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Oct. 19 (UPI) — Former Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., a convicted fraudster and identity thief, has said he will work to reform U.S. prisons, having been released from a penitentiary Friday by President Donald Trump.

Trump commuted Santos’s seven-year sentence for wire fraud and identity theft, the latest in a series of moves by Trump to exonerate associates and Republicans involved in criminal activity.

Santos was expelled from the U.S. House in 2023 after refusing to resign following a scathing ethics investigation uncovered his criminal activity. In an interview with the Washington Post, Santos called his time in federal prison “dehumanizing” and “humbling.”

The former representative admitted to stealing the identities of 11 people, including his own family members. He served 84 days in prison before being exonerated by Trump and released from prison Friday night. He also admitted that he embellished and fabricated his biography during his run for Congress in 2020.

Santos called the prison system, and the facility where he was housed, FCI Fairton in N.J., as “broken” with “rotting facilities, and administrators who seem incapable or unwilling to correct it.” He said a large hole in the ceiling exposed “thick, black mold,” and claimed broken air-conditioning systems forced inmates to endure sweltering heat.

“The building itself is hardly fit for long-term habitation: sheet metal walls, shoddy construction, the look and feel of a temporary warehouse rather than a permanent facility,” Santos wrote on The South Shore Press website while he was incarcerated.

As part of his plea deal, Santos agreed to pay $600,000 in restitution and forfeiture costs.

Santos pushed back on critics who claim the former congressman is not being held accountable for his crimes, and said that, beyond repentance, he has “dealt a second chance.”

“I understand people want to make this into “he’s getting away with it. I’m not getting away with it,” Santos said following his release. “I was the first person ever to go to federal prison for a civil violation … I don’t want to focus on trying to rehash the past and want to take the experience and do good and move on with the future.

In announcing Santo’s commutation on social media, Trump claimed that the former congressman had been “horribly mistreated,” and that “at least” the former representative had the “Courage, Conviction, and intelligence to ALWAYS VOTE REPUBLICAN!”

Santos, 37, served fewer than three months of his seven year sentence. He said he has no plans to re-enter politics and would do his best to repay campaign donors based on “whatever the law requires of me.”

An Australian medic working at Gaza City’s al-Shifa Hospital says she has lost count of the number of amputations she has had to perform, as two more hospitals were shut down amid Israel’s relentless bombardment of the enclave.

“On the first day, I started off thinking I’ve never seen anything like this, and then in the following days I’ve seen … more. I’ve lost count of the number of amputations I’ve done,” Dr Saya Aziz, an anaesthesiologist, told Al Jazeera.

“The worst thing is these patients are alive … when we take them into the [operation] theatre they’re alive, they’re bleeding to death,” she said, adding how in the recess area of the hospital, dangling bits of toes and flesh and people with missing limbs have become a common sight.

Dr Aziz, who joined the barely functional medical facility about a week ago, says that as soon as hospital staff members hear a huge bomb, within minutes, the hospital fills up with mass casualties.

“You’ll hear the wailing, the screams, the chaos of family members bringing in the patients … it is a bloodbath,” she said.

The doctor added that the hospital’s operating theatre is also in a sordid state with flies everywhere, while Israel has curbed the entry of aid, including medical supplies, into Gaza.

“Everything is just filthy. I can’t even clean the patients covered in dust, gun powder, we’ve got no gauze … I wish I had a couple of towels, which I could wash the patients with. I have no fluids to clean them with. I have no pain relief to give them. My heart breaks,” Aziz said.

Healthcare crippled by Israeli attacks

Al-Shifa Hospital was once the largest medical complex in the Gaza Strip, but most of it now lies in ruins after several rounds of intense Israeli ground and air sieges since the start of the war in October 2023.

Gaza’s healthcare facilities have been repeatedly targeted by Israel, including with 2,000-pound bombs supplied by the United States, Israel’s closest ally.

