Free Republic

Some hospitals in Gaza say they are under attack as heavy fighting and explosions over the last 24 hours have continued amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict. Targeting civilians is against the laws of war, but Israel maintains that Hamas uses civilians as shields. International organizations have decried the shellings in retaliation for Hamas' Oct. 7 terror attack, which killed more than 1,400 in Israel. The death toll continues to mount in Gaza with 11,078 dead as of Friday, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry. Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza's largest medical center located in Gaza City -- where thousands of wounded...

Tel Aviv — The Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry has released harrowing new footage of what it says are conditions inside Al-Shifa hospital. Israeli forces are continuing to pummel northern Gaza in what the IDF says is an effort to wipe out the Islamist militant group once and for all. In a seven-minute graphic video posted on the ministry's Facebook page, an unnamed doctor is seen describing his surroundings as wounded and injured people are strewn across the hospital floor. "The department is completely full of wounded and injured," the unnamed doctor says in the video. "They are on the ground...

More than a dozen children with cancer or other serious blood disorders have been safely evacuated from Gaza after weeks of difficult negotiations involving the U.S., Egypt, Israel and Hamas — but more than 30 remain in the war-torn territory, three doctors involved in the effort tell NBC News. The children, accompanied by parents or companions, were evacuated from the Al-Rantisi Specialized Hospital for Children to hospitals in Egypt and Jordan, the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and the World Health Organization said Friday. The development comes as hospitals across northern Gaza on Thursday and Friday came under munitions fire...

Jazmine Hughes, a writer for the New York Times Magazine, resigned this week after a conflict with her editors over signing of an anti-Israeli letter. New York Times Magazine Editor Jake Silverstein said Hughes violated the company’s policy on public protest. The incident exposes the inherent conflicts — and hypocrisy — in the shift away from neutrality in reporting in media companies and graduate programs. I have long been a critic of what I called “advocacy journalism” as it began to emerge in journalism schools. These schools encourage students to use their “lived expertise” and to “leave[] neutrality behind.” Instead,...

Paris (AFP) – AFP on Saturday called on Israel for "an in-depth and transparent investigation" into the exact involvement of its army after a strike severely damaged its office in Gaza City, which has been shelled for weeks. “A strike on the offices of an international news agency sends a deeply troubling message to all the journalists working in such difficult conditions in Gaza," said AFP Chairman and CEO Fabrice Fries. AFP is one of the few international media organisations to have an office in the Gaza Strip. An AFP employee who visited the office on Friday said an explosive...

It was neither the place nor the time for a proper goodbye, said Omar Dirawi. Not here, in this dusty field strewn with dead people wrapped in blankets and zipped up in body bags. And not now, as Israeli airstrikes crashed around him for the third week, erasing more of his neighborhood and sundering hundreds of families and friendships. Yet on this October week in Gaza’s central town of Zawaideh, the 22-year-old Palestinian photojournalist buried 32 members of his family who were killed in Israeli air raids last Sunday. Dirawi’s aunts, uncles and cousins from Gaza City had heeded Israeli...

Haneen Okal, a Palestinian-American who lives in New Jersey, reunited in recent months with family in the Gaza Strip for the first time in more than 10 years, she told ABC News. Now, Okal and her three young children -- two of whom were born and raised in the U.S. -- find themselves caught in the Israel-Hamas war despite pleas to U.S. officials in Israel, Okal said in an interview. "It's very terrifying because we all want to get out of here," Okal said. "Unfortunately, the U.S. embassy is not helping. We feel abandoned." Okal's husband, Abdulla, is at home...

Israel is warning of a "prolonged" war in Gaza as it prepares to launch a ground invasion of the densely populated Palestinian territory. Many of those paying the ultimate price for the brutal weekend terror attack on Israel by Gaza's Hamas rulers are the youngest Palestinians. Hospitals and clinics struggling to keep their lights on since Israel imposed a complete blockade, cutting electricity supplies to the Palestinian enclave, are full of tiny bodies covered in blood and exhausted doctors trying desperately to save their lives. The blockade has amplified the misery of the millions of people who live in the...

After Covid completely upended life on college campuses, students and recent graduates are encountering a new challenge: student loans. Millions of college students and graduates — including Black women, who carry the highest burden of student debt — held on to the hope of President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan, which the Supreme Court struck down in June. Yet, Biden is aiming to push policies that would provide relief for loan borrowers, with his announcement Wednesday approving $9 billion in student loan forgiveness for 125,000 borrowers. Still, as payments resume, several Black students and graduates told NBC News that...

If there’s one thing journalism schools should know by now, it is not to hire professors based on their DEI credibility, as such moves will likely lead to conflict. But in a world where news outlets seek to promote advocacy over objectivity, such hirings are not surprising. UNC-Chapel Hill’s debacle with Nikole Hannah-Jones in 2021, while illustrating the point, is not nearly as absurd as the new peak of ridiculousness reached at Texas A&M University (TAMU) in August. As has been widely reported, the institution was forced to settle with former New York Times editor Kathleen McElroy for $1 million,...

