LAPD officers on the UCLA Campus in May of this year.(Mario Tama / Getty)

The lifelong Republican mayor of Oklahoma City, David Holt, announced this past week, he would not cast his ballot for the Republican presidential candidate in a column entitled: "A Republican Mayor's Unexpected Presidential Vote." 

The Israeli military killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in the Gaza Strip on October 17, and it didn’t take long for the usual media suspects to line up with their anti-eulogies.

NPR is adding a new team of editors to give all content a “final review”—thanks to the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

There are ten days until November 5th, millions of Americans have already cast their ballots, and finally–finally–the media has begun to focus on the fact that a major-party candidate for President is bat-shit crazy.

Do MAGA voters even care? Or does their hatred of “those people” [fill in the minority of your choice] outweigh the very real prospects of domestic autocracy and potentially, World War III? Do they even understand that Trump’s mental breakdown means they are actually voting for a JD Vance presidency?

The leading Israeli human rights group B’Tselem warned this week the world must stop the “ethnic cleansing” of northern Gaza, where the Israeli military has imposed a brutal siege since October 5, demanding that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians flee south or face death. Israel is blocking almost all food, water and medicine from reaching northern Gaza while its forces carry out deadly raids and bombardment of the area, overwhelming the remaining hospitals.

A Syrian girl fleeing the war in Lebanon with family arrives at the Syrian-Lebanese border crossing in Jousieh, Syria on Oct. 2, 2024. (AP Photo/Omar Sanadiki)

The leaders of many countries … verbally denounce Israel’s operations, but these condemnations are not backed by practical actions.’ ,Photograph: APAImages/REX/Shutterstock // The Guardian

The Indiana Youth Institute reports one of the biggest challenges to improving youth mental health in Indiana is the persistence of barriers to accessing care. (Adobe stock)

There are three candidates for Governor in Indiana’s election on November 5th.

Only one supports public education:   Jennifer McCormick.

Photo credit: Muhammad Mahdi Karim, Wikimedia Commons

Each new week brings new calamities for people in the countries neighboring Israel, as its leaders try to bomb their way to the promised land of an ever-expanding Greater Israel.

Republican vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance listens as Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at the Butler Farm Show fairgrounds on October 05, 2024 in Butler, Pennsylvania. Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Why is the Biden administration helping migrants and not hurricane victims?” You’ve no doubt heard this line, or some version of it, from your Facebook Uncle over the past two weeks. “Why is the government spending money on food stamps for drug addicts and not taking care of homeless vets?”

Ryan Bergh, a machinist at Boeing's factory in Everett, Washington for 10 years, cheers during a strike rally for the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) at the Seattle Union Hall in Seattle, Washington, on October 15, 2024. Photo by JASON REDMOND/AFP via Getty Images

Striking union members who work for the aerospace giant Boeing reached a tentative contract agreement Saturday after nearly 6 weeks on the picket line demanding better wages and benefits.

The Indiana Secretary of State's office reports only 59% of registered voters in Marion County, the state's largest, cast a ballot in the 2020 presidential election. (Adobe Stock)

Ralph welcomes back William Hartung of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. They'll discuss the Cost of War Project's latest reports on US military spending in support of Israel, and the humanitarian costs of the war in Gaza. Then, Ralph is joined by Palestinian writer and analyst Sumaya Awad to discuss the mass civil disobedience at the New York Stock Exchange, which was organized by Jewish Voice for Peace to protest the weapons manufacturers that are making millions off the genocide in Gaza.

Early voting has already begun in Indiana in advance of the Nov. 5, general election. (Photo/Pexels.com)

Three days after early voting began in the state and less than a month before the Nov. 5 general election, Indiana Secretary of State Diego Morales and Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita asked federal officials to verify the citizenship status of more than 550,000 Hoosiers on the state’s voting rolls.

Here is the list of Republicans who worked for Trump who are not endorsing him because they believe he is a clear and present danger to our democracy:

As the official death toll in Gaza passes more than 42,400, the true number may be impossible to know until Israel’s war is over. But medical workers who witnessed the carnage in Gaza’s hospitals are speaking out. We speak with Dr. Feroze Sidhwa about his op-ed in The New York Times that features harrowing stories from dozens of healthcare workers and CT scans of children shot in the head or the left side of the chest. The Times called the corresponding images of the patients too graphic to publish.

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.