Democracy Now! Productions

We spend the hour with civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative. In 2018, the organization opened the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, to tell the history of millions of enslaved Africans who were abducted and trafficked across the Atlantic to the Americas by European powers, and to chronicle the legacy of slavery, racism, lynchings and segregation in the United States. The Legacy Museum has just opened its first international exhibition as part of the Edinburgh International Festival in Scotland. “In putting together the content we have at the Legacy Museum, you begin to appreciate just how global the institution of slavery was,” Stevenson tells Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman in Edinburgh. “We were eager to have an opportunity to present this content on this continent, which … hasn’t done very much to acknowledge this history.” Stevenson details the Equal Justice Initiative’s goal of educating the public about racial iniquities, as well as his own family’s connection to slavery. “My foreparents did not come to this country seeking greater opportunity. They did not come seeking shelter from some distant threat. They came in chains. They were victims of a brutal abduction,” he says.

From London, we revisit the Gaza Tribunal, an independent, nongovernmental inquiry into the United Kingdom’s complicity in the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. The tribunal, held nearly one year ago, was chaired by our three guests: former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, Israeli professor of human rights law Neve Gordon and Palestinian legal scholar Shahd Hammouri. Their new book is titled The Gaza Tribunal: Britain’s Complicity in Genocide. We discuss the recent apology from Prime Minister Andy Burnham over the Labour Party’s early support for Israel’s assault on Gaza, the United Kingdom’s crackdown on the Palestine Action protest group under counterterrorism laws, and whether British policymakers will face any accountability for participating in “one of the biggest crimes in humanity.”

A federal judge in Boston blocked the U.S. Postal Service from enforcing part of Trump’s executive order to tighten mail-in voting rules before November’s congressional elections. The order required states to submit lists of eligible voters who may receive mail ballots. If the states refused to do so, USPS would not deliver the ballots. Sophia Lin Lakin, a voting rights lawyer with the ACLU, said in a statement, “Today’s ruling sends another necessary message to an administration that continues to weaponize portions of the government to ​sow chaos into our elections.”

Three executions are scheduled in Alabama, Oklahoma and Tennessee Thursday, in what would be the first time since 2010 that three people are put to death on the same day in the United States. In Tennessee, Republican Governor Bill Lee has refused to grant clemency to Darrell Hines, who is scheduled to be executed Thursday despite his attorneys warning that he could suffer cruel and unusual punishment. His attorneys said the physician likely to oversee Hines’s execution is unqualified to insert the IV to administer lethal drugs, citing the May botched execution attempt of Tony Carruthers. Governor Lee called off Carruthers’s execution and granted him a one-year reprieve after the physician struggled for about an hour to insert the IV to administer lethal drugs. Witnesses described the scene as a “bloody mess,” according to the Tennessee Lookout. Hines has suffered two strokes that left him partially paralyzed on his left side, blind in his left eye and in severe pain.

In Wisconsin, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley appears to have narrowly defeated Democratic Socialist Francesca Hong for the Democratic Party’s gubernatorial nomination. With 98% of the expected vote tallied, Hong is trailing by about 3,000 votes. It’s an unexpectedly poor showing for Hong, after most polls showed her leading the race by double digits.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the number of confirmed Ebola cases has surpassed 4,000. It’s now the second-largest Ebola outbreak ever recorded. The World Health Organization has recommended testing an existing Ebola vaccine to see if it could protect against the strain now spreading in the DRC. This is the WHO’s Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus: “It’s moving really, really fast. And I can’t hide from you my feelings. Maybe expressing my feelings properly would be better. I’m deeply, deeply concerned by how the situation is on the ground.”

Millions of people in Greenland, Iceland and northern Spain will witness a total solar eclipse today, the first of its kind since 1999. A partial eclipse will be visible across a vast swath of western Europe, northwestern Africa and some eastern states and provinces in North America. Here in London and the U.K., people are scrambling to get special glasses to witness the eclipse.

An alleged Iranian threat to assassinate President Trump led to a secret operation last month that possibly endangered the lives of journalists and White House staffers. That’s according to The Washington Post, which reported Tuesday that Trump secretly swapped planes just before departing a NATO summit in Turkey, hiding in an airport catering truck normally used to load food and supplies onto planes. Trump then departed Turkey on a smaller military aircraft, even as the White House told the public he was aboard Air Force One alongside the reporters, White House staff and other crew members. The White House was responding to what it considered a credible Iranian threat to shoot down Air Force One. That followed the U.S. assassination of Iran’s supreme leader, members of his family and other top officials. Steven Cash, executive director of The Steady State and a former CIA intelligence officer, said, “It appears that the idea was we can reduce the danger to President Trump by offering up 100 or so people to be killed by the Iranians in his place.”

The United States Navy said Tuesday it had fired on a Panama-flagged cargo ship attempting to break the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports in the Gulf of Oman. The missile strikes reportedly targeted the ship’s engine room, leaving it disabled. The Pentagon did not say whether it killed or injured any sailors. The attack came as President Trump told reporters that U.S. forces are in “total control” of the Strait of Hormuz. Trump’s claim came as mediators in Qatar announced that negotiations between Iran and Oman over the Strait of Hormuz have reached an advanced stage. This is a spokesperson for Qatar’s Foreign Ministry.Majed al-Ansari: “We have heard positive statements from both capitals in the recent couple of days, and we are eagerly awaiting. Our main priority here is the reopening of the strait, maintaining the ceasefire and making sure that we are able to push forward towards the negotiation.”The emerging deal would see vessels enter the strait along a northern route, via Iranian waters; ships exiting the strait would follow a southern route through Omani waters. Meanwhile, six people were killed and 10 others wounded when Iran-allied Houthi fighters attacked a ship in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. The Houthis say the ship was carrying Saudi military equipment. Last month, the Houthis declared a naval blockade of Saudi ports.

The Trump administration has awarded a $158 million contract to a group founded by a former ICE agent to legally represent unaccompanied immigrant children in the U.S. The Minneapolis-based Our Rescue was founded in 2013 by Tim Ballard, who quit his job in federal immigration enforcement to combat the sex trafficking of children — inspiring the 2023 movie “Sound of Freedom.” The film drew widespread acclaim from conservatives, but others criticized it for featuring conspiracy theories perpetuated by the far-right group QAnon. Ballard abruptly left Our Rescue in July 2023. In the months after his departure, he was accused of sex trafficking, forced labor and abusing women himself. The contract between Our Rescue and the Office of Refugee Resettlement could reportedly increase up to $244 million. This comes after the federal government also awarded a $150 million contract to a small Texas law firm with ties to the Trump administration to represent unaccompanied immigrant children in court. Burke Law Group is based in Houston and primarily focuses on administrative law.