Sunday, 31 December 2017
Small Plane Crashes in Costa Rica
(SAN JOSE, Costa Rica) — The Costa Rican government says that a plane believed to be carrying 12 people has crashed in a wooded area.
The Public Safety Ministry posted photographs of the crash site showing burning wreckage of the plane in Guanacaste, northwest Costa Rica.
Sunday’s statement says the plane belongs to Nature Air and had taken off nearby.
Saturday, 30 December 2017
Iran Condemns Donald Trump’s ‘Deceitful and Opportunist’ Tweet Supporting Protests
Iran has strongly condemned U.S. President Donald Trump’s tweet supporting a wave of economic protests sweeping major cities in Iran.
A state television report on Saturday quoted Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Bahram Ghasemi, as saying that “Iranian people give no credit to the deceitful and opportunist remarks of U.S. officials or Mr. Trump.”
The economic protests began Wednesday in Mashhad. Officials say some 50 protesters have been arrested so far. U.S. President Donald Trump has tweeted out support for those protesting early Saturday.
Friday, 29 December 2017
Mystery Writer Sue Grafton Dies at 77
(LOS ANGELES) — Mystery writer Sue Grafton has died in Santa Barbara, California. She was 77.
Her daughter, Jamie Clark, posted news of her mother’s death on Grafton’s web page Friday.
She says her mother passed away Thursday night after a two-year battle with cancer and was surrounded by family, including Grafton’s husband, Steve.
Grafton was the author of the so-called Kinsey Millhone Alphabet Series in which each book title begins with a letter from the alphabet. The last was “Y is for Yesterday.”
Her daughter concluded her posting by saying, “the alphabet now ends at Y.”
Thursday, 28 December 2017
Wednesday, 27 December 2017
Tuesday, 26 December 2017
Monday, 25 December 2017
Sunday, 24 December 2017
Saturday, 23 December 2017
Friday, 22 December 2017
Thursday, 21 December 2017
Wednesday, 20 December 2017
Kevin Frayer: TIME Picks the Best Wire Photographer of 2017
Kevin Frayer Is TIME’s Pick for
Wire Photographer of 2017
The scale of the crisis is brutal. Monumental in scope and intense in suffering, the exodus of the Rohingya from Myanmar into neighboring Bangladesh saw hundreds of thousands of people make their way toward a stateless and static unknown, walking for days in intense heat and wading through rivers.
The plight of the Rohingya, a Muslim minority in majority-Buddhist Myanmar, is not a new story. But the speed with which more than 600,000 left their homeland since late August, and the stories they carried and shared upon arrival, brought a renewed urgency to the matter and inspired a mass of photographers to descend on the region. It was largely through the resulting photography that the rest of the world came in 2017 to learn the true horror of what they fled and how they did so.
Among the photographers who produced that groundswell of imagery, Allison Joyce and Paula Bronstein of Getty Images each stand out for their unflinching coverage; the former with a series of portraits and accompanying stories, and the latter with a dramatic look at the sea arrivals after dark. Dar Yasin of the Associated Press, Dan Kitwood of Getty and Mohammad Ponir Hossain of Reuters all amassed strong and distinct work, as did Adam Dean for The New York Times and Moises Saman of Magnum Photos.
A Rohingya boy cries as he climbs on a truck distributing aid near the Balukali refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar on Sept. 20.
But it is the searing portfolio by Getty photographer Kevin Frayer, who seamlessly captured both scale and intimacy, that stands out most. For this work, and a year of strong coverage on themes ranging from energy technology to daily life, Frayer is recognized as TIME’s Wire Photographer of the Year.
Frayer, who lives in Beijing with his wife and son, arrived in Bangladesh in September, several weeks after the violence in Myanmar escalated. While Frayer worked to secure his permit, he saw strong images beginning to emerge. But nothing prepared him for the raw reality of witnessing it firsthand. “To watch hundreds of thousands of people being forced from their homes likely for good was a uniquely sad and exhausting experience,” he tells TIME. “I felt it needed a contribution from as many photographers as possible.”
His first goal was to capture the enormity and chaos. “It was happening at such a staggering rate; the flow of the boats arriving, the crossings by land, the camps growing—new cities growing overnight,” Frayer says. “It was tragedy in overload. Every single person had a sad story and every day was kind of full of these hopeless scenes.”
