An Abstract:

Our November+December issue investigates the Christian nationalist movement that aspires to take over government at all levels, from school boards and state legislatures to Congress and the Supreme Court. Read the series of stories here.

Some days, it feels like the bad news overshadows the good.

Dear Friend of Press Freedom,

Here are some of the most important stories we’re following from the U.S. and around the world. If you enjoy reading this newsletter, please forward it to friends and family. If someone has forwarded you this newsletter, please subscribe here.

The Indiana Citizen launched its virtual ballot in 2020. The tool has become more robust during the last four years. (Adobe Stock)

Jill Stein doesn’t give, as the old saying goes, a flying f*ck about democracy. Instead, she’s all about how famous she can become and how much money she can grift off her repeated presidential campaigns. It’s a damn dangerous game.

Fresh off her 2016 political quacksalvery, in which she handed that year’s election to Donald Trump, this professional grifter — who’s been doing real damage to the Green Party for over a decade — is trying to get Trump back into the White House.

A boy inspects the damage to a mosque bombed by Israel in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza Strip, on October 6, 2024. Photo: Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto/Getty Images

Word tends to spread fast in rural Knox County, Ohio. But misinformation has spread faster.

The first article in the Mount Vernon News last fall about a planned solar farm simply noted that residents were “expressing their concern.” But soon the county’s only newspaper was packed with stories about solar energy that almost uniformly criticized the project and quoted its opponents.

As people across Florida and the Southeast braced for Hurricane Milton, Elon Musk used his platform to spread disinformation about ongoing federal emergency-response efforts.

Tens of millions of people viewed Musk’s bogus claim that FEMA was blocking aid shipments to those in desperate need of relief. It didn’t take long before he recycled the same racist and anti-immigrant conspiracy theories we’ve seen too much of these days, when he insisted that FEMA had “used up its budget ferrying [immigrants] into the country instead of saving American lives.”

Corporate media’s handling of the US-supported Israeli assault on Lebanon has, like all war propaganda, entailed a campaign to demonize the purported bad guys—Hezbollah, in this case. The coverage of the US/Israeli assault on Lebanon has also evinced a casual disregard for Lebanese lives, and often an outright zest for killing the country’s people.

Professor Rashid Khalidi on Israel’s growing wars in the Middle East and the United States’ complicity in them

As Hurricanes Helene and Milton devastated parts of the southeastern United States, they not only brought destruction in their wake but also highlighted a disturbing pattern of corporate exploitation during natural disasters. As thousands of residents fled the path of these catastrophic storms, reports of airlines, hotels, and other companies inflating prices emerged, raising concerns over corporate profiteering during emergencies.

Jews have been unfairly blamed for a lot of things, but getting the weather gods to unleash Hurricane Helene as part of a plot to take over America is certainly a new one. Abraham, who may be viewed as the first Jew, was an aristocrat from the highly civilized Sumerian city of Ur but even Ishkur, the local weather god, might have balked at such a request from pre-Yahweh Abe. However, Marjorie Taylor Greene ascribes to the Jews an uncanny control over the weather.

From the NY Times article by Peter Bake, October 8, 2024, on Donald Trumps' post presidency relationship with Vladimir Putin as disclosed in Bob Woodward's new book "War", which will be released this week.

"Former President Donald J. Trump has secretly spoken with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as many as seven times since leaving office, even as he was pressuring Republicans to block military aid to Ukraine to fight Russian invaders, according to a new book by the journalist Bob Woodward.

Election Day is Tuesday, November 5, 2024. Polls will be open in Indiana from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., local time. 

To vote early, find your polling place, and research the candidates on your ballot, visit IndianaVoters.in.gov.  

On October 18, 2023, protesters with the anti-Zionist organization Jewish Voice for Peace and other progressive Jewish groups staged a sit-in in the Cannon House Office Building at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., to protest the Israeli assault on Gaza.PHOTO BY ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES

Dan Fischer had been working as a Hebrew and Jewish ethics teacher for three years at Sinai Synagogue in South Bend, Ind., when a television reporter asked him for comment during an ​“All Out for Palestine” rally held four days after October 7. 

The media is shocked, shocked, I tell you, that Jack Smith has the goods on Trump and, holy cow, we had a traitor in the White House! And he committed crimes to both gain and try to hold office!

But our media continually ignores context: this is nothing new for Republican presidents.

What’s troubling isn’t so much Trump’s being busted for a very small slice of his multitude of crimes, but that our media so consistently ignores the crimes of past Republican presidents as if they never happened.

Reproductive rights defenders are celebrating a significant legal victory after Fulton County Judge Robert McBurney struck down Georgia’s controversial six-week abortion ban, known as the LIFE Act, on Monday. The ruling, seen as a major step in the ongoing fight for reproductive freedom, found the state’s restrictive abortion law to be a violation of “a woman’s right to control what happens to and within her body.” McBurney’s decision temporarily restores the legality of abortion up to 22 weeks of pregnancy in Georgia, pending appeals.

New Yorker writer Emma Green’s latest piece, “The Case for Having Lots of Kids” (9/24/24), dives into the right’s election flashpoint that there is something seriously wrong with Americans—especially women—not having enough children.

A relative holds the body of a 4-year-old Palestinian girl who died of malnutrition. The U.N. has declared a famine in parts of Gaza. Credit:Ashraf Amra/Anadolu/Getty Images

The U.S. government’s two foremost authorities on humanitarian assistance concluded this spring that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza.

Janine Jackson interviewed NYU’s Mohamad Bazzi about Israel’s terror attacks in Lebanon for the September 27, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

By Ralph Nader
September 27, 2024

Israel’s Biden-backed war machine is once again bearing down on defenseless Lebanese people. Hostilities on the Israeli/Lebanon border have been occurring since the establishment of Israel and the dispossession of Palestinians and their land in 1948. But last week’s war-crime-laden escalation by Netanyahu stunned the world.

KEY POINTS

CNN‘s Jake Tapper took a baseless accusation made on X and elevated it to a national story, smearing Palestinian-American Rep. Rashida Tlaib as antisemitic.

President Joe Biden is welcomed by United Auto Workers President, Shawn Fain, second from left, and Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Mich., left, on arrival at Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport in Romulus, Michigan, on Sept. 26, 2023. JIM WATSON / GETTY IMAGES

Joe Biden has pledged repeatedly to go further than any of his predecessors with his support for U.S. labor rights.

It is a 900-page policy "wish list" for the next Republican president, a proposal that would expand presidential power and impose an ultra-conservative social vision.

"What you're going to hear tonight is a detailed and dangerous plan called Project 2025, that the former president intends on implementing if he were elected again," Vice-President Kamala Harris said early in the ABC News presidential debate.

Donald Trump, who has repeatedly disavowed the document, responded: "I have nothing to do with Project 2025".

Plastic bottles filled with supposedly clean, pure water have become a ubiquitous part of daily life, lining supermarket shelves and filling landfills worldwide. Despite being marketed as a safer and more convenient alternative to tap water, bottled water is emerging as a major threat to both planetary and human health. Recent studies, including a new commentary published in BMJ Global Health, are now calling for a critical reevaluation of its use.

Mother Jones illustration; Getty

 A new report finds that Indiana loses $4.22 billion annually due to child care issues, namely in missed tax revenues and employee shortages. (Getty Images)

The lack of affordable child care options in the state is costing the state — not just on an individual level, but also in terms of “economic potential,” according to a new study from the Indiana Chamber of Commerce and Early Learning Indiana.