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This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form. AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. As we’ve reported,...

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form. AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show in Haiti, where police said Sunday they arrested a key figure in last...

At a concession stand at Staples Center in Los Angeles, Adelaide Avila was pingponging between pouring beers, wiping down counters and taking out the trash. Her Los Angeles Lakers were playing their hometown rival, the Clippers, but Avila was working too hard to follow the March 2019 game. When she filed taxes for her previous year’s labors at the arena and her second job driving for Uber, the 50-year-old Avila reported making $44,810. The federal government took a 14.1% cut.

When it comes to resistance to receiving the COVID vaccine, you’ve probably heard about the conspiracy theories — the wild assertions that vaccines contain microchip tracking devices, that they can alter your DNA, that they can “shed” or spread from person to person, or even the claim by some that the vaccine makes you magnetic. Much of the discourse around vaccine hesitancy is centered around these bogus conspiracy theories, and as a result, they’ve often been discussed in connection with the U.S. failure to meet the Biden administration’s goal of vaccinating 70 percent of American adults by July 4. But there’s a much less discussed factor when it comes to vaccine hesitancy — and it has nothing to do with conspiracies.

In an upset reminiscent of the 2018 victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, socialist underdog India Walton has bested a powerful Democratic insider in the primary race for the mayor of Buffalo, New York. With the Democratic nomination secured, and in the absence of any Republican challenger, the path to the inauguration of a socialist mayor, a vanishingly rare event in major U.S. cities, seems clear.

A new analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) shows that the Republican-Democrat divide in COVID vaccination rates is stark — and growing. In April, according to the analysis, counties that voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 election had a 20.6 percent vaccination rate while counties that voted for Joe Biden had a 22.8 percent vaccination rate. By May, the red counties had a 28.5 percent rate of vaccination while the blue counties had a 35.0 percent rate.

With the latest term of the Supreme Court having come to a close last week, Democrats appear anxious to know whether the Court’s current oldest justice, Stephen Breyer, plans to step down, a move that would allow them to confirm a replacement named by President Joe Biden in the near future. The anxiety is perhaps warranted, as Democrats do not want to see yet another Supreme Court seat fall to a judge nominated by a Republican president, especially after the death last fall of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg enabled former President Donald Trump the opportunity to further cement the right-wing ideological composition of the High Court.

The largest drug companies are far more interested in enriching themselves and investors than in developing new drugs, according to a House committee report released Thursday that argues the industry can afford to charge Medicare less for prescriptions. The report by the House Oversight and Reform Committee says that contrary to pharmaceutical industry arguments that large profits fund extensive research and innovation, the major drug companies plow more of their billions in earnings back into their own stocks, dividends and executive compensation.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.AMY GOODMAN: Now we’re turning to Nikole Hannah-Jones. After months of controversy, the acclaimed journalist, The New York Times,...

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. An international human rights commission has arrived...