The Netherlands’ largest newspaper, De Telegraaf, recently published an interview with a woman claiming to organise her own evacuation flights from Dubai, selling seats at €1,600 (US$ 1850) each. Four days later, her photo was removed from the article, though the interview remained.

Bellingcat has found that the original image not only includes artefacts commonly associated with generative AI, but that the flights referenced in the article do not appear to exist.

The story came at a time when thousands of Dutch people were reportedly seeking urgent ways to leave the region following Iranian missile and drone strikes across the Gulf in retaliation for US-Israeli strikes.

Published on De Telegraaf’s website on March 5, the headline reads: “Dutch people in the Middle East feel abandoned by the government: We just rented a plane ourselves.”

The Dutch minister of foreign affairs was confronted with this headline during a television interview, in which he described ongoing efforts by the Dutch government to repatriate citizens to the Netherlands.

The article features interviews with several Dutch people struggling to leave Dubai and Abu Dhabi, including Tamara Harema. Under the subheading “Dutch people hire their own plane”, Harema says she was “rebooked five times by Emirates” and that the official repatriation flights organised by the Dutch government were not ‘taking off’.

As part of a group, she says, they are organising buses and have hired an Airbus A321 to fly home. Harema is quoted as saying: “The first plane is already full, so we’re organising a second flight. Stranded travellers can contact us.”

However, several discrepancies in Harema’s photo, published in the original article, suggest it was AI-generated. No trace of a person matching Harema’s face or profile could be found, and flight-tracking data suggests no such plane took off.

The Photo

In the image below, the world’s tallest structure, Burj Khalifa, can be seen through the window overlooking the Dubai skyline. Each side of the tower is unique, with platforms that protrude at different heights and in different directions. It also contains several mechanical floors, which appear as dark bands in the photo.

By cross-checking the height of the visible platforms together with the location of the mechanical floors, it’s possible to determine that Harema’s hotel room faces north-west, towards the Burj Khalifa’s south-east-facing facade.

Several discrepancies are visible when comparing Harema’s photo with other images of the building, including an upper mechanical floor appearing higher than in other images and the absence of the water feature at the base of the building.

To establish whether Harema’s photo could have been taken several years earlier, Google Street View imagery was analysed from 2013 onwards. No match could be found when comparing the arrangement of buildings at the base of the Burj Khalifa.

Several other irregularities, as shown below, including the hotel room furniture and details of Harema’s clothing and jewellery, also suggest it may have been AI-generated.

Fully Booked Airbus A321

Regarding whether the plane existed, Harema says in her interview that buses have already been arranged to collect passengers from two locations in Dubai on Saturday, March 7, after which a 232-seater Airbus A321 will depart from Muscat, Oman, for the Netherlands.

The article notes the cost is €1,600 (US$ 1850) per person, without detours. “Although we read that a Dutch repatriation flight costs €600, just try getting on such a flight,” says Harema.

According to Flightradar24, multiple A321s departed Muscat on March 7 and 8, but none bound for the Netherlands. The only aircraft that did arrive in Amsterdam from Muscat were either government-organised repatriation flights or scheduled Oman Air services, none of which were Airbus A321s.

Two Airbus A321s were recorded on the ground at Muscat Airport on March 7. One, belonging to Gulf Air, later departed for Rome via Riyadh March 8. The other, operated by SalamAir, had been flying routes between Oman and Bangladesh until March 3, but has since remained in Muscat.

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After contacting De Telegraaf, an explanation for the photo’s removal was added at the bottom of the article, stating that the photo did “likely not meet our journalistic guidelines.”

The newspaper’s deputy editor-in-chief, Joost de Haas, added:

“Regarding the quoted Tamara Harema, the editors contacted her after Mr. Chizki Loonstein—a long-standing source for one of our reporters—informed us about attempts to charter a plane. Mr Loonstein informed us that Ms Harema stayed in Dubai and could tell us more about it. This led to messages from which several quotes from Harema were extracted, as reproduced in the relevant passage of the article.”

A search for Loonstein led to a six-month-old report from another Dutch newspaper, NRC, which claimed that Loonstein, a lawyer, emigrated to Dubai after his legal company went bankrupt, leaving his clients, victims of fraud, worse off.

