A two-month investigation by The New York Times has uncovered painful new details about a pattern of rape, mutilation and extreme brutality used against Israeli women during the attacks by Hamas in early October. Sexual attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence.
Relying on video footage, photographs, GPS data from mobile phones and interviews with more than 150 people, including witnesses, medical personnel, soldiers and rape counselors, The Times identified at least seven locations where Israeli women and girls appeared to have been sexually assaulted or mutilated.
Witnesses described finding more than 30 bodies of women and girls in and around the rave site and in two kibbutzim who were left with their legs spread, their clothes torn off and signs of abuse in their genital areas. Hamas has denied accusations that such acts occurred.
Civilian deaths:
The Israeli military, in a rare admission of fault, acknowledged that it had carried out two airstrikes on Dec. 24 which Gazan health officials said killed dozens of civilians in the neighborhood of Al Maghazi. An unidentified military official told Israel’s public broadcaster that an improper choice of weaponry was to blame for the high civilian death toll.
Elsewhere in the war:
The U.S. imposed financial sanctions to try to dry up the flow of Iranian funds to the Houthi militia in Yemen, which has been sowing chaos on the Red Sea since the war in Gaza began.
They’re paid billions to stop child labor. They’re failing.
Social compliance audits, meant to check for abuses in the supply chains used by large corporations, have grown into an $80 billion global industry. But they have routinely failed to root out migrant child labor, a Times investigation found.
In a series of articles, The Times has documented migrant children working dangerous jobs in every state, in violation of labor laws. Private auditors have failed to detect such children working for U.S. suppliers of Oreos, Gerber baby snacks, McDonald’s milk, Skittles, Starburst and many other products. Sub-suppliers remain almost entirely unscrutinized.
Auditors for several firms said they were encouraged to deliver findings in the mildest way possible as they navigated pressure from the independent auditing firms that paid their salaries, the corporations that required inspections and the suppliers themselves, which usually arranged and paid for the audits.
Haley says ‘of course the Civil War was about slavery’
A day after giving a stumbling answer about what started the Civil War that did not mention slavery, Nikki Haley told an interviewer: “Yes, I know it was about slavery. I am from the South.” At a town-hall meeting in New Hampshire yesterday, she had said the war was about government overreach and “the freedoms of what people could and couldn’t do.”
Haley has surged into second place in polling for the state’s Republican presidential primary election on Jan. 23.
Russia retakes land hard won by Ukraine
Russia is making progress around the southern village of Robotyne, recapturing land that Ukrainian troops took at the peak of their summer counteroffensive in the south.
With their counteroffensive stalled, Ukrainian troops are now on the back foot in many places, and Kyiv is increasingly worried that its military will not have the resources to keep up the fight.
More top news
Burkina Faso: Human rights organizations say that the country’s military junta has been forcibly conscripting its critics.
Covid: The JN.1 variant, first detected in the U.S. in September, now accounts for nearly half the country’s cases.
South Korea: The death of the “Parasite” actor Lee Sun-kyun, amid accusations against him and other entertainers, has highlighted the government’s “war on drugs.”
Liberia: More than 40 people were killed in the explosion of a gas tanker after they rushed to scoop up fuel from the overturned vehicle.
Business: A study found that ChatGPT helped business consultants with creative tasks, but not with tasks that required reasoning based on evidence.
Sports: Russell Wilson, the Broncos’ star quarterback, will be benched for the final two games of the season and is expected to be cut.
Weather: A major storm, including a possible tornado, caused “significant damage” in Britain.
Investigation: In Mississippi, allegations of wrongdoing against local sheriffs are often ignored.
TIME TO UNWIND
Who was Tom Smothers?
Tom Smothers, the older half of the comic folk duo the Smothers Brothers, died on Tuesday at 86. “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” their seminal variety show, brought political satire and a spirit of youthful irreverence to network television, paving the way for “Saturday Night Live” and “The Daily Show.”
The brothers satirized issues like the Vietnam War, racial politics and drugs, with Tom playing the fool to Dick’s straight man. But “in real life, Tom thought and felt deeply,” writes Nell Scovell, a veteran comedy writer who worked on a 1988 reboot of the variety show. “He cared about social justice and the creative process. He labored over details.”
Read Scovell’s full appraisal here.
A.I. art can feel human. Whose fault is that?
A fake Drake/Weeknd mash-up is not a threat to our species’ culture, our critic Jason Farago writes. It’s a warning: We can’t let our imaginations shrink to machine size.
The explosive growth of text-to-image generators such as Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and Dall-E provoked anxieties that A.I. was coming for capabilities once understood as uniquely human. But Jason believes that machines passing as human are less of a danger than humans acting like machines. Every year, he writes, “art and entertainment has resigned itself further to recommendation engines and ratings structures” and “further internalized the tech industry’s reduction of human consciousness into simple sequences of numbers.”
“To make something count,” Jason writes, “you are going to have to do more than just rearrange precedent images and words, like any old robot. You are going to have to put your back into it, your back and maybe also your soul.”
Dinner table topics
A-list A-game: John Terzian is the rare club owner that famous people trust.
Hips don’t lie: Shakira’s hometown in Colombia honored her with a 21-foot statue.
Words to live by: Our book critics talked about the passages they can’t stop thinking about.
“I do” it differently: Couples are honoring and elevating classic wedding traditions with new approaches.
WHAT TO DO TONIGHT
Cook: Ozoni, or New Year mochi soup, is comforting and nourishing.
Watch: In Michael Mann’s “Ferrari,” the Italian racecar tycoon roars to life.
Resolve: Try our tips to eat better in 2024.
Listen: Check out these five new classical albums.
Learn: How much anxiety is too much?
Judge: Did these paperback book designs improve on the hardbacks?
Hunt: What can $200,000 buy you in the Bronx?
Roam: Get inspired by our most-read travel stories of 2023.
Play: Today’s Spelling Bee, Wordle and Mini Crossword. For more, find all our games here.
ONE LAST THING
Wine by the pint returns to Britain
In 2024, the Brits will be able to drink like Winston Churchill again.
The government announced yesterday that it would allow stores and pubs to sell pints of wine, said to be the former prime minister’s favorite quantity of champagne. Why is this happening? Because of Brexit, the U.K. no longer has to abide by European weights and measurements.
The British pint is a little bigger than the American one, but I’ll let Churchill handle the specifics: He’s believed to have said that a pint of his beloved bubbly was just “enough for two at lunch and one for dinner.”
Have a measured evening.
Thanks for reading. Matt will be back tomorrow. — Justin
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