WASHINGTON — The Biden campaign is preparing to target Republican economic positions, views they expect to play a large role in the second Republican presidential debate in California on Wednesday. President Joe Biden has frequently touted "Bidenomics" — the term the administration embraced that encompasses his economic agenda — but more recently highlighted what he is calling "MAGAnomics," using the term for the first time according to a senior White House official to target Republican economic policies earlier this month. The Biden campaign plans to portray "MAGAnomics" as harming middle-class families, senior citizens and American manufacturing, all the while helping...

CHICAGO (WLS) -- With a potential federal government shutdown looming, Illinois political leaders and officials are anticipating how local services and programs might be affected. A government shutdown may impact flights from Chicago airports and payment for government employees, including sailors serving at Naval Station Great Lakes. Illinois Congressman Jesus "Chuy" Garcia said a government shutdown would hit the state hard. "It would affect nutrition programs, education programs, our ability to travel through airports," Garcia said. Governor JB Pritzker issued a statement Wednesday saying he is working with Illinois Treasurer Mike Frerichs to reinstate a 100-million dollar zero or low...

Katie Barnes, an ESPN writer who conducted one of the first and only in-depth on-camera interviews with transgender University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas, has finally answered the question people have asked them for years: What does a fair and trans-inclusive athlete policy look like? Barnes, who uses gender-neutral pronouns, has covered transgender athletes for seven years and women’s sports for eight. During that time, they have never publicly shared their own opinions about policies governing trans athletes’ participation and what they believe would ensure fairness for everyone involved. However, as they wrote articles about Thomas, who set off an...

Democrats on Sunday sought to play down the ramifications in Washington from last week's indictment of Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden's son, while Republicans seized on the development. In appearances on the Sunday public affairs show circuit, top Democrats noted the lack of firm evidence to back up Republicans' allegations that the president directly profited off of or influenced his son's business dealings while suggesting that the GOP is trying to distract from more important issues. Polling indicates a large number of voters agree with Republicans' line of attack. A Quinnipiac University survey earlier this month found that half of...

A court document filed on Tuesday has revealed that Department of Justice prosecutors are seeking a 120-day sentence for InfoWars host Owen Shroyer, who did not enter the Capitol building on January 6, 2021. The Biden DOJ claimed that Shroyer "spread election disinformation paired with violent rhetoric" to viewers in the months leading up to January 6, and that on the day, "Shroyer took to a megaphone before leading a crowd to the Capitol" and said "The Democrats are posing as communists, but we know what they really are: they’re just tyrants, they’re tyrants. And so today, on January 6,...

At a time when the majority of Americans recognize the corporate media are dishonest, journalism tops the list of the 10 most regretted college majors, according to a ZipRecruiter survey from last November that CNBC republicized on Sunday. A whopping 87 percent of journalism graduates regret their degree choice, with sociology, liberal arts, communications, and education next on the regret list. Of job seekers with college degrees overall, 44 percent regret their chosen major.

(CHICAGO (WLS) -- Chicago shootings this weekend have left at least 20 people shot, one fatally, police said.) WASHINGTON (AP) — A masked white man carrying at least one weapon bearing a swastika fatally shot three Black people inside a Florida store Saturday in an attack with a clear motive of racial hatred, officials said. The shooting in a Dollar General store in a predominately Black neighborhood left two men and one woman dead and was “racially motivated,” Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters said. In addition to carrying a firearm with a painted symbol of the genocidal Nazi regime of Germany...

A camera clicks. In a fraction of a second, the shutter opens and then closes, freezing forever the image in front of it. When the camera shutter blinked inside an Atlanta jail on Thursday, it both created and documented a tiny inflection point in American life. Captured for posterity, there was a former president of the United States, for the first time in history, under arrest and captured in the sort of frame more commonly associated with drug dealers or drunken drivers. The trappings of power gone, for that split second. Left behind: an enduring image that will appear in...

NEW YORK (AP) — Donald Trump’s aggressive response to his fourth criminal indictment in five months follows a strategy he has long used against legal and political opponents: relentless attacks, often infused with language that is either overtly racist or is coded in ways that appeal to racists. The early Republican presidential front-runner has used terms such as “animal” and “rabid” to describe Black district attorneys. He has accused Black prosecutors of being “racist.” He has made unsupported claims about their personal lives. And on his social media platform, Truth Social, Trump has deployed terms that rhyme with racial slurs...

After years of claiming that American elections are rife with fraud, conservative election activists are preparing a new tool to take matters into their own hands. Activists are currently testing a computer program called EagleAI NETwork, a database loaded with voter rolls and other records that promises to quickly churn through the data and find registrations that may be suspect based on other sources. The activists then personally evaluate the flagged voter registrations one by one — looking up home addresses on Google Maps, searching for obituaries online — and prepare lists of questionable registrations to report to local officials....