Contacted for comment, Loonstein confirmed that he knew Harema and had shared her contact details in “an app group” in relation to a flight from Muscat to Amsterdam. After this contact, Bellingcat sent him the photo of Harema to confirm her identity and asked him to share Harema’s contact details. In response, Loonstein refused to provide further comment. 

Merel Zoet and Claire Press contributed to this report.

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mondengel2:

ef-1:

My favouritest sport fact ever is that in 1990s 2 cardiac surgeons watched an f1 race to save the lives of countless kids. The Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children (GOSH) kept losing the lives of patients after successful heart surgeries. Specifically the 10-15 minutes after a bonefide clinically successful surgery patients would die:

And so the two surgeons filmed a handover after heart surgery and sent it to the Ferrari pitcrew who were told to critique and improve handover process

And from this:

we got this:

The error rate during patien handovers dropped from 30% to 10% with the F1 informed protocol.

I literally love this fact so much because being an pitcrew member is such a thankless job because theyre underpaid and overworked mechanics and they literally saved lives in this instance.

When Formula 1 Met Medicine: The F1 Pit Stop That Saved Lives

I love this!

And it that it wasn’t a one and done.

The doctors went to the race tracks to watch the car changes and the pit crews went to the hospitals and watched a live transfer and offered suggestions and they kept working with them to improve.

After there was a successful improvement of the most vital metrics of a handover of a patient from surgery to ICU, the pit crews also worked with other hospitals for other procedures and it’s now a whole thing of trying to apply the specialized, streamlined and speedy teamwork and nonverbal coordination of pit crews to other high-risk fields.

This is a perfect example of how two very different fields of knowledge meeting can make a huge leap forward in progress.

7777777awawawa7777777:

sorry everyone we won’t be seeing any men today they’ve all been bricked into their enclosure

In 1999, while serving as research fellows at Cambridge University’s Cavendish Laboratory, physicists Thomas Fink and Yong Mao made a mathematical study of necktie knots. They published a summary in Nature that year and a detailed exposition in Physica A in 2000.

They found that, if knots are modeled as persistent random walks on a triangular lattice, there are exactly 85 ways to tie a tie. Of the 10 knots they scored as most aesthetic (for symmetry and balance), only four (four-in-hand, Pratt knot, half-Windsor, Windsor) are well known to Western men; interestingly, the simplest of the remainder, the unassuming small knot, above, is popular in the communist youth organization in China.

Here’s a list of the most aesthetic knots in their list.

This is the grave of James E. Webb.

Born in 1906 in Tally Ho, North Carolina (what a name!), Webb grew up pretty well off. His father was county superintendent of schools, segregated of course. He went to the University of North Carolina, graduating in 1928. He then joined the Marines, which was not a common move in 1930, when he signed up. There was hardly any room to move up, this was the isolationist period of America, so the military didn’t have much funding. But it did need pilots and that was Webb’s job. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant and was on active duty until 1932.

Upon leaving the Marines, Webb decided on politics as his future. He became an aide to a congressman named Edward Pou, who was hugely powerful in his day and had done a lot of work to overturn the Red Scare after World War I. Pou was at the very end of his time, though still chair of Rules Committee. The Roosevelt administration needed New Deal legislation to get through Congress and Pou made that happen. Given Pou’s age, young men like Webb played important roles in keeping all this together. At the same time, Webb enrolled in George Washington Law and got his degree in 1936, being admitted to the DC bar soon after. In those last couple years, he was working privately for Oliver Gardner, another today unknown but then powerful Democrat, who was the former governor of North Carolina and who had a prominent DC law firm.

In 1936, Webb was hired by a company called Sperry Gyroscope. They did all sorts of electronic equipment. The firm expanded rapidly during World War II. Webb rose rapidly and became VP by the time he rejoined the Marines in 1944. This meant a huge expansion in radar systems, setting the company up to be a major player in the military-industrial complex then forming. He actually wanted to join the Marines in 1941, but he was declared too important to developing weapons to fight, which actually seems like a very reasonable position for the government to take. But he kept persisting and so he was let back in as a captain and soon was a major, commanding a Marine air wing and finishing his time as lieutenant colonel. He was then put in charge of planning the radar program for the upcoming invasion of Japan, but of course that didn’t happen.