[time-ad size=”large”]
One such scene unfolded on a September afternoon during a rush for aid in the city of Cox’s Bazar. “I remember watching a boy fight his way through a restless crowd and then pull himself up on the [aid] truck,” Frayer recalls. “I saw him trying to beg for food… and then a tear rolled down the side of his cheek. I remember it as if it was in slow motion.”
While the perception exists that some photojournalists will harden after witnessing humanity’s lowest moments again and again, Frayer believes one must not stop feeling. “When you’re witnessing things and you don’t have a feeling for the humanity or the tragedy in your work, the people who are looking at your images will not feel anything,” he says. “That’s the tool of photojournalism and we owe these people the best work we can possibly do.”
But the impact of his work, and that of his colleagues, was more than just emotive. “I’ve been doing this a couple of decades and I felt this story put me in touch with the fundamentals of what journalism can do,” says Frayer. “When I first arrived in September, the U.N. was barely on the ground, there was almost no food being distributed. Then slowly, after the pictures and the stories were coming out of Cox’s Bazar, people got moving.”
A Chinese couple say goodbye to each other before traveling home at a Beijing rail station on Jan. 26.
A woman wears a scarf around her head during a sandstorm in Beijing on May 4.
Festival-goers watch dancers at a fair during Lunar New Year celebrations in Beijing on Jan. 29.
A North Korean restaurant worker tries to attract customers in the border city of Dandong on May 23.
A man looks out the window on his way home at a Beijing rail station on Jan. 26.
Frayer’s coverage of the Rohingya, which recently appeared in TIME as a 12-page photo essay with text under his byline, came after months of strong storytelling elsewhere. In China — a vast and challenging workspace exquisitely covered by Fred Dufour of Agence France-Presse, Damir Sagolj of Reuters and Bryan Denton of the Times, among other — Frayer expertly composed artful scenes of daily life, from couples saying goodbye at a train station to children attending Lunar New Year festivities.
He excelled, too, on the themes of energy and the environment as China stepped into a role from which the United States pulled back this year. Whether it was a study of the country’s addiction to coal or an erudite dive into the solar-panel market, Frayer didn’t just show the facts but worked to make them surprising or revealing—often times both.
A man rides a tractor near a state-owned steel plant in Hebei on June 2.
Catholic worshippers carry palm fronds during Palm Sunday Mass at an “underground” church near Shijiazhuang on April 9.
Girls of the Long Horn Miao ethnic minority group listen to music during Lunar New Year celebrations in southern Longga village on Feb. 6.
A farmer of the Long Horn Miao ethnic minority group carries corn husks for feed in southern Xiaobatian village on Feb. 7.
“The most important story for me in China is its emergence as a climate change leader,” says Frayer. “When China was lecturing the president of the United States on how to treat the planet, it was the biggest signal that it had emerged as the new Roman Empire.”
In China’s Anhui province, the world’s largest floating solar panel farm was built on a lake formed from a collapsed coal mine. That irony was not lost on Frayer. “Watching those changes speaks to the country’s ability to constantly shift gears and adapt,” he says. “There is no denial of climate change in China—everyone feels like they need to act.”
A police officer stands guard during a sandstorm overlooking Tiananmen Square on May 4.
A worker carries flotation devices used to support panels to be used in a large floating solar farm project in Huainan on June 13.
Refugees make their way through the water after crossing the river to Bangladesh on Nov. 1.
And though the ongoing tragedy of the Rohingya and the looming threat of global warming are worlds apart in cause and impact, Frayer believes they share something in common: “Both of these stories speak to our species and our inability to treat each other and the planet with the kind of dignity or delicacy that it deserves.”
A construction worker welds steel at a new development site on May 14.
Damaged bicycles from the bike share company Ofo Inc. are seen at a repair depot on March 29.
An ethnic Uyghur man walks in an alleyway in the old town of Kashgar on June 27.
