Author: Reporter

Leading up to the 2020 election, Facebook ads targeting Latino and Asian American voters described Joe Biden as a communist. A local station claimed a Black Lives Matter co-founder practiced witchcraft. Doctored images showed dogs urinating on Donald Trump campaign posters. None of these claims was true, but they scorched through social media sites that advocates say have fueled election misinformation in communities of color. As the 2024 election approaches, community organizations are preparing for what they expect to be a worsening onslaught of disinformation targeting communities of color and immigrant communities. They say the tailored campaigns challenge assumptions...

Hughes Van Ellis was the youngest known survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre. He spent his latter years pursuing justice for his family and other descendants of the attack on “Black Wall Street.” He died at 102. The World War II veteran and published author who was affectionately called “Uncle Redd” by his family and community died on October 9 while in hospice in Denver, said his family’s publicist, Mocha Ochoa. After the war, Van Ellis worked as a sharecropper and went on to raise seven children, all in the shadow of the Tulsa massacre in 1921, when a...

The capture of dozens of Israeli soldiers and civilians, elderly women, children, and entire families, by Hamas militants has stirred Israeli emotions more viscerally than any crisis in the country’s recent memory and presented an impossible dilemma for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government. The Islamist militant group’s 2006 seizure of a sole young conscript, Gilad Shalit, consumed Israeli society for years — a national obsession that prompted Israel to heavily bombard the Gaza Strip and ultimately release over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, many of whom had been convicted of deadly attacks on Israelis, in exchange for Shalit’s freedom....

Israel Defense Forces (IDF) increased airstrikes on the Gaza Strip and sealed it off from food, fuel, and other supplies on October 9 in retaliation for a bloody incursion by Hamas militants, as the war’s death toll rose to more than 1,600 on both sides. Hamas also escalated the conflict, pledging to kill captured Israelis if attacks targeted civilians without warnings. Days after the October 7 attack began, Israel was still finding bodies from Hamas’ stunning weekend attack into southern Israeli towns. Rescue workers found 100 bodies in the tiny farming community of Be’eri — around 10% of its...

Humanitarian groups are scrambling to assist civilians caught in the war between Israel and Hamas and determine what aid operations are still safe to continue, efforts that are being complicated by an intensified blockade of Gaza and ongoing fighting. Two days after Hamas militants went on a rampage that took the world by surprise, Israel increased airstrikes on Gaza and blocked off food, fuel, and other supplies from going into the territory, a move that raised concerns at the United Nations and among aid groups operating in the area home to 2.3 million people. Hamas, in turn, pledged to...