Category: World

Twelve days into a ransomware attack that has upended health-care services at five hospitals in southwestern Ontario, a cybercriminal group claimed responsibility in an online blog describing how the attack happened and what it says are the millions of private patient records it has stolen. 

In a report to Windsor Regional Hospital Thursday, CEO David Musyj said the hospital is slowly getting back on track, working hard to restore services. He noted that although the impacted hospitals  “closely examined” the ransom demand from the cybercriminals, they decided against paying it. 

“We knew … that we could not trust the promise of a criminal to delete this information,” he said. 

“We learned that payment would not speed up the safe restoration of our network.” 

It’s the first time Musyj has spoken about the attack and his message served as a counter to the claims of the cybercriminals, who bragged about the extent of the damage in an online blog. 

After the hospitals refused to pay, the hackers followed through on their threat of releasing a portion of private health information. 

Details about that exposed personal information, along with the cybercriminal group that has claimed responsibility for the attack, have been released in an article from DataBreaches.net — a website run by a formerly licensed health-care professional who lives in New York State. 

CBC News spoke with the author of the website and has agreed to keep them anonymous to protect their safety.

The author, who goes by the pseudonym Dissent Doe, says they don’t have expertise in cybersecurity, beyond having reported on the issue in their online blogs since 2006. 

CBC News has verified Dissent’s identity. Brett Callow, a threat analyst for anti-virus software company Emsisoft, says while the site and Dissent have a track record of reliability for its reporting on cyberattacks, the specific claims hackers make to it should be taken with some skepticism. 

Daixin cybercriminal group claims responsibility for attack 

Multiple police organizations, including INTERPOL and the FBI, continue to investigate the cyberattack that stalled essential health-care services for thousands of people in Windsor-Essex, Chatham-Kent and Sarnia. The attack on the hospitals’ IT provider TransForm forced internal health systems to be shut down at all five hospitals, causing staff to resort to using paper charting.

Since the attack began, cancer patients have had to receive care at other hospitals in the province, staff payroll has been disrupted and, as recently as Wednesday evening, personal health information has been published on the dark web.  

According to Dissent’s reporting on DataBreaches.net, the group that claimed responsibility for the attack is called Daixin.

Dissent says they don’t know where the group is based or how many people are behind the operation. 

Callow told CBC News the group first started operating mid-2022 and he believes it is a fairly small group, as they haven’t been very active and don’t have a lot of victims. But he says it has been identified by the United States’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the FBI as a group of concern that tends to target the healthcare sector. 

“They are very much a known threat,” he said. 

He notes these groups can exaggerate the truth in order to put extra pressure on hospital systems to pay the ransom they are demanding. 

“We cannot assume that Daixin are telling the truth. Their intention will be to show the hospital in a bad light,” Callow said. 

CBC News reached out to TransForm, but it said it won’t be commenting further. 

Millions of health records stolen, published on dark web

In Dissent’s blog, the group claims the stolen data involves more than 160 gigabytes of 5.6 million records of personally identifiable information and protected health information. The dump also allegedly includes sensitive documents, like scans, from internal servers. 

Daixin leaked a portion of the data on the dark web Wednesday evening, which includes scans of patient information like records and claims. 

The cybercriminal group also says it has destroyed IT provider TransForm’s backups, though Dissent says it’s unclear whether they have gotten all of the backups. 

“Like most ransomware groups now they both steal a copy of the data … as well as encrypting or locking the computers from which it was stolen,” said Callow. 

Daixin allegedly gained access to TransForm’s systems a week before launching the attack on Oct. 23, according to Dissent’s blog. 

The cybercriminal group says it took a few hours to gain control of the system. It adds that TransForm had “expensive” software to detect intruders, but claims that similar passwords across administrators made them vulnerable. 

In response to Dissent asking whether the group was directly in the hospital’s networks, Daixin is quoted as responding with, “The networks were completely transparent — we could go anywhere.” 

Daixin told Dissent that TransForm knew the cost of the ransom on the second day of the attack, but it wouldn’t reveal that amount to Dissent. 

According to Callow, ransom demands can range from thousands to multiple millions of dollars. 

“In this particular incident, I would be surprised if they were asking for less than $1 million,” he said. 