Perhaps Webb wanted a career change anyway. Instead of going back to Sperry after the war, he went back to his old mentor Gardner, who was then Undersecretary of the Treasury. He got a job there and was very shortly recommended to Harry Truman as a good candidate to lead Bureau of the Budget in the president’s office, which was mostly in charge of dealing with budget issues in relationship to Congress. He did well enough at this that in 1949, Truman named him an undersecretary of state. He was a good organizational man and Dean Acheson tasked him in reorganizing State. He proved a pretty influential insider. He helped convince Truman to support Paul Nitze’s NSC-68 memo to build up NATO, which was opposed by Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, among other more powerful figures. Webb was also a knife-wielding insider. He soon had his revenge on Johnson, using his congressional friends to pressure Truman to dump him and replace him with George Marshall.

But Webb found himself outmaneuvered, mostly by Nitze, and decided to leave government in 1952. He returned to the private sector and spent the next nine years mostly in defense work, but occasionally doing bits of government work too. But in 1961, John F. Kennedy named Webb the head of NASA, a huge undertaking as Kennedy also pledged to get Americans to the moon. He would stay in that position until 1968, making him the second longest NASA head to the present (Charles Bolden was in there for the entirety of the Obama administration). It’s almost impossible to overstate Webb’s importance here. NASA was still a new agency. It was decentralized. Its mission wasn’t that clear. Webb transformed all of this. Sure, he’d push the Apollo program, but he also made sure to work Congress hard for funding for the interplanetary missions in the Mariner and Pioneer programs. He centralized operations at what would later be known as the Johnson Space Center in Houston. He was so well-connected and had the full backing of both Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and so he worked Congress lobbying for the agency very hard and quite successfully.

There’s another key aspect to Webb’s leadership. Like LBJ, Webb was a southern white boy who turned his back on white supremacy as an adult. He actively supported the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and determined to make NASA a leader in hiring minorities. Once Webb and (of all goddamn people) Wernher von Braun confronted George Wallace in public over this, I think over hiring black workers at the NASA facility in Huntsville, Alabama. Under the Eisenhower administration, almost no black workers were hired but by 1968, NASA was a leader in all the government for hiring black workers and that’s especially true compared to the other highly specialized scientific agencies.

Webb also took personal responsibility when Apollo 1 blew up and did all the PR work to save the agency and convince Americans that NASA was safe. He led a very public safety investigation and made himself point person, much to the relief of LBJ, who did not need more headaches in 1967. He also started writing a book about administration. I doubt it’s a very exciting read, but 1969’s Space Age Management: The Large-Scale Approach is in some ways a classic of Great Society liberalism. It took the managerial approach, placed himself as an ideal leader who could be emulated (anyone who writes about this stuff basically sees themselves as the ideal) and stated that the enormity of running NASA was a good model. But unlike basically all managerial books, he didn’t mean it was a good model to run a corporation. He meant that people fighting and other social problems could work for government agencies with as much money and power as NASA and fix those problems through management. Again, Great Society liberalism in a nutshell. Maybe a bit of a dream, but don’t we all wish this was how things had worked since 1969?

Anyway, Webb resigned when Richard Nixon won the presidency, he became a regent of the Smithsonian, served on tons of big boards for companies and non-profits, did the rich and powerful old person thing. The Webb telescope was later named for him. That became somewhat controversial in 2021 when a Scientific American article said it should be renamed because Webb didn’t fight the expulsion of homosexuals from the space program in the 50s. But there’s no evidence Webb had anything to do with those decisions and the whole thing seems pretty dumb and overwrought to me. It’s not a bad way of thinking about changes in liberalism–from the belief that we can come together and pick everyone up through the managerial state to pure identity politics that is more about symbolism than effective action. Now, if he was Robert E. Lee or something, sure, or, like, had actually played a role in these firings, but this was taking the renaming craze a bit far.

Webb died in 1992. He was 85 years old.

James E. Webb is buried on the confiscated grounds of the traitor Lee, Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia.

If you would like this series to visit other heads of NASA, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. T. Keith Glennan is in Manns Choice, Pennsylvania and Thomas O. Paine is in Santa Barbara, California. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.

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