Disa Lindgren

As many of you know, we've been fighting for years to challenge the grotesque cash bail and pretrial detention policies around the U.S. that keep 100,000s of human beings in cages and separated from their families every single night, mostly because they lack cash. Tomorrow, the California Supreme Court will issue the most important court decision ever decided on this question--and probably the most important decision in U.S. history in terms of the number of people in jail. At stake is essentially whether several hundred thousand presumed innocent people every year in misdemeanors and non-violent felonies can be detained in cages prior to trial. It's the most important issue we've ever worked on.

Lowering the voting age to 16 for local elections? It’s more likely than you think…

There is no easier or more important political position to take than to do everything possible to stop this. It will change our society forever, and Democrats are going along with it.

Due to federal budget cuts, PBS News had to make the difficult decision to rework our staffing and programming. This Sunday, our PBS News Weekend team will sign off the air.

Roald Dahl on Measles: Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything. 'Are you feeling all right?' I asked her. 'I feel all sleepy,' she said. In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead. The measles had turned into a terrible thing called measles encephalitis and there was nothing the doctors could do to save her. That was...in 1962, but even now, if a child with measles happens to develop the same deadly reaction from measles as Olivia did, there would still be nothing the doctors could do to help her. On the other hand, there is today something that parents can do to make sure that this sort of tragedy does not happen to a child of theirs. They can insist that their child is immunised against measles. ...I dedicated two of my books to Olivia, the first was ‘James and the Giant Peach’. That was when she was still alive. The second was ‘The BFG’, dedicated to her memory after she had died from measles. You will see her name at the beginning of each of these books. And I know how happy she would be if only she could know that her death had helped to save a good deal of illness and death among other children. Roald Dahl, 1986

Ilhan Omar: “Our President’s obsession with me and the Somali community really is creepy and unhealthy. I am not someone to be intimidated and we are not going to be scapegoated. We are here to stay”