Hospital pleads to be left alone in alleged messages to cybercriminal group 

In a screenshot that Daixin sent to Dissent, which is now published on their blog, the cybercriminal group can be seen messaging with “Bluewater Health and others.” 

In the message, the hospital’s negotiator says they are trying to restore their operations and will recover from this. It says that the hospital cannot pay and adds “but please know this: cancer treatment is being cancelled. Surgeries are being postponed. Our patients are hurting.”

The hospital pleads with the “admin” user and asks that they “delete the data and leave us alone.”

In response, Daixin says the hospital will end up paying more money to restore their systems than what it would cost to just pay the ransom. 

“Either way — we’re not upset, we’ll pour your data into our leak site after the timer expires,” reads the message from admin. 

According to Callow, even if institutions pay the ransom, “the recovery process isn’t streamlined and isn’t necessarily quick and easy.” 

When asked whether paying a ransom would make it more likely that TransForm would be hit with another cyberattack in the future, Callow said that’s not accurate. 

“The hospitals are absolutely making the right decision not to pay,” he said.

“Ransomware attacks happen for one reason and one reason only, and that is that they are profitable. If other organizations took the same stance as the hospital and refused to pay, there’ll be no more ransomware.”

Dissent told CBC News that this situation is not uncommon and the lack of sympathy is typical. 

“They’ll say, ‘It’s just business,’ and they’re not really feeling badly for patients whose data are stolen or exposed or patients whose appointments have to be rescheduled because of the disruption to services,” they said. 

Windsor Regional says recovery will take weeks 

During Musyj’s report to hospital board members, he noted the past 11 days have been a test to patients, community and employees but says it’s a test his staff are passing and applauded the hard work that staff are doing to keep the hospital afloat. 

Despite the digital disruptions, Musyj says that not one ambulatory surgical procedure was delayed from the beginning and scheduled surgeries are close to being fully back on track. 

He added the focus is on cancer patients and getting radiation treatments safely up and running, noting that they are making progress on this. 

Musyj said the hospitals are working with leading cyber experts and Ontario Health to get themselves in a place of stability. 

No hospital board members asked questions about the attack. 

The young woman found guilty of killing Connor Boyd in a “pointless teen drama” is fighting to keep her name secret forever.

Boyd was run over after falling from a moving ute in Auckland’s CBD in the early hours of April 24, 2022 after a night of escalating tensions amongst a group of friends.

The Crown said the young woman grabbed Boyd as she sat in the backseat, while her former boyfriend, who was driving the ute, also held on to Boyd.

On Tuesday, after around 8 hours of deliberations, a jury at the High Court in Auckland rejected the man’s defence of self-defence and his version of what happened that night and found him guilty of manslaughter. The woman was found guilty of manslaughter as a party.

The young man was also found guilty of failing to stop to ascertain injury.

While the woman was found not guilty of stomping and kicking a woman she’d previously admitted attacking.

The case was back in court on Friday where the woman’s lawyer, Julie-Anne Kincade KC, argued that naming her client would cause her and her family extreme hardship.

Kincade initially asked for an adjournment while the Supreme Court decides the case of a convicted rapist who carried out his attacks when he was a teenager.

She said, like the present case, the teenage rapist’s case explores issues relating to rehabilitation and youth justice principles.

She said her client had been subjected to a “social media campaign” and had lost her job as a result. There had also been misinformation about the case posted online.

She said that had been curtailed by the suppression order, but others will “jump on the bandwagon” if she is named.

Justice Ian Gault said he didn’t follow that argument.

“Do you at least accept that submission is not based on evidence?”

Kincade responded: “Your Honour, it’s a submission based on common-sense.”

The woman’s application for permanent name suppression was opposed by the Crown and the media.

Crown prosecutor Jessica Ah Koy said there was no dispute the woman would face some hardship, but that was no different to other young people appearing in court.

She said while there had been threats in the past, there was no evidence that behaviour had continued.

Ah Koy said Boyd’s family strongly opposed the continuation of name suppression.

Kincade said she had instructions to file an appeal if the result did not go in her client’s favour.

Evidence at trial

The final moments of Connor Boyd’s life were captured on CCTV camera and formed the centrepiece of the Crown case against the pair.

Crown, prosecutor Claire Paterson labelled the events leading up to Boyd being run over as a “pointless teen drama”.

In closing the case to the jury, she said there was a ring of truth in the saying “nothing good ever happens in town after midnight”.

