This post was originally published on Democracy Now!.

This post was originally published on Democracy Now!.

The partial reopening of Gaza’s southern Rafah crossing with Egypt has been marked by chaos and severe restrictions imposed by Israel, as tens of thousands of Palestinians continue to wait for medical evacuation to receive urgent care outside the Gaza Strip. According to U.N. data, only 36 Palestinians in need of medical treatment were allowed to leave Gaza during the first four days of the crossing’s reopening. Palestinians permitted to reenter Gaza have also reported abuse and hourslong interrogations. This comes amid growing skepticism over the implementation of the second phase of the Trump-brokered ceasefire, which Israel has repeatedly violated with near-daily attacks across Gaza since the truce took effect in October.

“No one inside Gaza is calling this a ceasefire,” says Arwa Damon, former CNN correspondent and the founder of INARA, a nonprofit organization that supports children impacted by war. She says ongoing Israeli restrictions on medical evacuation are essentially a death sentence for many people, including children. “They are either going to end up with permanent injury or they are going to die.”

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With the 2026 Winter Olympics underway in Italy, we speak with writer and academic Jules Boykoff, author of six books about the Olympics, who says Milan is hosting the Games despite widespread public opposition from locals. Boykoff says that while the Olympics have attempted in recent years to institute some “cosmetic” reforms, “they don’t get at the core elements that really plague the Olympic Games, and that’s overspending, that’s the intensification of militarized policing, that’s greenwashing, that’s corruption, that’s the displacement of local populations.”

Boykoff’s recent piece for The Nation, co-authored with Dave Zirin, is headlined “Get Ready for This Year’s Undemocratic, Debt-Ridden, and Mobster-Infused Winter Olympics.”

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President Donald Trump is refusing to apologize for sharing a racist video on social media that depicts former President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama as apes. The video remained available on Trump’s Truth Social page for 12 hours before it was deleted around noon on Friday. It prompted rare criticism from members of his own party, including South Carolina’s Tim Scott, the Senate’s only Black Republican, who called it “the most racist thing” he had seen from the White House.

“This is a disgusting and despicable display of racism from President Trump,” says Wisdom Cole, senior national director of advocacy for the NAACP. “Instead of unifying the nation and celebrating the achievements of Black America … he chooses to continue to perpetuate bigotry.”

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We speak with Aliya Rahman, a U.S. citizen who was violently dragged from her car by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis last month and detained at the Whipple Federal Building, which has become the epicenter of the government’s immigration crackdown in the city. Rahman says she repeatedly told agents she was disabled and had a brain injury, but they ignored her pleas for medical attention or other accommodation. “I was taken out of that place unconscious,” says Rahman, who describes lasting injuries and trauma from her detention. Rahman was not charged with any crime. “What I saw in that detention center was truly horrific.”

We also speak with attorney Alexa Van Brunt, director of the Illinois office of the MacArthur Justice Center, who says victims of ICE violence like Rahman can sue the federal government for violating their rights, “but they cannot sue the officers in their individual capacity.”

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Democracy Now! Monday, February 9, 2026

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Democracy Now! Monday, February 9, 2026

This post was originally published on Democracy Now! Video.

• At Least 50 People Arrested in Minneapolis While Marking One Month Since Renee Good's Killing
• Mexican Immigrant Whose Skull Was Broken During His Arrest by ICE Speaks Out
• More Than 1,000 Google Workers Call On Company to Cancel Contracts with ICE and CBP
• Federal Judge Puts Temporary Hold on Data Sharing Between IRS, Social Security Administration and ICE
• Trump Refuses to Apologize for Publishing a Racist Video Depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as Apes
• DOJ to Allow Congress Unredacted Access to Epstein Files
• Israeli Security Cabinet Approves New Rules to Tighten Control Over Occupied West Bank
• Iran Says It's Willing to Limit Uranium Enrichment for Sanctions Relief
• Hong Kong Court Sentences Media Mogul Jimmy Lai to 20 Years in Prison
• Drone Attack by Paramilitary Group RSF Kills at Least 24 People in Sudan
• Federal Judge Orders Trump Admin to Unfreeze $16 Billion in Funds for New York Tunnel Project
• U.S. Vice President Vance Booed at Opening Ceremony of Winter Olympics
• Bad Bunny Makes History as First Artist to Perform Super Bowl Halftime Show in Spanish

This post was originally published on Democracy Now!.

This post was originally published on Democracy Now!.

This post was originally published on Democracy Now!.

This post was originally published on Democracy Now!.

This post was originally published on Democracy Now!.

This post was originally published on Democracy Now!.

This post was originally published on Democracy Now!.

This post was originally published on Democracy Now!.