Hundreds of medics have been killed in the 23 months of brutal war that has been dubbed a genocide by numerous rights organisations, including the United Nations.

Dr Adnan Al-Bursh, the head of orthopaedics at al-Shifa Hospital, was tortured to death in an Israeli prison months after he was arrested in December 2023. Dr Hussam Abu Safia, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, was arrested last November. He still languishes in an Israeli jail.

Targeting of health facilities, medical personnel and patients is considered a war crime under the 1949 Geneva Convention.

Aziz said that on Sunday, Israel’s attacks also killed one of the hospital’s nursing staff and his wife.

“Their one surviving child, an 11-year-old, had burns on his face. I couldn’t even give him any pain relief,” she said, tearing up.

“His name is Mohammad, and he kept saying, ‘I could see my father, I never even said goodbye to him.’”

Israel has routinely justified its deadly attacks on healthcare facilities across Gaza by saying it was targeting Hamas, though it has never provided any proof for its claims.

But media reports, including from Al Jazeera, have documented evidence of Israel’s targeting of medics and hospitals during the course of the devastating war that has killed more than 65,300 Palestinians.

On Monday, the Gaza Health Ministry said two Gaza City hospitals stopped services due to the escalation of Israel’s ground offensive and damage caused by continued Israeli bombing, as tanks advanced deeper into Gaza City.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza City have been forced to flee, as Israel has vowed to seize the city, which hosted more than a million people ahead of the latest Israeli offensive that began a few weeks ago.

Famine has also spread in Gaza as Israel continues to block the entry of aid. At least 440 people have died due to starvation so far.

The Health Ministry said in a statement that al-Rantissi Children’s Hospital had been badly damaged in an Israeli bombardment a few days ago. It also reported Israeli attacks in the vicinity of the nearby St John Eye Hospital, which forced the suspension of services there, too.

“The occupation deliberately and systematically targets the healthcare system in the Gaza governorate as part of its genocidal policy against the Strip,” it said.

“None of the facilities or hospitals have safe access routes that allow patients and the wounded to reach them,” the ministry added.

But despite Israel’s attacks, doctors at the major urban centre’s al-Shifa Hospital say leaving patients is not an option.

“Our medical crews are still carrying out their humanitarian mission in this hospital complex under heavy pressure,” the director of the hospital, Dr Muhammad Abu Salmiya, told Al Jazeera’s Ibrahim al-Khalili in Gaza City on Saturday.

“Their message continues: We serve patients and the injured to the best of our abilities.”

An American paediatrician who volunteered in the Gaza Strip says the injuries inflicted on Palestinian aid seekers at sites run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) suggest that Israeli forces there shot the men and boys deliberately, by targeting and maiming specific body parts on specific days.

Ahmed Yousaf made the comments to Al Jazeera from the Jordanian capital, Amman, on Tuesday, hours after returning from Gaza, where he had spent two and a half weeks working at Al-Aqsa Hospital in central Deir el-Balah and al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.

The doctor said he witnessed “mass casualty incidents” from Israeli shootings at the food distribution points run by the United States-backed GHF on an almost daily basis.

The boys and young men came in with very specific injuries, “almost like a daily pattern”, he said.

“Meaning on a given day, say Monday, we’d get 40,60 patients coming in at a given time, and they would all be shot in the legs, or in the pelvic area, or the groin on a given day, just kind of a similar pattern. And the next day, we would see upper body, chest, thoracic pattern, and then there were days we saw only head wounds, upper neck bullet wounds. And what it felt like, at least for me, the position that I went with, was that somebody behind the gun that day was going to choose the way they were either going to maim or decide to kill people,” he said.

“It was age indiscriminate.”

Yousaf’s comments are the latest by medical staff in Gaza that accuse Israeli forces and US contractors of targeted and indiscriminate violence at the GHF sites.

Doctors Without Borders, known by its French acronym MSF, said last week that the GHF-run food distributions in famine-stricken Gaza have become sites of “orchestrated killing and dehumanisation“, while Human Rights Watch said the shootings amount to serious violations of international law and war crimes.