The messy backstory to the night included shifting teenage friendships, one-night stands, overlapping friend groups, drunken grandstanding but also plain and simple bullying that got out of control and led to the death of Boyd, Paterson said.

“It is utterly regrettable and so tragic that this is what came from something so silly as a teenage friend group one-night stand, particularly that this all had nothing to do with the defendants or Connor…[but] the choices we make have consequences.”

During the trial, the court heard a friend of one of the defendants, who said Boyd had confronted and threatened him.

The male defendant, who was leaving to head home from the club, saw Boyd and confronted him, telling him to leave his friend alone.

“I thought he’d listen to me…I’d never had drama with Connor before,” the defendant said.

It is alleged that Boyd said the defendant’s friend was: “Lucky not to have a bullet in his head.”

That is when the defendant punched him.

“I regretted hitting him as soon as I’d done it,” he said.

Boyd was further assaulted when the female defendant pushed, kicked and punched him, an act she admitted to in court.

The group made up and then dispersed. The defendants left in the man’s Toyota Hilux, and it was while they were on Gore St, they both say that Boyd walked over to the ute, and continued making threatening comments.

The female defendant said she pushed Boyd and then slapped him before the male defendant grabbed on to him and started driving. This all happened in the space of seconds.

Paterson told the jury, Boyd had no safe option from the moment he was grabbed, and the car started moving.

“He has not chosen to be in this situation, he’s quite literally being dragged into it…the reason he had no safe option is because the car never stopped.”

The male defendant admitted grabbing on to Boyd with the intention of driving and holding on to him.

But he claimed he was scared for his safety and the safety of his passengers as Boyd punched him through the car window.

In the CCTV footage another arm can be seen out the Hilux window grabbing Boyd, but the female defendant repeatedly denied she was holding on to him.

Boyd can be seen running alongside the vehicle and hanging on to the runner board, before he appears to fall and is run over.

“The dangerousness of the driving is shocking. It is so utterly unnecessary.”

After Boyd fell and his head was run over, the defendant made no attempt to stop, saying he was panicked and shocked.

“I thought it had gone over his leg at most. I didn’t think it was as serious.

He admitted, in hindsight, he should have stopped.

The female defendant called 111 seven minutes after the incident, saying “some dude tried to f… up my boyfriend, he was trying to punch my boyfriend”.

Paterson suggested this was because she was trying to make it look like it was not her or her boyfriend’s fault.

She disagreed and said it was because she was freaking out and just wanted to get help for Boyd.

Paterson told the jury the defendants weren’t acting out of fear that night.

“Any fear that night was fantasy. They were angry. As they grabbed him they wanted to teach him a lesson and give him a fright,” she said.

She said irrespective of what may or may not have come out of Boyd’s mouth that night, his behaviour is not aggressive, and he posed no threat to anyone.

The pair have been remanded on bail to appear for sentencing on February 16.

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s spectacular rise and fall in the cryptocurrency industry — a journey that included his testimony before the U.S. Congress, a Super Bowl advertisement and dreams of a future run for president — hit a new bottom Thursday when a New York jury convicted him of fraud in a scheme that cheated customers and investors of at least $10 billion US.

After the month-long trial, jurors rejected Bankman-Fried’s claim during three days on the witness stand in Manhattan federal court that he never committed fraud or meant to cheat customers before FTX, once the world’s second-largest crypto exchange, collapsed into bankruptcy a year ago.

“His crimes caught up to him. His crimes have been exposed,” assistant U.S. attorney Danielle Sassoon told the jury of the onetime billionaire just before they were read the law by Judge Lewis A. Kaplan and began deliberations. Sassoon said Bankman-Fried turned his customers’ accounts into his “personal piggy bank” as up to $14 billion US disappeared.

She urged jurors to reject Bankman-Fried’s insistence when he testified that he never committed fraud or plotted to steal from customers, investors and lenders and didn’t realize that his companies were at least $10 billion US in debt until October 2022.

The judge set a sentencing date of March 28 for the seven counts of fraud and conspiracy.

FTX founder liked ‘celebrity chasing,’ prosecutors said

The trial attracted intense interest with its focus on a fraud on a scale not seen since the 2009 prosecution of Bernard Madoff, whose Ponzi scheme over decades cheated thousands of investors out of about $20 billion US. Madoff pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 150 years in prison, where he died in 2021.