[time-ad size=”large”]
Alexandra Genova is a writer and contributor for TIME. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
TIME Picks the Top 100 Photos of 2017
On May 23, photographer Phil Hatcher-Moore saw Naneyan Lokopir, a 13-year-old in South Sudan, lying on the ground of a cholera treatment center. That same day in the U.K., Andrew Testa watched a man pray during a vigil for victims of the Manchester Arena bombing.
On Aug. 21, Meridith Kohut stood near children hovering over the casket of their baby cousin, who had been severely malnourished, in Venezuela. That day, Jim Urquhart pointed his lens out the window of an airplane, 40,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean, where he caught a stunning view of the solar eclipse.
[time-ad size=“large” align=“center”]
On Oct. 1, Andres Kudacki came across a white horse in hurricane-battered Puerto Rico. That night, David Becker was in the media tent at a country music festival in Las Vegas when gunshots suddenly rang out.
Images from those six moments and more stand out in a year of environmental disasters and polarizing elections, humanitarian crises and annual parades, mass shootings and awards shows. They couldn’t feel further from one another, yet a close look at these 100 pictures reveals a comforting web of similarity.
[time-ad size=“large” align=“center”]
It’s visible in the ways we grieve and hold one another, the ways we dance and run and cry, the way we throw our hands out in joy or fear. Each picture on its own represents a moment that cannot be duplicated. Taken together they can help remind us how, despite fortune or hardship or evil, we’re more alike than we are different.
Here, TIME’s photo editors present an unranked selection of the 100 best images of the year.
[time-ad size=”large” align=”center”]
TIME Picks the Top 100 Photos of 2017
On May 23, photographer Phil Hatcher-Moore saw Naneyan Lokopir, a 13-year-old in South Sudan, lying on the ground of a cholera treatment center. That same day in the U.K., Andrew Testa watched a man pray during a vigil for victims of the Manchester Arena bombing.
On Aug. 21, Meridith Kohut stood near children hovering over the casket of their baby cousin, who had been severely malnourished, in Venezuela. That day, Jim Urquhart pointed his lens out the window of an airplane, 40,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean, where he caught a stunning view of the solar eclipse.
[time-ad size=“large” align=“center”]
On Oct. 1, Andres Kudacki came across a white horse in hurricane-battered Puerto Rico. That night, David Becker was in the media tent at a country music festival in Las Vegas when gunshots suddenly rang out.
Images from those six moments and more stand out in a year of environmental disasters and polarizing elections, humanitarian crises and annual parades, mass shootings and awards shows. They couldn’t feel further from one another, yet a close look at these 100 pictures reveals a comforting web of similarity.
[time-ad size=“large” align=“center”]
It’s visible in the ways we grieve and hold one another, the ways we dance and run and cry, the way we throw our hands out in joy or fear. Each picture on its own represents a moment that cannot be duplicated. Taken together they can help remind us how, despite fortune or hardship or evil, we’re more alike than we are different.
Here, TIME’s photo editors present an unranked selection of the 100 best images of the year.
[time-ad size=”large” align=”center”]
Tuesday, 19 December 2017
Monday, 18 December 2017
TIME’s Best Photojournalism of 2017
Elections and protests. Wars and refugees. Water and fire.
Throughout the year, TIME commissioned photographers to record the biggest events shaping the world, from the fall of ISIS to the end of a circus, and supported others who committed to telling important stories, such as the humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen and political unrest in Venezuela. The resulting images provided our readers with invaluable glimpses at parts of the world they might never see and into the lives of people whom they may never meet.
In January, Adam Dean explored Myanmar’s secretive jade mining industry. He observed men hauling massive stones up impossibly steep slopes during the day, and watched them scavenge with flashlights at night. In March, Emanuele Satolli was dispatched to Mosul as Iraqi forces battled Islamic State militants to the death; months later, he visited Raqqa after the Syrian city was liberated. in May, Paolo Pellegrin traveled to northeastern Nigeria to chronicle the toll of Boko Haram’s brutality on a terrorized population.
[time-ad size=”large” align=”center”]
All year, Lynsey Addario kept pace with three Syrian refugee babies as their families navigated the struggles of securing a home in Europe. The multiplatform project Finding Home, which was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and Merck for Mothers, followed them as they traveled from Greece to, in one case, as far away as Estonia. By December, two of the families were in Germany.
