World
For the Russian banks banned from SWIFT, are there any options left?
As a part of its ever-expanding record of sanctions, the European Union has banned key Russian banks from SWIFT, the high-security system that allows monetary transactions all world wide.
Based mostly in Belgium, SWIFT is the dominant participant in fashionable finance: in keeping with the organisation, greater than 11,000 establishments in additional than 200 international locations use the community to conclude funds.
It’s estimated that SWIFT sends, on common, 42 million messages per day.
EU leaders selected to expel from SWIFT a chosen group of Russian banks, together with Sberbank, the nation’s largest, with the goal to chop off the Kremlin from the worldwide economic system and progressively drain the sources it pours into the army invasion of Ukraine.
However being out of SWIFT shouldn’t be the tip of the highway – it simply merely provides extra hurdles and issues.
Blacklisted banks nonetheless have an array of restricted – and typically dangerous – choices to bypass the SWIFT ban and proceed doing enterprise with their worldwide companions.
Watch the video above to find the alternate options to the SWIFT system.
World
Hamas' Gaza death toll questioned as new report says its led to 'widespread inaccuracies and distortion'
A new report cites a laundry list of alleged errors in the casualty tallies that the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health has issued during the conflict in Gaza, and found that worldwide media widely report the inflated numbers with little or no scrutiny.
The Henry Jackson Society (HJS), a U.K. based think tank, found “widespread inaccuracies and distortion in the data collection process” for the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health (MoH) which has resulted in a “misleading picture of the conflict.” The study also analyzed how journalists worldwide have spread misleading MoH data without noting its shortcomings or offering alternative information from Israeli sources.
The report’s author, Andrew Fox, a fellow at HJS said his team’s research is based on lists of casualty figures that the MoH has released through Telegram as well as lists released by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Fox said he and his team have been able to examine segments of the reporting, despite changeable MoH data being “really hard to interrogate.”
On Tuesday, Gaza health authorities updated its number of dead to what it said was more than 45,000.
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The report said the ministry’s reporting long indicated that women and children made up more than half of the war dead, leading to accusations that Israel intentionally kills civilians in Gaza.
“If Israel was killing indiscriminately, you would expect deaths to roughly match the demographic proportions pre-war,” Fox said. At the time, adult men made up around 26% of the Gazan population. “The number of adult males that have died is vastly in excess of 26%,” he said.
Within accessible reporting, Fox and his team also found instances of casualty entries being recorded improperly, “artificially increas[ing] the numbers of women and children who are reported as killed.” This has included people with male names being listed as females, and grown adults being recorded as young children.
Analyzing data by category has further highlighted biases within reporting. There are three kinds of entries within MoH’s casualty figures: entries collected by hospitals prior to the breakdown of networks in November 2023, entries submitted by family members of the deceased, and entries collected through “media sources,” whose veracity researchers like Dr. David Adesnik, vice president of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, has previously questioned.
Analysis of gender breakdowns among these groupings shows that hospital records “are distorted,” with a higher percentage of women and children among hospital-reported casualties than in those reported by family members.
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Though around 5,000 natural deaths typically occur in Gaza each year, the study found that MoH casualty figures do not account for natural deaths. It claims that it also fails to exclude deaths unassociated with Israeli military action from its count. This includes individuals believed to have been killed by Hamas, like 13-year-old Ahmed Shaddad Halmy Brikeh, who appears on a casualty list from August despite reports indicating he had “been shot dead by Hamas” while trying to get food from an aid shipment in December 2023. The list also excludes individuals killed by Hamas’ rockets, about 1,750 of which “fell short within the Gaza strip” between October 2023 and July 2024.
Fox and his team also found individuals who died before the conflict began had been added to MoH casualty counts. In addition, at least three cancer patients whose names were included in lists to leave the Gaza Strip for treatment in April had been listed as dead during the month of March.
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The ministry does not separate combatants and civilians in its casualty figures. Though the study states that Israeli forces have killed around 17,000 Hamas terrorists, Fox said that his research indicated the death toll may include as many as 22,000 members of Hamas. He said his research supports the fact that around 15,000 of the dead in Gaza are women and children, and 7,500 are non-combatant adult males.
“Collecting these sorts of lists in a war zone is a hugely challenging thing,” Fox admitted, but he stated that the MoH’s mistakes, whether innocent or deliberate, show that the institution is “really unreliable.”
Despite this unreliability, the Henry Jackson Society’s survey of reporting of the conflict found that 98% of media organizations it looked at utilized fatality data from MoH versus 5% who cited Israeli figures. Fox found that “fewer than one in every 50 articles [about the conflict] mentioned that the figures provided by the MoH were unverifiable or controversial,” though “Israeli statistics had their credibility questioned in half of the few articles that incorporated them.”
As an illustration of the phenomenon witnessed in the survey, Fox pointed out what he called an “incredibly biased” article from a British broadcaster that recently emerged citing MoH data claiming that there have been more than 45,000 deaths in Gaza. Though its report mentions MoH data, it does not break down the numbers of combatants and civilians, and does not mention the questionable veracity of MoH reporting. Instead, it parrots MoH claims, reporting that women and children make up for over half of the fatalities.
