The Real News Podcast

Nov. 20 is Black Consciousness Day in Brazil. A day celebrating the struggle of Black organizations, people, and movements in Brazil. Celebrating the ongoing fight against racism. And, above all, celebrating the history of Brazil’s most historic Black leader: Zumbi dos Palmares. He was leader of the great Palmares Quilombo, present-day Alagoas, an autonomous state built by escaped slaves in the 16...

Making ends meet in today’s economy is difficult enough, but with so many societal crises affecting working people’s lives on and off the shop floor—from mass layoffs to untenable costs of living, from an authoritarian federal government to AI and the climate crisis—it can feel all but impossible. What does it mean to have a union job, to be a union member, and to be part of the labor movement in...

The 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference, more commonly known as COP30, began on Nov. 10 in Belém, Brazil, on the edge of the Amazon rainforest. This year’s COP conference has more fossil fuel lobbyists in attendance than any previous conference, but it has also drawn the biggest delegation of Indigenous peoples from around the world—each group representing competing visions for addressin...

The Alabama prison system functions like a modern-day plantation: overcrowded, understaffed prisons like Bullock Correctional Facility run on forced labor, violence, and deliberate neglect. In this episode of  Rattling the Bars , host Mansa Musa speaks with journalist Matthew Vernon Whalan about his book  Bullock: Chronicles of Deprivation and Despair in an American Prison , and about the systemat...

Canadian journalist Nora Loreto reads the latest headlines for Monday, November 17, 2025. TRNN has partnered with Loreto to syndicate and share her daily news digest with our audience. Tune in every morning to the TRNN podcast feed to hear the latest important news stories from Canada and worldwide. Find more headlines from  Nora at Sandy & Nora Talk Politics podcast feed . Become a supporter...

Over 1,000 unionized Starbucks workers in over 40 cities across the US walked off the job on an indefinite Unfair Labor Practice strike on Thursday, Nov. 13. The union, Starbucks Workers United, says more workers at more unionized stores will be joining the picket line during the busy holiday season to pressure Starbucks to return to the bargaining table with proposals that seriously address worke...

Canadian journalist Nora Loreto reads the latest headlines for Friday, November 14, 2025. TRNN has partnered with Loreto to syndicate and share her daily news digest with our audience. Tune in every morning to the TRNN podcast feed to hear the latest important news stories from Canada and worldwide. Find more headlines from  Nora at Sandy & Nora Talk Politics podcast feed . Become a supporter...

It was the Great Depression. Early 1930s. United States. More than a thousand mortgages a day were being foreclosed on. Hundreds of thousands of families were losing their homes each year.  Times were hard for everyone. Especially hard for farmers. But neighbors found a way to push back and help their friends in a very creative way. They called it a penny auction. BIG NEWS! This podcast has won Go...

Historian David Hollinger connects the history of the 1964 free speech movement in Berkeley, California, to the protest movements and repressive crackdowns on free speech gripping universities today. In this episode of the Marc Steiner Show, co-hosted by Marc Steiner and Michael Fox, Hollinger draws on his firsthand experience and decades of research to explain the lessons we can learn from 1960s...

Canadian journalist Nora Loreto reads the latest headlines for Thursday, November 13, 2025. TRNN has partnered with Loreto to syndicate and share her daily news digest with our audience. Tune in every morning to the TRNN podcast feed to hear the latest important news stories from Canada and worldwide. Find more headlines from  Nora at Sandy & Nora Talk Politics podcast feed . Become a supporte...

Four years after the first Starbucks store in the US unionized in 2021, workers across the country are still facing rampant union busting and still fighting for a first contract with the coffee giant. That is why a supermajority of unionized baristas with Starbucks Workers United recently voted to authorize an Unfair Labor Practice strike, which is set to begin on Thursday, Nov. 13, on “Red Cup Da...

Canadian journalist Nora Loreto reads the latest headlines for Wednesday, November 12, 2025. TRNN has partnered with Loreto to syndicate and share her daily news digest with our audience. Tune in every morning to the TRNN podcast feed to hear the latest important news stories from Canada and worldwide. Find more headlines from  Nora at Sandy & Nora Talk Politics podcast feed . Become a support...

Canadian journalist Nora Loreto reads the latest headlines for Tuesday, November 11, 2025. TRNN has partnered with Loreto to syndicate and share her daily news digest with our audience. Tune in every morning to the TRNN podcast feed to hear the latest important news stories from Canada and worldwide. Find more headlines from  Nora at Sandy & Nora Talk Politics podcast feed . Become a supporter...

