Nation in the News | The Nation

Memphis death row prisoner Timothy McKinney has been trying to overturn a 1999 conviction for the fatal shooting of a police officer that he maintains he never committed. After a third trial and a hung jury, McKinney was finally offered a plea deal: plead guilty to second-degree murder and be released with time served. McKinney plead guilty to a crime he never committed and will be set free as early as today.

Nation Associate Editor Liliana Segura has followed McKinney’s case and her most recent Nation article chronicles the case, from a prosecution too corrupt to back down to a system that will send men to their death based on weak evidence. She spoke with Amy Goodman and Nermeen Shaikh about the trial and McKinney’s impending release on today’s Democracy Now!.

Documentary filmmaker Eugene Jarecki showed his film The House I Live In, an indictment of the “War on Drugs,” to prisoners across the country. Liliana Segura sat in on a screening.

What’s it going to take to break down journalism’s class- and race-based barriers of entry? MSNBC’s All In blog digs into Farai Chideya’s piece in last week’s issue of The Nation on how the field needs to change to be more just—and do good for itself in the process.

—James Cersonsky

Why did Al Jazeera kill an article critical of Zionism? Read Greg Mitchell’s analysis.

On Tuesday, Attorney General Eric Holder said the leak that prompted the Justice Department’s seizure of the phone records of almost 100 reporters and editors at the Associated Press needs to be investigated because it “put the American people at risk.”

Appearing on Democracy Now!, Nation Institute fellow Chris Hedges said that Holder presented no evidence of the leak, which is believed to be related to a terrorist plot foiled by the CIA, was dangerous. Moreover, even if the seizure doesn’t frighten journalists, it will have a chilling effect on their sources, he said.

“It is one more assault in a long series of assaults against freedom of information and freedom of the press,” Hedges said.

—Alec Luhn

Read more about whistleblower Bradley Manning and how his persecution has also touched the LGBTQ community.

Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff once concluded that economies stall when debt reaches 90 percent of GDP. A recent paper from Amherst College points out important holes in the Harvard paper's conclusions—and, in turn, the austerity playbook. "This study, on which so much of the austerity agenda, so much of our actual politics...so much of what they've based their argument on," Nation writer John Nichols says, "as the Harvard economists acknowledge, contains significant mistakes." Nichols joins KPFA radio (about 7 minutes into the show) to discuss the nuts, bolts and implications of the new findings.

—James Cersonsky

What does American trade policy have to do with the ongoing Bangladeshi factory fires? Read William Greider's analysis.