We host a debate between two former officials at the human rights organization Human Rights Watch. Omar Shakir resigned this week after more than a decade as the organization’s Israel and Palestine director, over a report on the Palestinian right of return that he says was blocked from publication for ideological reasons. “I’ve lost faith in our new leadership’s fidelity to the integrity of what we do best, which is to publish the facts that we document and consistently apply the law,” says Shakir. Yet HRW’s former executive director Kenneth Roth says the report was “utterly unpublishable” and questions the legal basis of the unpublished report’s claim that Israel’s denial of Palestinians’ right of return is a crime against humanity. “Some Palestinian refugees may have this great suffering required for it to be a crime against humanity, but a lot of them clearly don’t,” he states. Shakir calls Roth’s objections hypocritical in light of similar HRW claims about the rights of Rohingya and Chagos Island refugees. “The right of return remains this third rail even among progressive human rights institutions,” he says.

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In the wake of deadly mass protests that have shaken the ruling Iranian government, and with U.S. leaders publicly weighing the idea of military intervention and potential regime change in Iran, American and Iranian officials are beginning renewed talks over Iran’s nuclear program today. We speak to two guests, reporter Nilo Tabrizy and scholar Arang Keshavarzian, about the “very strange and contradictory situation” facing the country. “For both the Iranian state, but more importantly for Iranian people, it’s very unclear what all of this portends, especially since it doesn’t seem like these negotiations will go beyond the question of the nuclear program,” says Keshavarzian.

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The Washington Post has laid off more than 300 journalists, dismantling its sports, local news and international coverage. “Everybody is grieving, and it’s a loss for our readers,” says Nilo Tabrizy, one of the paper’s recently laid-off staff, who describes a “robotic” meeting announcing the cuts. “They didn’t have the dignity to look us in the eye.” The shocking staff culling has been widely attributed to the paper’s leadership under Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who bought the nearly 150-year-old institution in 2013. Karen Attiah, the former global opinion editor at the Post, was hired soon after Bezos’s arrival. She recounts how the arrival of a billionaire backer initially revitalized the paper with resources and creative freedom, before souring over the next decade. “We thought [he] shared the same values that we had,” says Attiah, who was fired from the Post last fall over comments she made about the death of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. “Journalism deserves better than a billionaire owner who decides that partying in Europe is more important than people’s lives.”

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The September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center in New York City was a major polluting event. Debris from the collapse of the buildings spread toxic substances, including asbestos, lead, mercury and more, throughout the disaster zone. As New York City leaders issue new calls for the release of files detailing the extent of this pollution, we revisit the reporting of Democracy Now! co-host Juan González, the author of Fallout: The Environmental Consequences of the World Trade Center Collapse. “What I tried to warn about in the series of articles that I wrote about the dangers, the health dangers, in the future for people who were living in or working at ground zero have proven to be true,” he says about his reporting on political leaders’ early denials of post-9/11 health risks. “More people have died as a result of illnesses contracted after the collapse of the World Trade Center than died on that day.”

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Democracy Now! Friday, February 6, 2026

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Democracy Now! 2026-02-06 Friday

• Headlines for February 06, 2026
• Juan González on Lasting Impact of 9/11 Toxic Exposure as NYC Faces Calls to Release Suppressed Files
• "Journalism Deserves Better": Ex-Washington Post Staffers Slam Billionaire Bezos for Gutting Paper
• Can U.S. & Iran Lower Tensions? Officials Begin New Talks Amid Trump Threats of Military Strikes
• Right of Return: Omar Shakir & Ken Roth Debate "Blocked" Human Rights Watch Report on Palestine

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• DHS Funding Is Set to Lapse as Top Senate Republican Rejects Restrictions on Immigration Agents
• Protesters from New York to Milan Decry Trump's Immigration Crackdown
• U.K. Opposition Parties Call for Vote of No Confidence in PM Starmer over Epstein-Linked Ambassador
• Brad Karp, Chair of Paul Weiss Law Firm, Resigns over Ties to Jeffrey Epstein
• Global Sumud Flotilla Plans Largest Humanitarian Mission Yet to Gaza
• Cuban President Open to Talks with U.S. Amid Warnings of "Humanitarian Collapse" Due to Oil Blockade
• Sudan's RSF Bombs Hospital as Famine Spreads in Darfur
• Nigerian Army Deploys to Kwara State After Massacre Leaves 170 Dead
• Bombing at Islamabad Mosque Kills 31 and Injures Scores
• U.S. Economy Shed 108,435 Jobs in January, Worst Month Since 2009 Recession

This post was originally published on Democracy Now!.

This post was originally published on Democracy Now!.

This post was originally published on Democracy Now!.

This post was originally published on Democracy Now!.

This post was originally published on Democracy Now!.

This post was originally published on Democracy Now!.

This post was originally published on Democracy Now!.

This post was originally published on Democracy Now!.