My colleagues on the investigative team are writing about what they discovered during a long inquiry into the deaths of hundreds of Kenyan domestic workers in Saudi Arabia. It's a story about how government corruption has let down women who leave Kenya to try to make a better life for their families, and I hope you'll read it.

But first, we want to give you the latest news about the attack during a Hanukkah celebration in Sydney, Australia, which killed at least 15 people.

An attack against Jews in Australia

At least 15 people were killed Sunday after gunmen attacked a Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach, Sydney. Australian authorities called the shooting a terrorist attack directed against the Jewish community. One suspect died and another was injured and arrested.

Here you can read what you need to know.

Hundreds of people had gathered on Bondi Beach, the most known from Australia, for the event. Children played while music and bubbles filled the air. Then, gunshots violently interrupted the celebration. Witnesses said that the shooting lasted about 10 minutes. More than three dozen people were injured.

The two attackers opened fire from a pedestrian bridge. At one point, a passerby managed to grab the gun from one of the attackers, according to verified videos and witness testimonies. These maps and videos show how the attack unfolded.

Although mass shootings are rare in Australia, the Jewish community was already on alert after a series of alarming anti-Semitic attacks. After Israel, Australia has the largest concentration of Holocaust survivors in the world.

A business lucrative and deadly

By Justin Scheck and Abdi Latif Dahir

This year we revealed a shocking statistic. More than 250 Kenyan workers, most of them women employed as domestic workers, have died in Saudi Arabia in recent years.

They were young women, working in seemingly secure jobs. However, autopsies described burns from electrocution, broken ribs, mysterious falls. A woman was found dead in a rooftop water tank. The documents attributed the death to natural causes. Some of those who managed to return home described being raped, burned, beaten, starved or locked indoors.

None of this was exactly new—journalists and human rights organizations have been documenting abuses against workers in the kingdom for more than a decade—but the magnitude was shocking. The Saudi government had promised reforms. Why, we asked ourselves, was the number of deaths still increasing?

What we discovered challenged our expectations. We thought that the underlying reasons for these abuses would be in Saudi Arabia. And it is certainly still true that workers there can be abused without legal recourse or help from the authorities.

But we discovered that the problems begin in Kenya, where the government is desperate to revive its economy and is sending workers abroad and, as we found over the course of an investigation that spanned about a year, is rife with officials who make money by facilitating that process.

Saudi Arabia is the top destination, and the Kenyan government has made it easier, cheaper and faster for Kenyans to find work there, with devastating consequences.

Who benefits from the flow of labor?

Kenya is trying to solve an unemployment crisis so deep that young people have been braving it. the police bullets to protest in the streets. President William Ruto has decided to solve the problem by sending millions of workers to richer countries.

In Saudi Arabia, even modest-income families have domestic helpers living in their homes, and other countries, including the Philippines, have sent workers there for decades. They have also faced abuses, and those countries have taken steps to address them.

The Ruto government, however, saw an opportunity to try to compete with lower prices against other countries. It has positioned Kenyan labor among the cheapest on the market. Under an agreement with the Saudi government, Kenyan domestic workers are paid about 40 percent less than their Filipino counterparts, and have few of its protections, such as rescue hotlines.

But, as we would discover, Kenya's economic strategy intersects with another problem for the country: the mixing of private and public interests by politicians.

Drawing on government and corporate documents in Kenya, we reveal how the family of Ruto and his political allies benefit from labor flow. We discovered that high-ranking legislators own placement companies that send women abroad; At least 10 percent of Kenya's labor companies are owned by politicians or politically connected figures. Ruto's wife and daughter are the main shareholders of the largest insurer in the sector.

The cheaper it is to hire Kenyan workers and the more minimal their protections, the more money the recruitment companies and the politicians who own them make. The government has effectively capped maids' salaries at just over $260 a month. And it offers no safety net for women who can't get paid or suffer abuse.

Ruto's government last year scrapped training requirements that were meant to protect female workers. Industry leaders told us they had pushed to remove those requirements because they would have reduced companies' profits.

Throughout our investigation, Ruto's office defended labor migration, saying it was beneficial for the economy and saying it had taken steps to protect workers. The government's top spokesman, who also owns a placement company, did not respond to a request for comment.

Blamed for their own abuse

Everywhere we looked, the people who were supposed to protect workers were profiting from them. Both government officials and industry leaders blamed Kenyan women for their own abuse, saying they had been beaten for being ignorant, lazy or rude. Allegations of rape were dismissed with claims that the women had been seductive.

The country's top industry lobbyist told us that Kenyan women were like “dogs” who were the property of their employers. The country's Secretary of Labor told us that Kenyan women were abused in Saudi Arabia because they had bad attitudes.

Over the last year, we have traveled all over Kenya. We have been to 40 of the 47 counties, and have met hundreds of women. What is striking, looking back, is how little they resemble the caricature their government has drawn of them.

Ruto, his family and his allies effectively capitalized on the ambition of some of the most enterprising workers in their communities. Many of these women had finished high school. Some had trained as teachers or chefs.

They all knew there were dangers in Saudi Arabia. But they were the kind of people willing to take a big risk to lift their family out of poverty.

When their government promised them higher salaries in Saudi Arabia, they took the leap. Too often, they also paid the price.

To learn more, start with the first article in our series.

WHAT ELSE IS HAPPENING

• José Antonio Kast was elected president of Chile, with which his country will join the recent turn of Latin America to the right.

IN ENGLISH THERE IS MORE

• A high-ranking Hamas commander, Raed Saad, was assassinated on Saturday in an Israeli attack in Gaza.

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said his country was willing to give in on some points, such as giving up, for now, the aspiration to join NATO, in exchange for solid security guarantees.

• Jimmy Lai, media magnate and Pro-democracy activist, was found guilty by a Hong Kong court. He could face up to life in prison.

• Trump vowed retaliation against the Islamic State after an attack in Syria killed two US soldiers and a interpreter.

SPORTS

Football: Lionel Messi's appearance in a stadium in India ended in chaos.

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THE COUPLE OF THE DAY

Mayar Kabaja and Hatem Saadallah

—The couple had their first date in Gaza City 10 days before the attack on October 7, 2023. Saadallah and his family were evacuated to Egypt, and have not been able to see each other since. They recently got married remotely.

THE READING MORNING