On Tuesday alone, at least 19 aid seekers were killed at GHF sites in Gaza, while many more were wounded, according to medics and witnesses.

At least 1,838 Palestinians have been killed while seeking aid, and another 13,409 have been wounded since the GHF began its operations in late May, official figures show.

Israel and the GHF deny the killings.

‘All of Gaza is a death trap’

Yousaf, the US paediatrician, said the victims at the sites were mainly boys and young men, as they are often the ones taking the risk to try to get food for their families, “given the dynamic of the risk associated with trying to carry a 5-pound [2.3kg] bag of flour, maybe kilometres, sometimes”.

“The people would tell us they were sometimes at the site, or around the area, or they were trying to leave… and they were shot indiscriminately; it was like they were being sprayed. It seemed quite obvious to them and to us, from a pattern-recognition perspective, in terms of who came to the ER [emergency room], that on a given day, whoever was making the decision behind the trigger was choosing a very specific pattern of fire,” he said.

The doctor went on to describe all of Gaza as a “death trap”.

“It is a cage in which people are being marked for death. It almost feels like there is a quota for the number of people that need to be killed on a given day,” Yousaf said.

On the days that Palestinians stayed away from the GHF sites, because Israel allowed in more aid trucks, there would be more intense air attacks, he said.

“The last four days that we were there, when there was a bit more aid access via food trucks that were allowed in, the risk profile changed and them going to the food distribution sites wasn’t nearly worth the risk because there was some food elsewhere, we saw a significant uptick in bomb blasts on the streets, homes, vehicles. So the pattern of the MCIs – the mass casualty incidents – changed from bullet wounds, mostly boys and young men, to just indiscriminate bombings. We saw women and children, elderly, on the days the bombs come in,” he told Al Jazeera.

The doctor described the Israeli atrocities in Gaza as a “genocide”.

One clear aspect of this, he said, was Israel’s refusal to let him and his colleagues take in medical supplies or baby formula.

“When we were screened by the [Israeli military] at the border, the vast majority of us had things confiscated from our bags. Things like food and multivitamins and antibiotics and medical supplies, like stethoscopes, everything you can imagine, that we wished we could have to treat the people on the ground in Gaza,” he said.

“And this resulted in a situation in which, when those patients came in, in different stages of dying, screaming in pain for their mothers… we knew that in any other environment, we could have done something for them, but in the environment of Gaza, in the death trap that is Gaza completely, we were unable to give them the aid that they deserve, to provide the human dignity and humanity that they deserve.”

The search for Shannon Matthews, nine, became a major missing person police operation and, after several weeks, she was found at an address in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire

A man who investigated Shannon Matthews‘ disappearance has revealed the moment he knew the girl’s mum Karen was the person behind it all.

Richard Edwards, who was a local reporter at the time, appeared on This Morning yesterday to talk about his involvement in the case which saw a huge missing person police operation launched for the girl. She was found at her mum’s then-boyfriend Michael Donovan’s house in a plot to claim a £50,000 reward, and both Karen and Donovan were prosecuted and jailed.

The search lasted 24 days in February and March 2008, during which time people on the estate near Dewsbury, West Yorkshire eventually became suspicious of Karen. It dawned on Mr Edwards himself Karen could be responsible when a man approached him – as he worked late on the estate one evening for a local newspaper – and pointed at Karen’s house, insisting she had known along along where Shannon was.

READ MORE: This Morning host says ‘stop the show’ minutes in as viewers ‘switch off’READ MORE: How to watch new Shannon Matthews documentary 17 years on from fake kidnap scandal

Speaking to Emma Willis and Andi Peters on the ITV This Morning sofa yesterday, Mr Edwards said: “There was one particular night where to this day I’ve never known who this person was. It was a Sunday night, a few days before Karen was arrested…

“A car pulled up on the estate, I was working, it was late on the Sunday, it was dark and a guy got out and he said ‘Where’s that Richard Edwards from the Yorkshire Evening Post?’

