OpenAI’s Sora, a text-to-video tool still in the testing phase, has set off alarm bells, threatening to widen society’s social trust deficit. How can people know what to believe, when they “can’t believe their eyes”?

• Sweden clears NATO hurdle: Hungary’s parliament votes to ratify Sweden’s bid to join NATO, bringing an end to more than 18 months of delays that have frustrated the alliance as it seeks to expand in response to Russia’s war in Ukraine.
• U.S. airman’s Israel protest: An active-duty member of the U.S. Air Force dies after he set himself ablaze outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, while declaring that he “will no longer be complicit in genocide.”
• Palestinian prime minister resigns: Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh says he is stepping down to allow for the formation of a broad consensus among Palestinians about political arrangements following Israel’s war against Hamas.
• GOP leader steps down: Republican Party chairwoman Ronna McDaniel says she is leaving the job after weeks of public pressure from the party’s likely 2024 presidential candidate, Donald Trump. 

Read these news briefs.

Months after protesters marched in Tel Aviv dressed as handmaidens to thwart an attempted judicial overhaul by the far-right government, Israeli women are shifting perceptions of gender roles as they serve on the front lines of the war effort.

Auteurs and actors are held in high esteem in France. That may be in part why the country is still wrestling with sexual abuse scandals involving some of its cinematic leading lights.

The founder of the first free public schools in the U.S. was born enslaved and won freedom not only for himself, but also his family, by commandeering a Confederate gunship. Why isn’t he as famous as Harriet Tubman?

Things rarely go according to plan. Understanding the art of improvisation – whether on stage or in life – enables us to dance with the surprises, mishaps, and pivots that life often presents. 

For Caribbean leaders gathering this week to discuss how to end rule by gangs in Haiti, a lesson might be found from a truce brokered in Mexico between warring drug cartels over the weekend: The best solution may lie in discerning the motives of those caught up in violence.

There are people in gangs and drug cartels who “no longer want war, they no longer want to be killing each other,” said Salvador Rangel, a retired Catholic bishop in Guerrero, the southern Mexican state where the two cartels overlap. It is crucial, he told The Associated Press, “to take advantage of that desire to bring peace.”

Across Latin America, countries are trying different tactics against a rise of nonstate violent groups. In Colombia, for example, the city of Buenaventura has become the center for government efforts to neutralize armed militias and other illicit groups since the two predominant gangs there declared a truce in 2022. The city’s homicide rate has dropped while civic participation among women and youth has increased. As a visiting delegation of the United Nations Security Council noted, “Lack of economic and educational opportunities continue to make young people vulnerable to recruitment by armed groups,” but they are also learning to see themselves as “not only victims, but also agents of change.”

In Mexico, the truce in Guerrero arose from efforts by local religious leaders to break the violence and extortion disrupting the lives of ordinary citizens. Four bishops held meetings with leaders from the two cartels. It seemed neither side was willing to budge, so the bishops backed off. Then, on Saturday, the groups announced a breakthrough on their own.

They haven’t said what changed their minds. But as a 2013 InSight Crime study of gang truces in Latin America noted, agreement reached between rival illicit groups – either directly or through civic mediators – is often built on establishing enough trust to promote further confidence-building and “verification of commitments.”

In Haiti, which has been without an elected government since the 2021 assassination of its prime minister, the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect estimates that 2 million people live in areas controlled by more than 200 different criminal groups. International efforts to send a peacekeeping force are aimed at restoring calm so that elections can be held.

More countries in Latin America realize that challenging gangs with either arms or arrests does not always work. “You cannot confront violence with violence, you cannot put out fire with fire,” Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said this month. “You must confront evil by doing good.”