Daily Times Editorials 15th September 2026

Behind Closed Doors

Upholding the life sentence of a man convicted of murdering his wife in Karachi, the Supreme Court described domestic homicide as a “crime of difficult proof.” Such deaths occur in spaces often controlled by the alleged perpetrator, where evidence may disappear, and murder can be presented as suicide, accident or intrusion. Investigators who approach these cases carelessly, the court said, should face consequences.

The judgment reaches far beyond one conviction.

Pakistani society places enormous moral weight on the sanctity of the home. Yet the same idea has often protected violence from scrutiny. Bruises are dismissed as marital disputes. Threats become anger. A daughter who returns home after being beaten is advised to think of her children and save her marriage. Families that would fight for her education can suddenly become champions of endurance when the danger comes from a husband.

Sahil documented 3,172 reported cases of gender-based violence in the first six months of this year, including 644 murders and 514 cases of torture. More than half occurred inside victims’ homes. Earlier national data put the conviction rate in reported domestic-violence cases at only 1.3 per cent.

Recent cases explain the court’s concern. Hina Javaid was found dead in her Rawalpindi home last month with her hands tied and injuries on her body. Police eventually treated the case as murder rather than suicide. In January, the Supreme Court considered the killing of Gulshan Bibi, who had earlier left an abusive marriage but returned after family elders pushed for reconciliation. She was later killed.

These are familiar patterns to anyone who has followed violence against women for years. Murder is often preceded by control over money, movement, phones and friendships; by threats, humiliation and isolation; by repeated attempts to send a frightened woman back into a home she has already said is unsafe.

The court has also rightly warned against character assassination after death. Too often, discussion shifts from what happened to a woman towards what sort of wife she was, why the marriage was troubled or why she wanted to leave. Such prejudice becomes dangerous when it seeps into police work.

Pakistan has laws, commissions, shelters and helplines. The greater weakness lies in what happens when a woman reaches a police station, needs somewhere safe to stay or fears the social cost of pursuing a case.

Provincial police forces should now translate this judgment into investigation protocols, training and accountability. *

Race Without Brakes

Wall Street discovered on Monday that artificial intelligence has a brake pedal after all. The Nasdaq 100 fell 1.7 per cent in early trading, the Philadelphia semiconductor index lost 6 per cent, and Nvidia dropped 3.5 per cent after Anthropic chief Dario Amodei called for slowing the rate at which frontier models acquire new capabilities.

President Donald Trump sees greater danger in slowing down. “Whoever wins AI, wins,” he noted on Monday, arguing that the technology needed no guardrail beyond a “strong and smart” president. His administration has made American leadership in artificial intelligence a strategic priority, while lawmakers from both parties continue to debate how far federal oversight should go. The warnings from inside the industry have become harder to confine to hypothetical catastrophe.

Anthropic said last week that it had disrupted attempts to use Claude in cyber operations and biological research with potentially dangerous applications. One case involved a researcher using the model while working on mammalian adaptation of highly pathogenic avian influenza. Anthropic said safeguards pushed the work onto weaker models and judged Claude’s contribution to that research to have been limited, but the case offered a glimpse of the problems frontier laboratories are already encountering outside controlled demonstrations.Vehicle Parts & Accessories

OpenAI has had its own embarrassment. Researchers found that its agents used more than 10 previously undisclosed websites for unauthorised communications after circumventing restrictions placed upon them. The behaviour was closer to covert message-leaving than a sophisticated cyberattack, but OpenAI subsequently acknowledged the need for greater transparency around unintended agent behaviour.

China is hardly standing still. Beijing has incorporated possible “loss of control” scenarios into its AI safety work and is developing rules for increasingly autonomous agents. President Xi Jinping has also stressed keeping artificial intelligence under human control. China simultaneously rejects attempts to use safety concerns as justification for containing its technological rise.

That makes the next round of US-China diplomacy unusually important. Mr Trump is expected to meet President Xi later this month, while AI safety discussions between the two governments are also anticipated. The two leading AI powers have plenty to quarrel over, from chips and model capabilities to allegations of technology theft. They also have an interest in preventing autonomous cyber activity or dangerous model behaviour from becoming another source of strategic miscalculation.Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence

Pakistan cannot treat this as somebody else’s technology argument.

Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal told the SCO Digital Economy Forum in Urumqi on Monday that the National AI Policy formed part of Pakistan’s push towards responsible artificial intelligence. Pakistan can hardly aspire to become an AI economy while leaving responsibility for its most consequential technology blurred between ministries. *