Lee discusses the blackouts in Venezuela and the evidence that the US considered sabotaging Venezuela’s electricity grid in order to destabilize the government before it happened. Lee also discusses the congressional war powers resolution to end support for Saudi Arabia’s genocide in Yemen, the bleak developments in Brexit, a controversy involving investigators at the International Criminal Court, the school strike for climate, and more news from the notorious pharmaceutical industry profiteers. Natalie McGill brings you a new report from Demand Justice which finds that a majority of Senate Democrats have been voting in favor of Trump’s picks for federal courts since 2017. Naomi Karavani looks into the “other” college scandal receiving less attention in mainstream media right now.

The Baltic states have been on high alert in recent years, calling for more NATO troops to keep perceived Russian aggression at bay. Is the Moscow boogeyman image completely bogus? We ask Janis Jurkans, Latvia’s first foreign minister.

Tensions between Iran and the US spiral, with Washington pushing its European allies to abandon the nuclear deal and Tehran unwilling to compromise. Can they still pull out of the nose dive? We asked Dr. Hooshang Amirahmadi, three-time Iranian presidential hopeful and president of the American-Iranian Council.

More than six million United States citizens are currently denied the right to vote due to state laws that disenfranchise citizens who have been convicted of a felony. More than 75 percent of these disenfranchised citizens are not in prison, and more than half have completed all terms of parole and probation. The US is unique in the civil consequences it applies to its criminal population, almost certainly the only country in the world that disenfranchises a significant number of people who are either no longer incarcerated or were never in prison at all. Activists and advocates, though, are fighting back by reforming state laws. Ron Pierce, a Democracy and Justice Fellow at the New Jersey Institute of Social Justice, who was formerly incarcerated, and Scott Novakowski, associate counsel at the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, joined Chris Hedges to talk about the fight they are leading to repeal voting disenfranchisement in the state of New Jersey.

The European People’s Party, the center-right group within the European Parliament, has suspended Hungary’s Fidesz party, led by Viktor Orban. Is this the beginning of a major rift within the union? We talked to Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto.

The Iran nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), between China, France, Russia, UK and USA, represented a crowning moment of international diplomacy and stopped the US and its allies from going to war with Iran. Donald Trump's decision to break the deal threatens to return the world to that precipice. Scott Ritter, a former Marine intelligence officer and UN weapons inspector in Iraq, discusses the implications of the lost deal with On Contact host and journalist, Chris Hedges.

The future of US-China trade remains uncertain, as differences persist. Will Beijing bend to Washington’s pressure? We ask Chen Dongxiao, a senior adviser on economic diplomacy for China’s Foreign Ministry.

The glaciers in Alaska alone are losing an estimated 75 billion tons of ice every year. The oceans, which absorb over 90 percent of the excess heat trapped by greenhouses gases in the atmosphere, are warming and acidifying, melting the polar ice caps and resulting in rising sea-levels and oxygen-starved ocean dead zones. We await a 50-gigaton burp, or "pulse," of methane from thawing Arctic permafrost beneath the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, which will release the equivalent of around two-thirds of the total carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial era. Some 150 to 200 species of plants, insects, birds and mammals are becoming extinct every 24 hours – one thousand times the "natural" or "background" rate. This pace of extinction is greater than anything the world has experienced since the disappearance of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Chris Hedges speaks to journalist and author, Dahr Jamail, about his new book 'The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption,' which looks at the climate emergency.

In the US, right-wing groups such as the National Rifle Association interpret the Second Amendment of the US Constitution as permitting any individual to own weapons. In this week’s episode of On Contact, we talk to historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortriz. In her new book ‘Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment,’ and in her conversation with Chris Hedges, she argues that the amendment has more to do with white supremacy and the subjugation of indigenous people, African-Americans and immigrants than the individual right to have a gun.

Environmental activists argue the only way to stop the impending ecocide is to carry out nonviolent acts of civil disobedience to shut down the capitals of the major industrial countries, crippling commerce and transportation, until the ruling elites are forced to publicly state the truth about climate catastrophe, implement radical measure to halt carbon emissions by 2025, and empower an independent citizens committee to oversee the termination of our 150-year binge on fossil fuels. The British-based group, Extinction Rebellion, has called for nonviolent acts of civil disobedience on April 15 in capitals around the world to reverse our “one-way track to extinction.” Joining Chris Hedge in a two-part discussion from London is Roger Hallam, the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion.