Free Republic

Turkey on Saturday became the latest country to pull its ambassador from Israel since the beginning of Israel’s war with Gaza-based militant group Hamas, citing Israel’s refusal to heed calls for a humanitarian pause in the conflict. Turkey recalled ambassador Sakir Ozkan Torunlar, according to a statement from Turkey’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Saturday morning, calling out Israel for an “unfolding humanitarian tragedy in Gaza” after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “no longer someone we can talk to,” though Erdogan acknowledged: “complete disconnection is not possible, especially in international diplomacy.”

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — From targeting Chinese-owned farmland to banning gender-neutral terms like “pregnant people” from state documents, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders has rolled out announcements in recent weeks in quick succession, cheered on by her Republican base. Washington — has also fielded questions from behind a lectern at the state Capitol. But it’s the lectern she’s not using — a $19,000 purchase that’s led to an audit and claims her office illegally altered public records — that remains a problem for the first-term governor. That lectern hasn’t been seen at Sanders’ public events, and the governor’s office...

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...

The Associated Press has some nerve browbeating readers over the alleged scourge of Israel-Hamas war “misinformation” on social media despite its own guilt of pushing terrorist propaganda. AP pontificated in its Oct. 24 headline how “Misinformation about the Israel-Hamas war is flooding social media. Here are the facts.” The leftist outlet lectured how “[i]n the days since Hamas militants stormed into Israel early Oct. 7, a flood of videos and photos purporting to show the conflict have filled social media, making it difficult for onlookers from around the world to sort fact from fiction.” Yes, AP actually sought to humanize...

KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip (AP) — Yousra Abu Sharekh’s days begin in the southern Gaza Strip often after sleepless nights amid blaring ambulance sirens and the clamor of neighbors in the brief pause between relentless Israeli airstrikes. By daybreak, the 33-year-old mother is on the hunt for bread, lining up for hours at bakeries to buy one bag to feed her two children. Without electricity, disconnected from her relatives and terrified by the sounds of warplanes overhead, she rushes in the afternoon to see her sick mother at a crowded U.N. shelter 20 minutes away. Only two weeks ago, Abu...

If you’re a “journalist,” time is running out so you better act now! Later in September, the Columbia Journalism School is hosting a critical event on climate news coverage. For those in the know, the Columbia Journalism School is one of the institutions leftist journalists strive to impress. It’s like a gated country club for the liberal elite who are hosting a big party for reporters to learn how to write on climate. They call it a “blueprint for media transformation,” but let’s call it what it really is: reporter re-education camp. They already control the news you see, or...

It’s imbecilic for The Associated Press to act like any person with common sense would take its screeching about “human-caused climate change” seriously now after being paid millions to spread eco-propaganda. AP’s climate “writer” Seth Borenstein kicked off his July 31 enviro-screed by making it sound like the beginning of a science fiction novel. “At about summer’s halfway point, the record-breaking heat and weather extremes are both unprecedented and unsurprising, hellish yet boring in some ways, scientists say. Killer heat. Deadly floods. Smoke from wildfires that chokes. And there’s no relief in sight,” Borenstein cried. But Borenstein buried a more...

NEW YORK -- Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis said definitively that rival Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, an acknowledgement the Florida governor made after years of equivocating answers.“Of course he lost,” DeSantis said an interview with NBC News posted Monday. “Joe Biden's the president.”DeSantis has often sidestepped questions about whether he believes the 2020 election results were legitimate. But in recent days he has started publicly questioning the lies that Trump and his allies have made about the election's legitimacy.Federal and state election officials and Trump’s own attorney general said there was no credible evidence the election’s outcome was...

Texas A&M University on Friday announced the resignation of its president in the fallout over a Black journalist who said her celebrated hiring at one of the nation’s largest campuses quickly unraveled due to pushback over her past work promoting diversity.

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken says there can be no cease-fire in the war in Ukraine unless it is part of a “just and lasting” peace deal that includes Russia’s military withdrawal. Blinken said Friday that “a ceasefire that simply freezes current lines in place” and enabled Russian President Vladimir Putin to “rest, rearm, and re-attack” would not be “a just and lasting peace.” In a speech during a visit to Finland, Blinken said that Russia must also pay for part of Ukraine’s reconstruction and be held accountable for its full-scale invasion of its neighbor...

Apparently Humpty Dumpty has taken a senior editing position with the Associated Press. Lewis Carroll’s character from Alice in Wonderland famously intoned, “When I use a word… it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less,” and the giant propaganda agency feels the same way. Writing in Human Events, Libby Emmons calls out the AP for redefining the word “insurrection” to apply to the January 6, 2021 demonstrators, and then, when that definition was applied by others to the left wing demonstrations that disrupted the Tennessee and Montana state legislatures, re-redefining the term so as...