“I thought I’ve done something to offend this fella, but I need to front up. I said ‘That’s me’. He came over, he was right at the end of Mooreside Road and he pointed towards the house, he went ‘She’s done it. She’s known where that little girl has been all along.’

“Then got into the car and drove off and I thought right… that was weird. That was on top of the other stuff I’d been hearing. And then three days later she was arrested.”

The mum would later be charged with child neglect and perverting the course of justice. She was jailed for eight years after a jury found her guilty of those offences.

But Mr Edwards still to this day – 17 years on – does not know who the man who approached him was. The journalist continued: “If he’s watching this and wants to get in touch with me just to explain who he is and just clear up that tiny little outstanding part of the story. I would love to hear from him because he didn’t tell me who he was, but he was right. He was right.”

Donovan was also jailed for eight years after the trial at Leeds Crown Court, after which he was convicted of kidnapping and false imprisonment. Donovan died of cancer in hospital at the age of 54 last year.

June 6 (UPI) — Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate detained by the Trump administration in March for deportation over his pro-Palestinian views, offered a public declaration that details what he’s experienced since his arrest.

In a case document filed Thursday, Khalil listed what he described as the “irreparable harms” he has suffered, which he claimed have affected several parts of his life that “include dignitary and reputational harm, personal and familial hardship, including constant fear for personal safety, continued detention, restrictions on my freedom of expression, and severe damage to my professional future.”

The declaration, which was made from inside the LaSalle Detention Center in Jena, La., where Khalil has been held since March 9, puts focus on the birth of his son, which happened during his incarceration.

“Instead of holding my wife’s hand in the delivery room, I was crouched on a detention center floor, whispering through a crackling phone line as she labored alone.” Khalil described.

“I listened to her pain, trying to comfort her while 70 other men slept around me. When I heard my son’s first cries, I buried my face in my arms so no one would see me weep.”

Khalil described that the first time he saw his son was through a window, and the first time he held him was in an immigration courtroom, to which his wife had to travel ten hours to reach, with their newborn.

“I speak to her as often as possible, but these conversations are not private, everything is monitored by the government,” Khalil said, which makes it impossible for them to comfortably speak freely.

“We leave so much unsaid, and that silence weighs heavily on both of us.”

Khalil said that not only has the situation been “devastating” for him, but that his wife has dealt with harassment since his arrest. Khalil further described the anguish of seeing Trump administration officials post statements and photos of him on social media that he purports as “accompanied by inflammatory language, grotesque and false accusations, and open celebration of my deportation.”

Khalil expressed concern for his future as well. He said he was hired by the nonprofit equality-focused Oxfam International group only days before his arrest as a Palestine and Middle East/ North Africa policy advisor, and was scheduled to start work in April, but the job offer was formally revoked. He says “I strongly believe” his arrest and continued detention is the reason for this.

He added that should the charges against him stand, “the harm to my professional career would be career-ending.”

Khalil further worried his arrest would result in a lifetime of “being flagged, delayed, or denied when traveling, applying for visas, or engaging with consular authorities anywhere in the world,” and not just him, but his wife and son.

His mother had also applied for a visa in March to visit the United States to see their child be born, and although that was approved, the U.S. embassy returned her passport without a stamp, and now her case is under “administrative processing,” and remains unapproved. Khalil’s elderly father, whom he describes as “severely disabled,” lives in Germany, and he ponders whether any country allied with the United States will ever grant him entry should the charges stand.

Khalil detailed the allegations under which he has been held for deportation, which not only did he deny as testimony at his May immigration court hearing, at which he purports “The government attorneys did not ask me any questions regarding these issues.”

However, Khalil maintained his greatest concern of all is a determination by Secretary of State Marco Rubio based on a law that an “alien” can be deported should his presence in the United States “have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.”

