Christabelle, a 10-year-old Congolese girl, said she was raped alongside her mother by M23 insurgents in February. The child passed out and awoke in excruciating pain.

17-year-old Christelle said she was gang raped by at least seven M23 soldiers during the battle for Goma in January. She needed surgery to recover, but the pain was just beginning. Neighbors called her a “compromised woman” whom no one would marry. Her parents sent her away to neighboring Burundi. “I don’t have family. I can’t go to school. I can’t work. They destroyed my life,” she said of her rapists.

Celine, age 9, said 10 M23 soldiers burst into her home in the middle of the night. “They stabbed my mom to death in front of me,” she said, shaking violently at the memory. Celine said the soldiers tried to rape her, but got frustrated because she was so tiny, so they beat her instead. She and her uncle fled to Burundi. “I couldn’t even bury my mom,” she said.

M23 and other armed combatants are using sexual violence as a weapon of war in Congo. Reuters spoke with 46 rape victims, nearly half of them children. One was so badly injured that two surgeries have only begun to repair the damage. It’s a tactic of terror meant to destroy families and communities, a veteran doctor who works with rape survivors told Reuters

For months, the Trump administration has been accusing its political enemies of mortgage fraud for claiming more than one primary residence.

President Donald Trump branded one foe who did so “deceitful and potentially criminal.” He called another “CROOKED” on Truth Social and pushed the attorney general to take action.

But years earlier, Trump did the very thing he’s accusing his enemies of, records show.

In 1993, Trump signed a mortgage for a “Bermuda style” home in Palm Beach, Florida, pledging that it would be his principal residence. Just seven weeks later, he got another mortgage for a seven-bedroom, marble-floored neighboring property, attesting that it too would be his principal residence.

In reality, Trump, then a New Yorker, does not appear to have ever lived in either home, let alone used them as a principal residence. Instead, the two houses, which are next to his historic Mar-a-Lago estate, were used as investment properties and rented out, according to contemporaneous news accounts and an interview with his longtime real estate agent — exactly the sort of scenario his administration has pointed to as evidence of fraud.

I first came upon Richard Wright via The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson (incredible book btw), the title of which actually comes from a poem in the original draft of Black Boy:

I was leaving the South
to fling myself into the unknown...
I was taking a part of the South
to transplant in alien soil,
to see if it could grow differently,
if it could drink of new and cool rains,
bend in strange winds,
respond to the warmth of other suns
and, perhaps, to bloom.

I first read Wright's novel Native Son, a story about a young black man (Bigger Thomas) born to Jim Crow Mississippi and living in Chicago's redlined Black Belt in the 1930s

The book was especially captivating to me through Wright's ability to express the chaotic, bewildered psychological turmoil in Bigger's mind throughout the book.

Reading Black Boy, Wright's autobiography, it is clear where this ability came from. As powerful as Native Son is, I found Black Boy to be even more so. The details of his life are harrowing. The abject poverty and hunger, the racial subjugation and humiliation, the suppression of his individuality and intellect by his own family and community. But again what made this book so captivating to me was clarity with which he could see and portray his own inner life and psychology through all of this. His prose is engrossing and poetic. I was absorbed in it from page one. I've never quite read anything else like it, and can't recommend it enough.

If anyone has read Black Boy or anything else by Wright (or Isabel Wilkerson as well for that matter; Caste and The Warmth of Other Suns are absolute favorites of mine), I'd love to hear your thoughts.

The plaintiffs’ brief alleges that Meta was aware that its platforms were endangering young users, including by exacerbating adolescents’ mental health issues. According to the plaintiffs, Meta frequently detected content related to eating disorders, child sexual abuse, and suicide but refused to remove it. For example, one 2021 internal company survey found that more than 8 percent of respondents aged 13 to 15 had seen someone harm themself or threaten to harm themself on Instagram during the past week. The brief also makes clear that Meta fully understood the addictive nature of its products, with plaintiffs citing a message by one user-experience researcher at the company that Instagram “is a drug” and, “We’re basically pushers.”

Perhaps most relevant to state child endangerment laws, the plaintiffs have alleged that Meta knew that millions of adults were using its platforms to inappropriately contact minors. According to their filing, an internal company audit found that Instagram had recommended 1.4 million potentially inappropriate adults to teenagers in a single day in 2022. The brief also details how Instagram’s policy was to not take action against sexual solicitation until a user had been caught engaging in the “trafficking of humans for sex” a whopping 17 times. As Instagram’s former head of safety and well-being, Vaishnavi Jayakumar, reportedly testified, “You could incur 16 violations for prostitution and sexual solicitation, and upon the seventeenth violation, your account would be suspended.”

Archive link in case anyone hits a paywall.

This article is from September, but it is good, and in light of other recent efforts by the Indian government at mass surveillance of their population, I think it is worth a read.

A system like Aadhaar is a great way for governments to sneak in a platform of surveillance and control under the guise of welfare and could serve as a model for other governments seeking to supercharge their own surveillance efforts.

From exile in Moscow, ex-intel chief Kamal Hassan and Assad cousin Rami Makhlouf are spending millions of dollars in competing efforts to build fighting forces that would lead a revolt along Syria’s coast. They are also vying for control of a network of 14 underground command rooms stocked with arms and ammunition that were built in the dictatorship’s last days. Syria's government has deployed another former Assad insider – a childhood friend of the new president – to neutralize the plotters.

[...]

DAMASCUS - Former loyalists to Bashar al-Assad who fled Syria after the dictator’s fall are funneling millions of dollars to tens of thousands of potential fighters, hoping to stir uprisings against the new government and reclaim some of their lost influence, a Reuters investigation has found.

Assad, who escaped to Russia last December, is largely resigned to exile in Moscow, say four people close to the family. But other senior figures from his inner circle, including his brother, have not come to terms with losing power.

Two of the men once closest to Assad, Maj. Gen. Kamal Hassan and billionaire Rami Makhlouf, are competing to form militias in coastal Syria and Lebanon made up of members of their minority Alawite sect, long associated with the Assad family, Reuters found. All told, the two men and other factions jostling for power are financing more than 50,000 fighters in hope of winning their loyalty.

[...]

To counter the plotters, Syria’s new government is deploying another former Assad loyalist – a childhood friend of new President Ahmed al-Sharaa who became a paramilitary leader for Assad and then switched sides mid-war after the dictator turned against him. The task of that man, Khaled al-Ahmad, is to persuade Alawite ex-soldiers and civilians that their future lies with the new Syria.