In the U.S., assignments ranged from Donald Trump’s inauguration and the Women’s March on Washington—a whirlwind two days covered by Natalie Keyssar, Dina Litovsky, Christopher Morris, Ruddy Roye, Lexey Swall and Peter van Agtmael—to an after-hours look inside the White House, photographed by Benjamin Rasmussen.
[time-ad size=”large” align=”center”]
And that’s not all. In August, Christaan Felber shadowed UFC champ Conor McGregor as he prepared for his Vegas brawl against Floyd Mayweather. Twice, Danny Wilcox Frazier checked in with the Tameems, a family of seven Syrian refugees in Iowa, whom TIME featured in late 2016. In September, Brent Humphreys surveyed the historic flooding in Houston. Later that month, Andres Kudacki spent more than a week documenting the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, where millions of Americans were suddenly left without electricity and water.
As the world readies for 2018, TIME looks back at our photographers’ important and revealing work from the year that now comes to a close.
[time-ad size=”large” align=”center”]
Between Life and Death in Yemen
Between Life and Death in Yemen
A 2-month-old boy, just over 4 lb. (2 kg), is weighed at a hospital in Saada on Oct. 29.
It takes about a dozen hours by car to reach Sana’a, the besieged capital of civil war-struck Yemen, from the port city of Aden, at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula. You must bypass Taiz, the frontline city where fighting rages between a mosaic of loyalist forces, rebels and al-Qaeda jihadists. You must cross an incalculable number of military roadblocks controlled by any one of the multiple factions vying for control.
Finally, you will arrive at the adobe houses behind the Bab-al-Yemen—the centenary door that marks the entrance to the old city. Today, it is daubed with the red and green slogan of the Houthi militiamen who seized the capital in September 2014. “God is great! Death to America! Death to Israel! Damn the Jews! Victory for Islam,” the slogan reads.
Six months later the Houthis, allied with the forces of former strongman President Ali Abdullah Saleh, arrived at the gates of Aden. Army units rose up, while others remained loyal to the new President Abd Rabbo Hadi. The civil war began in earnest. On one side, a coalition of about 10 mainly Arab countries backed Hadi, led by Saudi Arabia. On the other, the Houthis with covert support by Iran.
Boys and men inspect the site of an airstrike in Sana’a on Nov. 11.
Two and a half years on, the conflict has left over 10,000 people dead and 3 million displaced. The Houthis still control the major population centers, including Sana’a. On Nov. 4, the war entered a new and even more dangerous phase. Just two hours after the interception of a ballistic missile near Riyadh airport in Saudi Arabia, the sound of bombers could be heard rumbling above Sana’a. In an ink-black night, the Saudi planes took their revenge. A dozen missiles hit the Ministry of Defense and obliterated Al Sabeen Square, where Saleh staged a major demonstration last August. The symbolism was unmistakeable.
Within 48 hours, Saudi Arabia struck again at the heart of the wound, imposing a total blockade on a country already on the brink of starvation. Two-thirds of the population in Yemen, the poorest country in the Arab world, is dependent on humanitarian aid that was already in short supply. Over a month later, the blockade of sea, air and land ports has not been permanently lifted, despite Washington’s warning to its Saudi allies to relax restrictions. The politics of the war have since become more complicated; Saleh, the onetime strongman, was killed by the Houthi rebels after switching sides and pursuing peace with Saudi Arabia. Clashes between his followers and Houthi militias have killed dozens.
But when we visited in the fall, most Yemenis were more occupied just with survival. In Sana’a, war has become everyday. Every morning, people emerge with empty containers to seek drinkable water. At night, angry crowds amass to rail at Saudi Arabia and the complicit silence of the international community. In front of the collapsed buildings of the capital, historic statues have been stained with red paint, in memory of the hundreds of civilians killed by the Saudi military coalition’s air raids. The children of Sana’a no longer go to school, but they are very well educated on fighter jets. They point at the sky to identify a Mig, like military veterans. Since the blockade was imposed, the airplanes have been prowling over Sana’a every night.
A man drives a truck with water containers in Sana’a on Oct. 31.