Humanity still has a chance, close to the last one, to prevent the worst of climate change ’s future harms, a top United Nations panel of scientists said Monday. But doing so requires quickly slashing carbon pollution and fossil fuel use by nearly two-thirds by 2035, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said. The United Nations chief said it more bluntly, calling for an end to new fossil fuel exploration and rich countries quitting coal, oil and gas by 2040. “Humanity is on thin ice — and that ice is melting fast,” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said. “Our world...

The Associated Press attempted to blame Twitter owner Elon Musk and “pro-Russian” Twitter accounts for Americans’ distrust of Big Daddy Government and liberal media gaslighting about the toxic Ohio train disaster. Talk about a ridiculous attempt at a stretch. AP whined in a Mar. 18 story — “Pro-Moscow voices tried to steer Ohio train disaster debate” — that “anonymous pro-Russian accounts” used “Elon Musk’s new verification system” to spread “misleading claims and anti-American propaganda” about the East Palestine, Ohio train derailment. The train’s derailing led authorities to create a controlled explosion that released toxic fumes into the atmosphere. “The accounts,...

Abortion Topical Guide A style guide for abortion-related coverage, based on the AP Stylebook and common usage in AP stories. abortion Use the modifiers anti-abortion or abortion-rights; don't use pro-life, pro-choice or pro-abortion unless they are in quotes or proper names. Avoid abortionist, which connotes a person who performs clandestine abortions. gestational age The abortion bans taking effect after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade vary greatly in how they define when a pregnancy can be ended. Some laws restrict abortion at particular weeks of pregnancy. This means determining how far along someone is in pregnancy. The method...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Lawmakers in several Democratic-controlled states are advocating sweeping voter protections this year, reacting to what they view as a broad undermining of voting rights by the Supreme Court and Republican-led states as well as a failed effort in Congress to bolster access to the polls. Legislators in Connecticut, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey and New Mexico have introduced voting rights measures, while Michigan’s secretary of state is preparing a plan. Among other things, the proposals would require state approval for local governments to change redistricting or voting procedures, ban voter suppression and intimidation, mandate that ballots are printed...

There’s evidence of media bias everywhere, but in this particular case I’d like to focus on a game the press plays with the names of legislation/laws in their reporting about Republican initiatives: "Critics call" — JWF (@JammieWF) February 11, 2023 The biggest example of that lately has been Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act that Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law last year. The Left dubbed it the “Don’t Say Gay” law and the media dutifully fell in line. The Associated Press is still playing that game: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will soon take control of Walt Disney World's self-governing...

NEW YORK (AP) — A judge kept secret that two of Sam Bankman-Fried’s closest associates had turned against him so the cryptocurrency entrepreneur wouldn’t get spooked and fight extradition from the Bahamas, according to court transcripts made public Friday. At that hearing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon told the judge prosecutors had expected Bankman-Fried to consent to extradition Monday before there were “some hiccups in the Bahamian courtroom.” “We’re still expecting extradition soon, but given that he has not yet entered his consent”, Sassoon told U.S. District Judge Ronnie Abrams. The judge got assurance from Ellison’s lawyer that there was...

Retiring Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) said in an interview that too many politicians in Washington “don’t care” about the country, only about their “political ambitions.” In an interview with The Associated Press published Wednesday, Leahy said when he first joined the Senate in 1975, senators found ways to get things done regardless of differing views. Leahy, 82, the Senate Appropriations Committee chairman, has spent the last 48 years in the Senate and serves as the chamber’s president pro tempore and is third in line to the presidency. “I think then, most of [the senators] knew there were basic things the...

Young voters who are “critical to Democratic successes” are showing less enthusiasm for the party, according to a breathless Associated Press report. Well, so? I’m not discounting the power of young voters. Whatever their enthusiasm problem might or might not be, they showed up for the midterms in unexpectedly strong numbers. And as the AP story notes, “voters under 30 went 53% for Democratic House candidates compared with only 41% for Republican candidates nationwide.” Nevertheless, those young voters’ numbers are down significantly from the two previous elections: But that level of support for Democrats was down compared with 2020, when...

CLAIM: President Joe Biden signed an executive order in March 2022 that will introduce a cashless society, make paper money worthless, give government new power to inhibit purchases and create a social credit score system like the one in China, which would punish people financially for certain behaviors. AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. The executive order doesn’t do any of these things. It urged Federal Reserve to explore whether central bank should create its own digital currency and directed Treasury Department and other federal agencies to study the impact of cryptocurrency on financial stability and national security. THE FACTS: In March, Biden...