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Immigrant rights activists are urging the Biden administration to pardon longtime activist Ravi Ragbir, who has been targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for potential detention and deportation since 2001. Ragbir has been subject to regular ICE check-ins for over two decades, each time facing the possibility of being taken into custody by the agency. "Once you go into that building, your family, your friends, your community don't know if you'll walk back out," says Ragbir. We speak to Ragbir, his wife Amy Gottlieb and his lawyer Alina Das about his case and why they are calling on Biden to take action before the new Trump administration, with its promises to carry out mass deportations, has the opportunity to pose an even bigger threat to immigrants like Ragbir. A presidential pardon "will ensure that as a green card holder, Ravi will be able to remain here in the U.S.," says Das.
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Opposition parties had called for the chancellor to stay home as UK borrowing costs continue to rise.
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The president-elect has admonished Republicans to stay united around his ambitious domestic policy plans. But his track record with Congress is one of abrupt turnabouts and last-minute blowups.
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Raging wildfires continue to scorch communities across the Los Angeles area, killing at least five people, displacing about 100,000 more and destroying thousands of structures. With firefighters unable to contain much of the blaze, the toll is expected to rise. The wildfires that started Tuesday caught much of the city by surprise, quickly growing into one of the worst fire disasters in Los Angeles history. Mayor Karen Bass and the City Council have come under criticism for cutting the fire department's budget by around 2% last year while the police department saw a funding increase. Nearly 400 incarcerated firefighters are among those who have been deployed to battle the fires. Journalist Sonali Kolhatkar, who evacuated her home to flee the destruction, says it has been "frustrating" to watch the corporate media's coverage of the fires. "No one is talking about climate change in the media," she says. We also speak with journalist John Vaillant, author of Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World, who says the L.A. wildfires should be a wake-up call. "This blind — frankly, suicidal — loyalty to the status quo of keeping fossil fuels preeminent in our energy system is creating an increasingly difficult situation and unlivable situation," says Vaillant.
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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced major changes to what content is allowed on his company's social media platforms Facebook, Instagram and Threads, scrapping the system of independent fact-checkers in favor of "community notes" from volunteer users. Zuckerberg also loosened moderation rules around offensive speech, which will allow hateful content targeting women, LGBTQ people and other groups. Meta's changes have been widely interpreted as a gift to Donald Trump and other Republicans, who have long argued against the policing of hate speech and disinformation online. The company has also donated $1 million to Trump's inauguration and recently added Trump ally Dana White, the CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship, to its corporate board — part of a larger shift in Silicon Valley toward Trump and his MAGA movement. For more on these changes, we speak with media scholars Siva Vaidhyanathan and Marc Owen Jones, as well as Philippine journalist Maria Ressa, whose media company Rappler has been at the forefront of battling disinformation and hate speech on social media. "As of last year, 71% of the world is under authoritarian rule. We are electing illiberal leaders democratically, partly because our public information ecosystem … is corrupting our individual communications with each other," says Ressa.
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President Biden has spared the lives of 37 of 40 federal death row prisoners by commuting their sentences to life in prison. This comes just weeks before President-elect Donald Trump is set to return to the White House with a promise to restart and expand federal executions. "Death is in no way decreasing violence or is in no way giving anybody closure," says Herman Lindsey, who spent three years on death row before being exonerated in 2009 and condemns politicians like Trump who use executions as a "political tool." "Most politicians use that to put the fear into people and use it as a voting tool." President Biden's action comes after years of advocacy by civil rights and Catholic groups. Last week, he had a phone call with Pope Francis, who reportedly called for the sentences of death row prisoners to be commuted. "He shares that faith and put it into action in a pretty courageous way, to speak out about the needs of healing the criminal justice system, that too often is wrong," says Sister Simone Campbell, the former executive director of the Network Lobby for Catholic Social Justice.
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