The prosecution of Bankman-Fried, 31, put a spotlight on the emerging cryptocurrency industry and a group of young executives in their 20s who lived together in a $30-million luxury apartment in the Bahamas as they dreamed of becoming the most powerful players in a new financial field.

U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said they engaged in one of the biggest frauds in U.S. history.

Prosecutors made sure jurors knew that the defendant they saw in court with short hair and a suit was not the man with big, messy hair and shorts that became his trademark appearance after he started his cryptocurrency hedge fund, Alameda Research, in 2017 and FTX, his cryptocurrency exchange, two years later.

They showed the jury pictures of Bankman-Fried sleeping on a private jet, sitting with a deck of cards and mingling at the Super Bowl with celebrities including the singer Katy Perry. Assistant U.S. attorney Nicolas Roos called Bankman-Fried someone who liked “celebrity chasing.”

In a closing argument, defence lawyer Mark Cohen said prosecutors were trying to turn “Sam into some sort of villain, some sort of monster.”

“It’s both wrong and unfair, and I hope and believe that you have seen that it’s simply not true,” he said. “According to the government, everything Sam ever touched and said was fraudulent.”

Inner circle testified against him

The government relied heavily on the testimony of three former members of Bankman-Fried’s inner circle, his top executives including his former girlfriend, Caroline Ellison, to explain how Bankman-Fried used Alameda Research to siphon billions of dollars from customer accounts at FTX.

With that money, prosecutors said, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate gained influence and power through investments, contributions, tens of millions of dollars in political contributions, congressional testimony and a publicity campaign that enlisted celebrities like comedian Larry David and football quarterback Tom Brady.

Ellison, 28, testified that Bankman-Fried directed her while she was chief executive of Alameda Research to commit fraud as he pursued ambitions to lead huge companies, spend money influentially and even finance a presidential run. She said he thought he had a five per cent chance to be U.S. president someday.

Customers demanded their money back

Becoming tearful as she described the collapse of the cryptocurrency empire last November, Ellison said the revelations that caused customers collectively to demand their money back, exposing the fraud, brought a “relief that I didn’t have to lie anymore.”

FTX co-founder Gary Wang, who was FTX’s chief technology officer, revealed in his testimony that Bankman-Fried directed him to insert code into FTX’s operations so that Alameda Research could make unlimited withdrawals from FTX and have a credit line of up to $65 billion. Wang said the money came from customers.

Nishad Singh, the former head of engineering at FTX, testified that he felt “blindsided and horrified” at the result of the actions of a man he once admired when he saw the extent of the fraud as the collapse last November left him suicidal.

Ellison, Wang and Singh all pleaded guilty to fraud charges and testified against Bankman-Fried in the hopes of leniency at sentencing.

Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas last December and extradited to the United States, where he was freed on a $250 million personal recognizance bond with electronic monitoring and a requirement that he remain at the home of his parents in Palo Alto, California.

WATCH | FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried freed on $250M US bail: 

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried freed on $250M US bail

Featured VideoFTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried will be released on a $250 million US bond package while he awaits trial on fraud charges related to the collapse of the FTX crypto exchange, a federal magistrate judge said on Thursday.

His communications, including hundreds of phone calls with journalists and internet influencers, along with emails and texts, eventually got him in trouble when the judge concluded he was trying to influence prospective trial witnesses and ordered him jailed in August.

During the trial, prosecutors used Bankman-Fried’s public statements, online announcements and his Congressional testimony against him, showing how the entrepreneur repeatedly promised customers that their deposits were safe and secure as late as last Nov. 7, when he tweeted “FTX is fine. Assets are fine” as customers furiously tried to withdraw their money.

He deleted the tweet the next day. FTX filed for bankruptcy four days later.

In his closing, Roos mocked Bankman-Fried’s testimony, saying that under questioning from his lawyer, the defendant’s words were “smooth, like it had been rehearsed a bunch of times?”

But under cross examination, “he was a different person,” the prosecutor said. “Suddenly on cross-examination he couldn’t remember a single detail about his company or what he said publicly. It was uncomfortable to hear. He never said he couldn’t recall during his direct examination, but it happened over 140 times during his cross-examination.”

