FEATURING SAMEER DOSSANI – Election results from the world’s largest democracy show incumbent Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi with a massive and decisive victory. Modi’s right wing Hindu Nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party of BJP, has exceeded even its own expectations.

Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi of the Congress Party conceded defeat. Religious minorities in India fear what awaits them in Modi’s second term with the Prime Minister claiming a huge mandate for pushing his domestic and foreign policy agenda.

Sameer Dossani is co-founder of PeaceVigil.net, a website that designs tools to promote peace. Sameer holds a Masters Degree in Women’s Studies from LaTrobe University, Australia where his thesis focused on the role of religious sectarianism in undermining women’s rights in India.

FEATURING STEPHANIE ABRAHAM – Disney’s feature-film reboot of its 1992 animated film Aladdin has hit theaters and critics are oohing and aahing over the stunning visuals, resplendent costumes, and state-of-the-art CGI effects. But while the mega production company may be forgiven for engaging in orientalist fantasy nearly 30 years ago, does a similar-looking reprise make sense in 2019?

One main difference is that the cast of the 2019 live-action film is markedly more diverse than the voice-over actors of the 1992 animated film. Whether or not that protects Disney from accusations of peddling in stereotypes is up to critics.

Stephanie Abraham is the Pop Culture Correspondent and Film Critic for Rising Up With Sonali. She’s a writer and media critic, she helped found the feminist magazine make/shift and was the founding editor of the feminist magazine LOUDmouth. Her works have been published in McSweeney’s, Al Jazeera, Mizna and Bitch Magazine.

A single House Republican from Texas has stalled what was expected to be the near-certain passage of a long-awaited disaster-funding bill. Representative Chip Roy raised an objection to the $19 billion aid package that the Senate passed on Thursday evening with a vote of 85 to 8 and that even President Donald Trump said he would sign. Because the Senate vote came after most House members had left Washington DC ahead of the long weekend, House leaders had hoped on Friday morning to pass the bill by a procedure called “unanimous consent.” Because even a single objection can derail a vote in such a procedure, Rep. Chip’s opposition postponed the disaster-funding bill to June. The Washington Post explained that, “Roy’s objection to the disaster aid bill further delays legislation that would send aid to victims of Western wildfires, Midwestern flooding and hurricanes that hit the Southeast and Puerto Rico, as well as to other disaster-affected areas across the country.” What was remarkable about the bill was that Trump had unexpectedly signaled approval of a bill that did not include his border wall funding. The House is expected to have another unanimous consent vote next Tuesday.

President Trump, clearly spooked by Nancy Pelosi’s comments about him engaging in a cover up, decided to retweet a video compiled by Fox News of the House Speaker stumbling over her words. The heavily edited video was followed by a remarkably ageist and sexist commentator claiming that Speaker Pelosi was taking on too much and perhaps needed to pull back on her work. He made no mention of the President’s inarticulate oration or limited vocabulary. Meanwhile a second video of the House Speaker at an event this past Wednesday has been making the rounds of social media, digitally altered to make it appear as though her words were slurring and that she might have been inebriated. Right-leaning social media groups have pushed that video, which millions have already watched and likely not realized it was altered. Social media companies Facebook and Twitter have announced that they will not take down copies of the manipulated video.

In other news, President Trump on Thursday granted extraordinary powers to Attorney General William Barr to investigate the origins of the Special Counsel inquiry into his links to Russia in the 2016 election. The New York Times explained that, “Mr. Trump ordered the C.I.A. and the country’s 15 other intelligence agencies to cooperate with the review and granted Mr. Barr the authority to unilaterally declassify their documents,” giving Barr, “immense leverage over the intelligence community and enormous power over what the public learns about the roots of the Russia investigation.” Meanwhile Democrats in the Senate are asking their House colleagues ...

FEATURING ANNA GRACE HOTTINGER – When 16-year old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg launched her weekly strike from school on Fridays for the future of the planet, she may not have foreseen just how massive the movement would grow. School-aged children in hundreds of cities around the world have refused to attend school on Fridays demanding that politicians take immediate and decisive action on climate change.