“I understand that the Rubio Determination is not only a ground for deportation, but it is also a bar to entry,” said Khalil.

“In other words, no matter what happens to the other charge against me, it is the Rubio Determination that will make this country, the country of my wife and child, a country I cannot return to in the future.”

LIVERPOOL fans who lined the streets to celebrate the club’s Premier League triumph have spoken out after a car ploughed into a crowd.

A 53-year-old white British man from Liverpool was arrested at the scene on Water Street just after 6pm and is thought to have been the driver of the car, police said.

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Some 27 injured people were rushed to hospital – two with serious injuries – and 20 were treated at the scene, with more patients self-presenting later on, the North West Ambulance Service said.

A survivor of the Manchester Arena bombing was one of those knocked to the floor by the car.

Frankie, 24, told the Mail: “I was at the Manchester Arena incident. I don’t want to go out again.

They continued: “The side of the car went into me and I fell to the floor. It’s all a blur.

“I’ve got cuts and bruises and I’ll be fine but there’s loads who have got more severe injuries.”

Meanwhile, supporter Harry Rashid, 48, was a stone’s throw away from the swerving vehicle during the terrifying scene.

“It happened about 10 feet away from us,” he said.

“We were just in a crowd and we had no control over where we would be, because it was a very narrow street. 

“The vehicle came to our right. It emerged from just right next to an ambulance, which was parked up.

“This grey people carrier just pulled up from the right and just rammed into all the people at the side of us.

“It was travelling south, down Water Street, straight towards this strand, which is where the docks are.

“It was extremely fast. Initially, we just heard the pop, pop, pop of people just being knocked off the bonnet of a car.”

Merseyside Police are leading the investigation and were initially supported by counter-terrorism police.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said: “The scenes in Liverpool are appalling — my thoughts are with all those injured or affected.”

He later praised the “remarkable bravery” shown by the emergency services in Liverpool and added: “Everyone, especially children, should be able to celebrate their heroes without this horror.”

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper described the scenes as “truly shocking” and thanked the emergency services for their “swift response”.

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Singer says on day three of trial Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs routinely beat her and threatened to ruin her career with videos of sexual encounters.

Casandra Ventura, the singer popularly known as Cassie and former girlfriend of rap mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs, has taken to the witness stand on the third day of his trial to portray a relationship defined by physical abuse and routine humiliation.

Testifying before the court on Wednesday, Ventura said Combs, who faces sex trafficking and racketeering charges, beat her and threatened to release compromising videos that could damage her career.

“He would grab me up, push me down, hit me in the side of the head, kick me,” Ventura, a rhythm and blues singer, told jurors in Manhattan federal court.

“It would just make him more violent, make him stronger, make him want to push me harder,” Ventura said of efforts to resist Combs’s violent behaviour during their decadelong relationship.

Prosecutors have alleged that Combs used his wealth and control of an entertainment empire to manipulate and coerce women, sometimes through physical violence, into participation in drug-fuelled sex parties known as “freak-offs” and then used videos of sexual encounters as blackmail.

“He said that it would ruin everything that I had worked for, that it would make me look like a slut, that I would be shamed,” Ventura said. “Nobody should do that to anyone.”

She stated participation in the “freak-offs” started to feel like “a job where there was no space to do anything else but to recover and just try to feel normal again” and she developed an opioid addiction to cope.

On one occasion in 2013, Ventura sent Combs pictures of injuries she sustained when he threw her into a bed frame so he could “remember” what he had done.

“You don’t know when to stop. You pushed it too far and continued to push,” he responded. “Sad.”

Combs’s lawyers have conceded that the rapper has an aggressive temperament and has physically assaulted people but state he has been incorrectly charged with racketeering and sex trafficking and a freewheeling sexual lifestyle is being misconstrued by prosecutors.

Combs has pleaded not guilty to five counts of racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking and transportation to engage in prostitution. If he is convicted on all charges, he faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years in prison.