is visiting a Pennsylvania town this week to promote manufacturing in a state that helped him win the White House in 2016. He intends to tour Shell’s Pennsylvania Petrochemicals Complex, a massive plant that will convert natural gas into plastics. Critics are worried that when built, the plant will be the largest polluter in the state. Associated Press explained that, “The focus is part of a continued push by the Trump administration to increase the economy’s dependence on fossil fuels in defiance of increasingly urgent warnings about climate change. And it’s an embrace of plastic at a time when the world is sounding alarms over its ubiquity and impact.” The US Geological Survey just released a study entitled, “It’s Raining Plastic,” showing that rainwater samples from the Colorado Rocky Mountains shockingly contained multicolored microscopic plastic fibers. According to a Guardian Newspaper report about the study, “Rainwater samples collected across Colorado and analyzed under a microscope contained a rainbow of plastic fibers, as well as beads and shards.”

Meanwhile a report by the government together with the American Meteorological Society has found that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide were found to have accumulated in their highest concentrations in recorded history in 2018. The annual State of the Climate report also estimates that 2019 will be the 2nd or 3rd hottest year on record. And the Washington Post this week published a lengthy climate analysis of the United States, concluding that “[e]xtreme climate change has arrived in America.” In it, researchers found that New jersey “is one of the fastest-warming states in the nation. Its average temperature has climbed by close to 2 degrees Celsius since 1895 — double the average for the Lower 48 states.” The paper’s analysis of “more than a century of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration temperature data across the Lower 48 states and 3,107 counties has found that major areas are nearing or have already crossed the 2-degree Celsius mark.”

Some states are fighting back against the Trump Administration’s relentless drive to accelerate climate change. A coalition of nearly 2-dozen Democratic-controlled states is suing the federal government over the repeal of the Obama-era Clean Power Plan. Trump’s replacement rule is called the Affordable Clean Energy and was written to try to keep coal plants open for longer. The states suing the government say the new rule violates the Clean Air Act. 

In other news, more details about the death of billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein have emerged. CBS is reporting that according to one source, “there was shouting and shrieking from his jail cell,” on the morning of his death. Additionally, “One of Epstein’s guards at the Metropolitan Correctional Center on the night he died was reportedly not a regular corrections officer.” Congress is now calling for an investigation into Epstein’s death, a day after Attorney General William Barr accused...

FEATURING CHIP GIBBONS – In the wake of the mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, the nation has woken to the dangers of white supremacist violence as a form of domestic terrorism. Among the many calls for action – such as asking President Donald Trump to stop broadcasting his own white supremacist views – are suggestions for the FBI to begin treating domestic terrorism with the same seriousness as international terrorism. Indeed media pundits are calling on Congress to pass a domestic terrorism statute. 

But those who study the FBI’s long history of abusing power are urging caution.

Read Chip Gibbon’s article on In These Times, “Expanding the Powers of the FBI Is Not the Solution to White Supremacist Violence,” HERE.

Chip Gibbons, journalist whose work has been featured in Jacobin, In These Times, and the Nation. He is also the policy and legislative counsel for Defending Rights and Dissent, an organization founded by victims of the House Un-American Activities Committee that works to protect the right to engage in political expression. He just wrote the piece: “Expanding the Powers of the FBI Is Not the Solution to White Supremacist Violence.”

FEATURING WAQAS SYED – Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s decision to revoke the semi-autonomous rule of its northern-most state of Kashmir has been met with widespread denunciation. Kashmir has been at the center of long-simmering tensions and even war between India and Pakistan for decades going all the way back to the end of British colonization. But Modi’s right-wing Hindu nationalist government has inflamed tensions at a time when both India and Pakistan are nuclear-armed states. 

While Indian troops have long occupied the majority-Muslim state, thousands more troops have been sent to quell anger and enforce a curfew. 

Waqas Syed, national coordinator for North American Indian Muslim Association (NAIMA) and the California State coordinator for ICNA Council for Social Justice.