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We go to Guatemala to speak with an opposition lawmaker and a Maya K’iche’ leader who joined Thursday’s major national strike demanding the resignation of right-wing President Alejandro Giammattei and other government officials facing allegations of corruption. Major highways were blocked for hours as protesters marched through Guatemala City and in rural communities denouncing corruption, a worsening economic crisis and the government's catastrophic mishandling of the pandemic. The demonstrations are the “third chapter of our history in the fight against corruption, which started in 2015,” says Lucrecia Hernández Mack, Guatemalan physician and a member of the Guatemalan Congress with the political party Movimiento Semilla who was the first woman to lead the country’s Ministry of Health. “People here in Guatemala are just outraged.” Indigenous governments and people across Guatemala united in leading the call for the mass mobilization, adds Andrea Ixchíu, Maya K’iche’ leader, journalist and human rights defender in Totonicapán, Guatemala. “We are tired [of] how in the midst of the pandemic the Guatemalan government is stealing the money from the vaccines and militariz[ing] the country.”

Israel has launched what has been described as a maximum pressure campaign against Ben & Jerry's and its parent company Unilever, after the iconic ice cream brand announced it would halt sales in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. Israel has asked 35 U.S. governors to enforce state laws which make it a crime to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or BDS. The founders of Ben & Jerry's, who no longer have operational control of the company, have defended the company's decision. A number of Jewish groups including J Street, the New Israel Fund and Americans for Peace Now, all of whom oppose BDS, have defended Ben & Jerry's decision and rejected accusations that the company's decision was antisemitic. “What we are seeing is an aggressive, over the top, full-court press from senior officials in the Israeli government ... to target Ben & Jerry’s simply for the fact that they made a principled decision to respect the distinction between the state of Israel and the territory that it occupies beyond the green line,” says Logan Bayroff, Vice President of Communications of J-Street. “These anti-boycott laws aren’t just posing issues under the first amendment, they’re actually punishing companies that do the right thing by ending their complicity in human rights abuses,” adds Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine Director at Human Rights Watch.

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Today's BradCast should serve as yet another wake up call for those of us who may need one. [Audio link to full show is posted at end of this summary.] First up, Washington Post revealed on Friday that Donald Trump, late last year, attempted to order his acting Attorney General to declare that the 2020 election [...]

Today's BradCast, by and large, serves as another fine example of why we fight, and what we fight for. [Audio link to today's full show is posted at the end of this summary.] Among our stories today... We've got an update following yesterday's lively interview with John Brakey, the longtime, progressive Election Integrity and audit expert who [...]

Covid-19 cases in the UK are rising, largely due to the Delta variant of the virus that is much more transmissible.

Thousands of people marched across the U.S. in 50 cities on Saturday July 25th to demand “Medicare for All,” and expand the current free government-run healthcare program to everyone under 65.