Friday May 24th is the focus of a major global strike with more than 1,600 #FridaysForFuture events registered in 119 countries around the world. As extreme weather hits mid western and Southern states causing death and destruction, the evidence is all around us that our climate is rapidly destabilizing. Will the adults listen to our youth?

Anna Grace Hottinger, 16-year old youth climate activist from Shoreview, Minnesota, working closely on the international Fridays For Future movement and with a number of climate justice organizations.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer both accused President Donald Trump of having a “temper tantrum” on Wednesday when he walked out of a meeting on infrastructure legislation after only 3 minutes. Trump, apparently angered that Pelosi had just accused him of engaging in a cover-up seemed to not be in a mood to negotiate. Here’s Schumer, speaking to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. Speaker Pelosi, in a letter to her fellow lawmakers on Wednesday night echoed that language saying, “Sadly, the only job the president seems to be concerned with is his own. He threatened to stop working with Democrats on all legislation unless we end oversight of his administration and he had a temper tantrum for us all to see.” And on Thursday Speaker Pelosi gave a news conference where she repeated her claim that she didn’t want to proceed on impeachment. However, the Washington Post reported that Pelosi told her colleagues in private, “He wants to be impeached, so he can be exonerated by the Senate.”

In other news on Wednesday, a federal judge ruled that Deutsche Bank, the international financial institution that has loaned President Trump hundreds of millions of dollars, can comply with a congressional subpoena to disclose Trump’s records. Trump had sued to stop the bank from complying. The ruling came on the same day that New York state legislators passed a bill to hand over Trump’s state tax returns to Congressional committee chairs upon request, and a day after a judge ruled that Trump’s former accounting firm, Mazars USA can also comply with subpoenas for his records.  

Former State Secretary Rex Tillerson had a closed-door hearing with Congress members on Wednesday during which he recounted that Trump had been woefully unprepared for his very first face-to-face meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2017. Tillerson, who Trump fired last March spent 7 hours testifying behind closed doors to the House Foreign Affairs Committee and spoke among other things about Trump’s meeting in Helsinki with Putin. According to sources familiar with the hearing speaking with the Washington Post, “The U.S. side anticipated a shorter meeting for exchanging courtesies, but it ballooned into a globe-spanning two-hour-plus session involving deliberations on a variety of geopolitical issues.” A committee aide told the paper, “We spent a lot of time in the conversation talking about how Putin seized every opportunity to push what he wanted…There was a discrepancy in preparation, and it created an unequal footing.” The President responded to the reports of what was said at the hearing saying he, “was perfectly prepared for my meetings with Vladimir Putin. We did very well at those meetings.”

President Trump on Thursday announced a $16 billion bailout plan for American farmers who say they are harmed by the US’s tra...

A sixteen-year old boy from Guatemala named Carlos Gregorio Hernandez has become the latest casualty in President Donald Trump’s war on immigrants. Hernandez died this past Monday after apparently succumbing to the flu. He had been in Border Patrol detention for a week.

There have been at least half a dozen cases since last December of immigrant children dying in US custody, the latest phenomenon after last summer’s debacle of thousands of children ripped away from their parents.

Acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan faced the ire of lawmakers during a panel hearing on Wednesday over the children’s deaths. Congresswoman Nanette Barragán who has traveled to the US-Mexico border and witnessed Trump’s immigration policies first hand called McAleenan’s record “despicable.”

For more information, visit www.vdlf.org.

Christine Neumann-Ortiz, Executive Director of Voces De La Frontera.

Obesity we are told, is the scourge of health, linked to a large number of debilitating diseases including diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, cancer and more. For women especially obesity comes with societal judgments rooted in notions of impossible skinniness.

A new book examines how our attitudes toward obesity and fatness have been shaped by historical biases rooted in race and racism. In Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, author Sabrina Strings writes, “racial discourse was deployed by elite Europeans and white Americans to create social distinctions between themselves and so-called greedy and fat racial Others.”