Rattling the Bars's Mansa Musa explores how a one-woman play, The Peculiar Patriot, reveals the human cost of mass incarceration and the enduring ties between slavery and the prison system. The artist behind the play, Liza Jessie Peterson, has worked with incarcerated youth for decades, bringing their stories to the stage and to national audiences. Performed in more than 35 US prisons and filmed a...

Canadian journalist Nora Loreto reads the latest headlines for Friday, November 7, 2025. TRNN has partnered with Loreto to syndicate and share her daily news digest with our audience. Tune in every morning to the TRNN podcast feed to hear the latest important news stories from Canada and worldwide. Find more headlines from  Nora at Sandy & Nora Talk Politics podcast feed . Become a supporter o...

Just 11 months into his second term, President Trump has harnessed the brutal power of the federal government to go to war with American cities, communities, and citizens. Since the launch of “Operation Midway Blitz” in September, Chicago has become the epicenter of the Trump administration’s assault on immigrants, protestors, and political opponents, but Chicagoans on the front lines of that assa...

Canadian journalist Nora Loreto reads the latest headlines for Thursday, November 6, 2025. TRNN has partnered with Loreto to syndicate and share her daily news digest with our audience. Tune in every morning to the TRNN podcast feed to hear the latest important news stories from Canada and worldwide. Find more headlines from  Nora at Sandy & Nora Talk Politics podcast feed . Become a supporter...

Life on college campuses has changed dramatically in the last 10 months. While institutions of higher education continue to reel from the Trump administration’s top-down attacks and scramble to adjust, workers on campus say that their universities are simultaneously expanding their own internal repression and surveillance apparatuses to squash dissent. In this episode, we speak with a panel of gra...

From chronic overcrowding and inmate deaths to systematic abuse and lawbreaking by corrections officers, prison conditions in the state of Alabama have reached a crisis point. And yet, state leaders continue to push an “Alabama solution” that involves building more mega-prisons and expanding qualified immunity for officers. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, host Mansa Musa speaks with Dakarai...

Canadian journalist Nora Loreto reads the latest headlines for Wednesday, November 5, 2025. TRNN has partnered with Loreto to syndicate and share her daily news digest with our audience. Tune in every morning to the TRNN podcast feed to hear the latest important news stories from Canada and worldwide. Find more headlines from  Nora at Sandy & Nora Talk Politics podcast feed . Become a supporte...

In the late 1700s, Indigenous peoples in the Spanish colonies of the Andes were forced to work for the Spanish. They tilled the land, worked in the textile mills and the mines. Those that didn’t faced heavy taxes. But in early November 1780, Indigenous Incan leader Tupac Amaru II led an uprising against the Spanish that he hoped would end it all. It was the largest revolt against colonial Spain. T...

Canadian journalist Nora Loreto reads the latest headlines for Tuesday, November 4, 2025. TRNN has partnered with Loreto to syndicate and share her daily news digest with our audience. Tune in every morning to the TRNN podcast feed to hear the latest important news stories from Canada and worldwide. Find more headlines from  Nora at Sandy & Nora Talk Politics podcast feed . Become a supporter...

Taya Graham and Stephen Janis speak with voters in Harlem just 24 hours before the NYC mayoral election about what issues are important to them, what they think of the frontrunner candidate Zohran Mamdani, what they think of his opponent, former Governor Andrew Cuomo, and what they want the mayor to do for them. Credits:Pre-Production: Taya Graham/Stephen Janis Post-Production: Cameron Granadino B...

In 2021, when New York City taxi drivers were dying by suicide and others were going on hunger strike, begging City Hall for relief from the debt trap that had set them up for failure and financial ruin, a young NY Assemblyperson named Zohran Mamdani stood with them. Now, taxi drivers are standing with Mamdani in his bid to become the next mayor of New York City. Reporting on the ground in New Yor...

Canadian journalist Nora Loreto reads the latest headlines for Monday, November 3, 2025. TRNN has partnered with Loreto to syndicate and share her daily news digest with our audience. Tune in every morning to the TRNN podcast feed to hear the latest important news stories from Canada and worldwide. Find more headlines from  Nora at Sandy & Nora Talk Politics podcast feed . Help us continue pro...