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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

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.”

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.

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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.

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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.