Sabrina Strings, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. Her new book is called Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia.

President Donald Trump abruptly walked out of a scheduled meeting with Democratic leaders on Wednesday morning after hearing that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had accused him of engaging in a cover up. Pelosi, who has been facing increasing pressure from her colleagues to embark on impeachment proceedings, met earlier with fellow Democrats on Wednesday. Soon after she, together with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer attended a scheduled meeting with President Trump at the White House to discuss an infrastructure plan but reports emerged that Trump walked out of that meeting after just 3 minutes, seething over Pelosi’s comments. He then referred to her words during remarks in the Rose Garden.

Meanwhile news emerged of links between Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen and the head of a company with links to a Russian oligarch. Federal prosecutors had investigated the ties over the past two years in filings that were made public for the first time on Wednesday. One warrant explained that, “Telephone records related to Cohen’s cellular telephone show that on or about Nov. 8, 2016, the day of the presidential election, a telephone registered to Cohen exchanged the first in a series of text messages with the CEO of Columbus Nova.” Columbus Nova is run by Renova Group which is operated by a Russian national named Viktor Vekselberg. Columbus Nova’s CEO, who Cohen communicated extensively with, is Andrew Intrater, Vekselberg’s cousin. Cohen and Intrater exchanged 230 phone calls and 950 text messages starting on election day 2016.

The Justice Department has cut a deal with the House Intelligence Committee after Attorney General William Barr refused to testify at a recent hearing. Committee chair Adam Schiff announced that in exchange for postponing the enforcement of a subpoena on Barr the DOJ agreed at the last minute to produce much of the redacted material from the Special Counsel’s report to the committee. Meanwhile the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday announced more subpoenas for former White House officials to appear at hearings including former White House Communications Director Hope Hicks, and deputy White House Counsel Annie Donaldson who took extensive written notes and emerged as a player in the Mueller report.

The Washington Post has obtained a copy of a memo from the Internal Revenue Service over a Congressional request for Trump’s tax returns. According to the Post, the memo asserts that, “tax returns must be given to Congress unless the president takes the rare step of asserting executive privilege.” The memo itself says that turning over the tax returns, “is mandatory, requiring the Secretary to disclose returns, and return information, requested by the tax-writing Chairs.” Federal Reserve Chair Stephen Mnuchin has claimed that the DOJ advises him not to release Trump’s tax returns but the c...

FEATURING JODI JACOBSON – Actions were held in cities around the United States on Tuesday to oppose the slate of anti-abortion laws that Republicans are passing in state after state. Abortion rights activists sounded the alarm bells after Georgia’s so-called fetal heart beat ban passed. But it was when Alabama passed a near-total ban on abortion that anger around the nation has swelled even more.

President Trump, perhaps realizing the continued popularity of abortion access among the public, distanced himself from the extremism of the pro-lifers who don’t want even women who have been raped to have control of their bodies, saying on Twitter, “I am strongly Pro-Life, with the three exceptions, rape, incest and protecting the life of the mother.”

But of course it has been Trump who has created the biggest opening in decades for the anti-abortionists to overturn the Roe V. Wade Supreme Court decision granting women the constitutional right to control their own uteruses.

Jodi Jacobson, President and Editor in Chief of Rewire.News.

FEATURING JEFFREY C. ISAAC – The billion-dollar question emerging from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report is whether or not members of Congress should impeach President Donald Trump. Although the House of Representatives is where impeachment proceedings begin, it is the Senate where the process would complete. Democrats could start impeachment but unless Senate Republicans were on board it would go nowhere.

Still, there is a case to be made that impeachment ought to be pursued, whether or not it succeeds. There is debate both among Democratic Party members and among rank and file progressives.

Jeffrey C. Isaac is the James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science at Indiana University in Bloomington. His latest book is called #AgainstTrump: Notes From Year One. He is also Senior Editor at Public Seminar.

**This segment was originally broadcast on April 25, 2019.