Friday briefing: a pattern of rape and torture on October 7

Hamas weaponized sexual violence

Israeli officials say everywhere Hamas terrorists struck on October 7 – a rave, military bases along the Gaza border and kibbutz after kibbutz – women were treated brutally.

A two-month investigation by The Times found that the attacks on women were not isolated events but part of a wider pattern of gender-based violence. For months, Israeli activists have been outraged that UN Secretary General António Guterres and the UN Women organization did not acknowledge the many allegations until weeks after the attacks.

Times reporters have identified at least seven locations where Israeli women and girls have been sexually abused or mutilated. Many of the stories reported by my colleagues are difficult to stomach and the visual evidence is disturbing to see.

One photo showed the corpse of a woman with dozens of nails in her thighs and groin. A video provided by the Israeli military showed two dead Israeli soldiers who appeared to have been shot directly in the vagina. A witness told my colleagues that a Hamas terrorist had raped a woman, while another had cut off her breast.

Report: My colleagues used video footage, photographs, cell phone GPS data and interviews with more than 150 people, including witnesses, medical personnel, soldiers and rape counselors, to piece together the evidence.

Judicial reform: Israel’s Supreme Court is expected to rule in mid-January on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s divisive plan to overhaul Israel’s courts.

A northern front? As Hezbollah’s rockets pour into Israel from Lebanon, Israeli officials have threatened action along the border.

The US is preparing for more migrants

U.S. officials are struggling to cope with the chaos at the border with Mexico as thousands of migrants arrive every day. The spike could have implications for the Biden administration, which fears it could hurt Democrats’ election chances.

Arrivals have again reached record levels and are testing the ability of law enforcement agencies on both sides of the border to contain the explosion of illegal crossings. One expert said there were more migrants per day this month than any previous average, with apprehensions exceeding 10,000 per day last week.

“We are not equipped to deal with this,” one Border Patrol agent said. “It is a humanitarian disaster.”

Migrants: Some are fleeing the war in Sudan. Others, cartels in Mexico. Most are fleeing brutal violence, despair and poverty.

A Times investigation: Audits that look for problems, including migrant children in the workplace, have grown into an $80 billion global industry. But they have consistently missed child labor, including at the American suppliers of Oreo, Gerber and McDonald’s.

China’s spiraling real estate crisis

Citic Trust, one of China’s largest financial companies, said in 2020 that its new fund was as safe as it could be – because it would invest in real estate. Then the developer went bankrupt and the projects stalled.

My colleagues have reconstructed its unraveling, which provides a window into the broader problems of China’s real estate sector. What started as a housing crisis is now a full-blown crisis. Local government budgets, which relied on real estate revenues, have been destabilized. And the shock to China’s financial system has drained capital markets.

What’s next: China’s central government has finally signaled its willingness to intervene, pledging this month to “actively and prudently resolve real estate risks” and help companies meet their “reasonable financing needs.”

Museums around the world are struggling to attract new audiences. England’s tiny Crab Museum has found success with a sense of humor, drawing in visitors with irreverent, wholesome dioramas that teach visitors about climate change and capitalism.

Lives lived: Jiang Ping was a seminal Chinese legal scholar whose experiences with political persecution shaped his relentless advocacy for individual rights. He died at the age of 92.

The real threat that AI poses to art

A fake Drake/Weeknd mash-up is not a threat to the culture of our species, writes our critic Jason Farago. It is a warning: we must not let our imagination shrink to the size of a machine.

Take the growth of text-to-image generators, which has sparked fears that AI is coming to the visual arts as well.

But those images, at least to Jason, feel more like a video game than actual human expression. The compositions are very symmetrical. The figures have the waxy fruit skin and deep-set eyes of video game characters. It’s not a direct threat; AI cannot innovate and cannot pretend to be human.

The cultural threat, he argues, runs deeper. Instead of worrying about whether bots can do what humans do, we should raise our expectations about what humans can do.

“It’s not in the form of some cheap HAL-meets-Robocop fantasy of out-of-control software and killer lasers,” he says. “The threat is that we limit ourselves to the extent of the limited capabilities of our machines; the threat is that human thought and life will be sanded down to fit increasingly standardized data sets.”

Read his full essay here.

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