Venezuela’s repressive State apparatus remains operational despite the seizure of former President Nicolás Maduro by United States forces on 3 January, according to independent UN human rights investigators.
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The Politics of Capitalist Legitimacy
This post concludes a symposium on Jason Jackson’s Traders, Speculators, and Captains of Industry. Read the rest of the posts here. ** ** ** How good are our celebrated capitalists at allocating resources in ways that generate sustainable, broad-based prosperity? Today, American capital is piling into AI, cryptocurrency, and soon “humanoid robots,” even as the public institutions that historically…
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The post Generic GLP-1s are coming, but Americans don’t want to wait first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.
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AI Used to Promote Non-Existent Evacuation Flights From the Middle East
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.
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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.
Photo description as published by De Telegraaf reads: “Tamara Harema and a group organise their own flights to the Netherlands, for which they have rented an Airbus A321. “Otherwise, nothing would get off the ground.” © Own photo” Source: Published in De Telegraaf, March 5. 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.
Comparing Harema’s photo (bottom left) to all three sides of Burj Khalifa’s base suggests she is looking at the Southeast facade. Source: Harema’s image / Google Street View. 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.
Harema’s image (left), compared to a screenshot of a video of the building from 2020 (right), suggests a discrepancy between the upper mechanical floors. The water feature is also absent. Source: Harema’s image / Youtube. 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.
In Harema’s photo, the arrangement of buildings at the base of the tower does not match historic Google Street View images. Source Harema’s image/ Google Street View. 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.
(Left) a distorted lamp stand; (top right) blurring on the “V” of her T-shirt; (bottom right) an earring that appears to merge into her face – all discrepancies commonly associated with generative AI. 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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The post AI Used to Promote Non-Existent Evacuation Flights From the Middle East appeared first on bellingcat.
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Court Dismisses DISH’s $25 Million IPTV Piracy Lawsuit Against UK Hosting Provider
As pirate IPTV services have continued to grow in recent years, TV broadcasters and distributors have intensified their efforts to combat the problem.
Pay TV provider DISH Network, in tandem with the International Broadcaster Coalition Against Piracy (IBCAP), has been particularly active on this front, filing a series of lawsuits in the United States.
DISH vs. Innetra
In one of these cases, DISH last year filed a copyright infringement complaint against UK hosting provider ‘Innetra PC’ at a California federal court, accusing the company of aiding widespread copyright infringement while ignoring takedown requests.
Based on IBCAP’s evidence, the complaint alleged that Innetra provided essential infrastructure for pirate streaming services, including the separately targeted Lemo TV and Kemo IPTV, as well as Honeybee, Xtremehd, and Caliptostreams.
In its complaint, DISH argued that Innetra could not rely on safe harbor protection, as it largely ignored hundreds of infringement notices. Additionally, Innetra allegedly failed to designate a DMCA agent and had no policy for terminating repeat infringers.
The complaint listed 171 copyrighted works and requested damages of up to $25 million against Innetra and its general partner, Elna Paulette Valentin was also named as a defendant personally.
Innetra Requested Dismissal
In July last year, Innetra responded with a motion to dismiss. The company argued that the court lacked jurisdiction, as the UK company has minimal to no contacts with the United States or California.
Among other things, Innetra said it had no U.S. servers and had signed up just one paying U.S. customer since its founding, whose account was only active for two months.
The hosting provider did not disregard the idea of a legal battle entirely. Instead, it said that if DISH insisted on filing a lawsuit, it could do so in the United Kingdom, not in the United States.
“Dish may pursue its dispute in the United Kingdom, where Innetra is located. Dish, however, may not force foreign defendants that lack minimum contacts with the United States, let alone California, to defend themselves in the United States,” Inntra wrote in its motion last year.
Court Dismisses $25 Million Lawsuit
After the motion to dismiss was filed, the court allowed DISH sixty days of jurisdictional discovery before ruling on the motion to dismiss. However, that proved not to be enough to overcome the jurisdiction challenges.
Last week, Judge Noël Wise granted Innetra’s motion to dismiss, concluding that DISH had failed to demonstrate specific personal jurisdiction over the UK hosting company. The case was dismissed without prejudice.
The court applied the “purposeful direction” test established in recent Ninth Circuit case law, which requires a plaintiff to show that a defendant made regular sales in the forum and consciously cultivated a customer base there. However, based on the evidence provided by DISH, that is not the case here.
At the time of the alleged infringement, in 2024, Innetra had no U.S. customers at all. Two American customers briefly appeared in 2025: one paid $682 over two months before cancelling, and the other signed up for nine days without purchasing anything. The court described these contacts as “scant, fleeting, and attenuated.”
DISH also argued that Innetra’s peering arrangements with NTT and Lumen showed a deliberate effort to reach U.S. users. However, evidence provided during discovery showed that Innetra contracted with the German and Dutch branches of these companies, not their U.S. affiliates. Innetra did not use U.S.-based servers from these companies.
Finally, the court was not convinced by DISH’s evidence that nearly 49,000 instances of pirate IPTV services used Innetra’s infrastructure to transmit content into the U.S. Since these pirate services were making the connection to U.S. users, not Innetra, the hosting provider is not responsible for jurisdictional purposes.
What’s Next?
Because the case was dismissed without prejudice, DISH is allowed to refile the case, potentially with extra evidence. And as Innetra noted in its motion to dismiss, DISH can also file a lawsuit in the United Kingdom if they like.
For Innetra, putting up a defense turned out to be vital. After all, another DISH lawsuit against Ukraine-based hosting provider Virtual Systems recently showed that not responding in court can result in a multi-million-dollar default judgment.
For now, there is no sign of follow-up action against Innetra yet. However, DISH certainly continues its enforcement efforts elsewhere. Just last month, the company filed a fresh $21 million lawsuit against pirate IPTV operation DMTN, whose operator allegedly posed as Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan.—
A copy of U.S. District Court Judge Noël Wise’s order on the motion to dismiss is available here (pdf).
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.