“It’s just a great example of everything we’ve written in the report,” Fox said.
World
Arson at karaoke bar in Vietnam’s Hanoi kills 11, police say
Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security says suspected perpetrator confessed to starting blaze after dispute with staff.
A suspected arson attack at a cafe and karaoke bar in Vietnam’s Hanoi has killed 11 people and injured two others, police have said.
Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security said on Thursday that it had arrested a man who confessed to starting the blaze on the ground floor of the building following a dispute with staff.
Rescue workers who rushed to the scene brought seven people out of the building alive, two of whom were rushed to hospital, police said.
Footage that circulated on social media showed a multistorey building engulfed in flames as firefighters worked at the scene while surrounded by a crowd of onlookers.
“At that time, we saw many people screaming for help but could not approach because the fire spread very quickly, and even with a ladder, we could not climb up,” the Lao Dong newspaper quoted a witness as saying.
The Tien Phong newspaper quoted a witness as saying there was a strong smell of petrol at the scene.
“Everyone shouted for those inside to run outside, but no one called for help,” the witness said.
CCTV footage published by the VnExpress news site appeared to show a man carrying a bucket towards the cafe seconds before the blaze began shortly after 11pm (16:00 GMT) on Wednesday.
Fires are a common hazard in Vietnam’s tightly packed urban centres.
Between 2017 and 2022, 433 people were killed in some 17,000 house fires in the country, most of them in urban areas, according to the Ministry of Public Security.
In September last year, 56 people, including four children, were killed and dozens injured in a fire at an apartment block in Hanoi.
This October, a court in southern Binh Duong province jailed six people, including four police officers, over safety lapses related to a fire at a karaoke complex that killed 32 people in 2022.
World
The Year in Pictures 2024: Far From Ordinary
When shots were fired at a campaign rally for former President Donald J. Trump on a July evening in Butler, Pa., the veteran New York Times photographer Doug Mills was just a few feet from him. As the Secret Service rushed toward Mr. Trump, Mr. Mills’s heart pounded when he realized what was happening.
Then instinct took over. Mr. Mills kept taking pictures, at an extremely fast shutter speed of one eight-thousandth of a second, capturing an image that illustrates the magnitude of that moment: Mr. Trump, his face streaked with blood, his fist raised in defiance.
This year was made up of such extraordinary moments. And Times photographers captured them in extraordinary images. The Year in Pictures brings you the most powerful, evocative and history-making of those images — and allows you to see the biggest stories of 2024 through our photographers’ eyes.
The presidential campaign — full of twists and turns — provided some of our most memorable photos. Kenny Holston captured a shaky President Biden struggling to find his footing in what turned out to be his only debate of the 2024 election. Erin Schaff conveyed the exhilaration surrounding Vice President Kamala Harris in the short sprint of her campaign. And Todd Heisler brought home the excitement of an 8-year-old girl in pigtails, Ms. Harris’s great-niece, who watched with pride as Ms. Harris accepted her party’s nomination for president.
Yet even as the American political campaign intensified, wars ground on overseas, creating new dangers and obstacles for our photojournalists determined to document the fighting. The war between Hamas and Israel escalated into a regional conflict, and our photographers depicted the Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon, the families forced to flee their homes and the neighborhoods reduced to rubble.
When Israeli forces recovered the bodies of six hostages in Gaza, our photographers revealed the pain of the captives’ families as they cried out at their loved ones’ funerals after 11 months of anguished waiting. And last month, Samar Abu Elouf, a Palestinian photographer for The Times, delivered some of the most indelible images of the year: a series of portraits of Gazans horribly injured in the war, including children who had lost arms, legs or eyes.
Children were also central to the work of Lynsey Addario, a veteran photographer who has been chronicling the war in Ukraine since Russia first invaded in 2022. Ms. Addario’s images tell the stories of young Ukrainians with cancer whose treatment was disrupted by the war, often with devastating results. One, a 5-year-old girl whose chemotherapy was upended by the Russian invasion, ultimately lost her life.
Our photographers embrace their calling of bearing witness to history, showing readers the atrocities and the suffering that might otherwise be overlooked. But they also see their mission more broadly, and aim to depict the richness and color of life by regularly bringing us pictures that delight and surprise.
Take the photo by Hiroko Masuike from the ticker-tape parade in October for the New York Liberty women’s basketball team. The young fans pictured radiate a kind of awe-struck joy, screaming to the players by name. Or the photographs that show the sense of wonder on the faces of people at Niagara Falls as they bask in the magic of a solar eclipse in April.
We hope you can spend some time with these pictures, and take in our photographers’ reflections on them. This collection of images is a way to remember the year, but it is also, we hope, an opportunity to better understand their craft and their devotion to producing the world’s best photojournalism.
Curation
Tanner Curtis, Jeffrey Henson Scales
Interviews
Dionne Searcey
Editing
Natasha King
Digital Design
Matt Ruby
Print Design
Mary Jane Callister, Felicia Vasquez
Production
Peter Blair, Eric Dyer, Wendy Lu, Nancy Ramsey, Jessica Schnall, Hannah Wulkan
Additional Production
Anna Diamond
New York Times Director of Photography
Meaghan Looram
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