To the south of the capital, in the neighborhood of Faj Attan, Misarah Mohammed Maisar lies under a blanket in a small, impeccably kept living room on Oct. 27. Two girls stand at her bedside, as if posing for an incomplete family portrait. Just over two months earlier, an air raid targeting rebels in the surrounding mountains struck their house. Misarah woke up in hospital, only to be told of the deaths of her three-year-old and 14-year-old children. Doctors also told her a fragment of the shell was lodged in her spinal column, paralyzing her lower limbs. The operation that would give her a chance to walk again costs $5,000.
But for the past six months, the Ministry of Health funds have been virtually empty and the entire healthcare system is in a state of collapse. More than half of Yemen’s medical centers have closed, and even basic health care is difficult to provide in the remaining ones. The doctors that have not deserted have worked for months without hope of payment. Ghassan Abou Chaar, head of mission in Yemen for Doctors Without Borders, says this—and not merely the famine—is the great threat to the country. “We can have programs worth 100 million euros to distribute food, but if we don’t have doctors, it’s useless.”
In Saada, a town near the Saudi border more than 500 kilometers north of Sana’a, most doctors remain at their posts—not out of duty, but out of ideology. The city is the cradle of the Houthi rebels who practice Zaidism, a minority branch of Shia Islam. The Houthi leader, Abd-el-Malik Al Houthi, is said to be hiding in the nearby mountains and the movement’s revolutionary Islamist doctrine now holds sway over much of the local population. The Houthi militiamen succeeded in restoring order to this unstable border area, executing highway bandits and reconciling rival tribes. It offered a sense of security, but at the cost of freedom.
A view from the road between Saada and Sana’a.
For Saada lives under a strict ideological regime. Ministry of Education officials have been replaced by Houthi freelancers. As a result in primary and secondary schools, the Koran is mainly taught. Women are kept cloistered in houses. When they are allowed outside, girls wear the burqa from the age of 12—”even earlier, if they look pretty,” says the headmistress of one of Saada’s four girls’ schools. “We went from Saudi Wahhabism to Houthi fundamentalism. In fact, we fell from one hole to another,” says a local reporter who wished to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals. He says Houthis arrest and have assassinated political opponents here.
The Saudi-led coalition has declared the town a military zone and it has come under sustained attack. Mosques, schools, public buildings—everything that might have been a training camp or weapons cache has been razed to the ground by the coalition. When we visited, Governor Mohammed Jaber Awad took local journalists on a tour of what remains of his city. In the ruins of what was once the courtroom, he bends down to pick up a piece of shrapnel that he brandishes in front of the cameras. “Look at the gift of the West! Is the blood of Yemeni children worth less than Saudi oil?” he says. The United States has sold Saudi Arabia $20 billion worth of military equipment to the Saudi monarchy, including cluster bombs—more than 3,500 of which are believed to have been used in Yemen in less than a year.
At the public hospital in Saada, the most recent victims of these weapons—which are prohibited by the international convention—had just been admitted on Oct. 29. Nachmi, 9, sits on a bed with half his face torn off. Her mother put an arm around his bare shoulders. His brother lies immobile in a corner of the room. A projectile is lodged in the child’s brain, but there is no scanner or surgeon to attempt an operation. The boy floats between life and death. Their father explains that his sons were herding their sheep across a paved road when the bomb fell. Twenty minutes later, as family and neighbors came to their rescue, another fell. In military jargon, this is called a double tap. In human language, it simply means twice as many civilian casualties.
Nachmi, 9, with his mother in Saada. He was injured in an Oct. 28 airstrike.
Al-Masira, the official TV channel of the Houthi government, broadcasts images of those who fell under Saudi bombs ad nauseam. But there is another reality of this war that is unfolding far from the cameras: the growing proportion of child soldiers making up for the heavy losses suffered by the rebels since the beginning of the offensive. Fiercely denied by the Houthis, the existence of child soldiers in Yemen is an open secret. UNICEF has identified more than 2,000 minors among their ranks. “More and more 10-year-old children are being seen at checkpoints and at the martyr’s cemetery,” says Jamal Al Shami, the head of a local NGO.
