Will Mamdani’s Inauguration Open a New Chapter for New York City’s Muslims?
Muslim voters who backed Zohran Mamdani are now looking for him to follow through on his policy proposals.
Muslim voters who backed Zohran Mamdani are now looking for him to follow through on his policy proposals.
The swiftness with which Trump dismantled decades of meager, hard-fought protections exposed the limits of legal work.
A new report from the grassroots organization RootsAction aims to do what a promised “autopsy” from the Democratic National Committee ultimately did not: publicly reckon with the failures of the Democrats’ 2024 presidential campaign. While the Democratic Party’s official postmortem assessment was pulled from public release earlier this month, RootsAction’s “Democratic Autopsy” looks at how factors like “service to corporate power, hostility to the progressive wing of the party, out-of-control militarism [and] disconnection from the base of the working class” contributed to declining support for the party’s platform and candidates. “If you don’t examine real history, then you’re in a cycle that repeats the same problems,” says Norman Solomon, director of RootsAction, who joins Democracy Now! to discuss his organization’s findings.
New York City is preparing to welcome Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist and member of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America, into office as mayor. Ahead of the highly anticipated inauguration, we sit down with NYC-DSA’s co-chair Grace Mausser to discuss the goals of the incoming administration and next steps for the volunteer-powered campaign apparatus that helped propel Mamdani to City Hall. “Just getting a mayor into office, while impressive and very exciting, is not enough,” says Mausser. “The reason we rallied behind Zohran is because he is committed to building our project.”
Israel is set to suspend the operating licenses of Doctors Without Borders, Oxfam and dozens of other humanitarian aid groups in Gaza and the West Bank over alleged ties to Hamas, preventing international aid workers from entering Gaza and carrying out critical, lifesaving operations. Israel’s licensing process is “arbitrary and highly politicized,” explains Shaina Low, communications adviser for the Norwegian Refugee Council, one of the impacted groups. “This is just one more step to push out principled humanitarian actors, particularly those that speak out on behalf of the people who we’re there to serve, call for accountability for rights violations and violations of international law.”
As the Trump administration escalates its military campaign against Venezuela, we speak to Venezuelan journalist Andreína Chávez about the latest developments. Responding to the U.S. military’s drone strikes on small boats and seizures of oil tankers off the coast of Venezuela, Chávez says U.S. claims of pursuing fentanyl traffickers lack evidence and are “pretext” for an attempt “to asphyxiate the Venezuelan economy” and wrest control of the country’s state-owned oil reserves. In the face of U.S. aggression, says Chávez, “Venezuelan communes and Venezuelan popular organizations in general have responded to Trump’s claims that he owns the Venezuelan oil with a very strong response, saying that they’re going to defend sovereignty, that they’re going to defend Venezuela’s self-determination.”
Under the deal, Ivory Coast will be required to mobilize domestic resources to receive US financing.
Leftist Colombian President Gustavo Petro said the move would help “democratize wealth.”