Author: Reporter

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...

Republicans have no clear idea who will be the next U.S. House Speaker, leaving an unprecedented power vacuum in Congress and severely limiting America’s ability to quickly respond to the crisis in Israel, or any number of other problems at home and abroad. The ousted former Speaker, Kevin McCarthy, quickly jumped into the void on October 9, positioning himself as a de facto Republican leader even though his colleagues toppled him from power. But it is not at all clear if McCarthy could seriously make a comeback — or if one of the other Republicans seeking the gavel, Steve...