At the rehabilitation center in Sana’a on Nov. 6, a young boy tests his new prosthetic leg after jumping on a mine. He dreams of only one thing: returning to the front. Mohamed Sagaf gave his age as 18 in army records, but one parent confides his real age: 13. Between exercises to relearn how to walk, the boy listens in a loop to the Houthis’ patriotic song on his phone. When asked why he went to fight, Mohamed’s answer comes quickly: jihad, of course. The holy war against the Saudi aggressor.
This rage has helped the Houthis to cement power. But resentment is rising against the group, which represents only one third of the population. The people of the capital city rail at the cost of living, the taxes imposed on electricity and gasoline, the tithes collected in the name of the war effort from all small businesses. In the ministries, senior officials mutter complaints about the “Bedouin barely out of their tents” who have seized power. Even more discreetly, they complain about Iran’s growing hold on internal affairs.
But we observed no evidence of Iranian interference in this war, from the ground. The Saudis claim the rockets fired at Riyadh on Nov. 5 originated in Iran, but there has been no independent confirmation. Military support has been indirect and discreet; one senior military officer interviewed on national television admitted his troops in Saada had been trained by Hizballah, the Iran-backed militia based in Lebanon. The Saudis have tried to draw them into this proxy war too, by undermining the leadership in Lebanon—a move widely seen to have backfired.
Two beggars in Saada on Oct. 29.
Boys at an orphanage in Sana’a on Oct. 27.
Meanwhile, the people of Yemen are continuing their descent into hell. The cholera epidemic, which had ebbed in recent months, threatens to surge again due to a lack of medicines. The Red Cross suspects more than 750,000 have already been infected. Severe diarrhea is on the rise.
It’s Nov. 7, two days into the Saudi blockade. At the public hospital in the town of Ibb, between Aden and Sana’a, Dr. Ali Audi is engaged in a grim attempt at triage. Every day, his teams sort out patients to save the resources that are still available. Only the most serious cases are kept under observation—those for whom something can still be done.
In recent days, the number of patients hospitalized has been decreasing. This is not good news. The blockade has already caused the price of gas to soar, meaning people in remote areas can no longer get to hospital. Instead they are dying at home. “Even when families arrive here with a child between life and death, they can’t afford shelter or food for the duration of hospitalization. They end up leaving with their child after three days.” They usually know, he says, that the child will not survive.
A destroyed grandstand, where the army and Saleh loyalists would parade, in Sana’a on Nov. 5.
Sunday, 17 December 2017
Saturday, 16 December 2017
Friday, 15 December 2017
TIME’s Best Portraits of 2017
A year is, at its root, defined by the people who shape its headlines. What they say or don’t say. What they do or don’t do. This year—the year when a reality-television mogul entered the White House, when speaking out became the rule and not the exception—has been no different. And many of the faces behind those stories have been captured by photographers for TIME.
At the beginning of the year, Jody Rogac made portraits of women and girls who marched on Washington the day after Donald Trump took the oath of office. Months later, shock waves spread from the growing number of women, and some men, who spoke out about sexual harassment in the workplace. Rich and poor, famous and obscure, this group of “Silence Breakers” that was named TIME’s Person of the Year—captured in a portfolio shot by Billy & Hells—has brought down powerful men atop business, entertainment and media.
[time-ad size=”small” align=”center”]
Sometimes, the images can even get a second life. Nadav Kandar’s black and white portrait of Steve Bannon ran inside TIME in December 2016, but after the new year it appeared in color on the cover, paired with the headline “The Great Manipulator.” The reverberations from the chief strategist’s departure about six months later are still being felt.
Whether photographing French President Emmanuel Macron at his residence in Paris, or behind the scenes of culture’s most popular shows (Miles Aldridge and the cast of Game of Thrones, or Micaiah Carter and John Boyega of Star Wars), our photographers emerged with stunning portraits of those who defined 2017—and who could play an even larger role in the year to come.
[time-ad size=”small” align=”center”]
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle Just Announced Their Wedding Date
You can officially save the date for the most anticipated wedding of 2018: Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.
The ceremony will take place on May 19, Kensington Palace announced Friday morning. It will be held in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, where Harry’s father, Prince Charles, wed Camilla Parker Bowles in 2005.
Royal wedding watchers have been eagerly awaiting news about the nuptials since the couple got engaged in November. The American actress and the prince had been dating for about a year and a half before the engagement.