More than 3,600 Palestinian children were killed in the first 25 days of the war between Israel and Hamas, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry. They were hit by airstrikes, smashed by misfired rockets, burned by blasts and crushed by buildings, and among them were newborns and toddlers, avid readers, aspiring journalists and boys who thought they’d be safe in a church.

Nearly half of the crowded strip’s 2.3 million inhabitants are under 18, and children account for 40% of those killed so far in the war. An Associated Press analysis of Gaza Health Ministry data released last week showed that as of Oct. 26, 2,001 children ages 12 and under had been killed, including 615 who were 3 or younger.

“When houses are destroyed, they collapse on the heads of children,” writer Adam al-Madhoun said Wednesday as he comforted his 4-year-old daughter Kenzi at the Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the central Gaza city of Deir al-Balah. She survived an airstrike that ripped off her right arm, crushed her left leg and fractured her skull.

Israel says its airstrikes target Hamas militant sites and infrastructure, and it accuses the group of using civilians as human shields. It also says more than 500 militant rockets have misfired and landed in Gaza, killing an unknown number of Palestinians.

More children have been killed in just over three weeks in Gaza than in all of the world’s conflicts combined in each of the past three years, according to the global charity Save the Children. For example, it said, 2,985 children were killed across two dozen war zones throughout all of last year.

“Gaza has become a graveyard for thousands of children,” said James Elder, a spokesperson for UNICEF, the U.N. children’s agency.

Images and footage of shell-shocked children being pulled from rubble in Gaza or writhing on dirty hospital gurneys have become commonplace and have fueled protests around the world. Scenes from recent airstrikes included a rescuer cradling a limp toddler in a bloodied white tutu, a bespectacled father shrieking as he clutched his dead child tight to his chest, and a dazed young boy covered in blood and dust staggering alone through the ruins.

“It’s a curse to be a parent in Gaza,” said Ahmed Modawikh, a 40-year-old carpenter from Gaza City whose life was shattered by the death of his 8-year-old daughter during five days of fighting in May.

Israeli children have also been killed. During Hamas’ brutal Oct. 7 rampage across southern Israel that sparked the war, its gunmen killed more than 1,400 people. Among them were babies and other small children, Israeli officials have said, though they haven’t provided exact figures. About 30 children were also among the roughly 240 hostages Hamas took.

As Israeli warplanes pound Gaza, Palestinian children huddle with large families in apartments or U.N.-run shelters. Although Israel has urged Palestinians to leave northern Gaza for the strip’s south, nowhere in the territory has proven safe from its airstrikes.

“People are running from death only to find death,” said Yasmine Jouda, who lost 68 family members in Oct. 22 airstrikes that razed two four-story buildings in Deir al-Balah, where they had sought refuge from northern Gaza.

The strike’s only survivor was Jouda’s year-old niece Milissa, whose mother had gone into labor during the attack and was found dead beneath the rubble, the heads of her lifeless twin newborns emerging from her birth canal.

“What did this tiny baby do to deserve a life without any family?” Jouda said.

Israel blames Hamas for Gaza’s death toll — now more than 8,800, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry — because the militant group operates from jam-packed residential neighborhoods. Palestinians point to the soaring casualty count as proof that Israeli strikes are indiscriminate and disproportionate.

The war has injured more than 7,000 Palestinian children and left many with lifechanging problems, doctors say.

Just before the war, Jouda’s niece Milissa walked a few paces for the first time. She will never walk again. Doctors say the airstrike that killed the girl’s family fractured her spine and paralyzed her from the chest down. Just down the hall from her in the teeming central Gaza hospital, 4-year-old Kenzi woke up screaming, asking what had happened to her missing right arm.

“It will take so much care and work just to get her to the point of having half a normal life,” her father said.

Even those physically unscathed may be scarred by war’s ravages.

For 15-year-olds in Gaza, it’s their fifth Israel-Hamas war since the militant group seized control of the enclave in 2007. All they’ve known is life under a punishing Israeli-Egyptian blockade that prevents them from traveling abroad and crushes their hopes for the future. The strip has a 70% youth unemployment rate, according to the World Bank.

“There is no hope for these children to develop careers, improve their standard of living, access better healthcare and education,” said Ayed Abu Eqtaish, accountability program director for Defense for Children International in the Palestinian territories.

But in this war, he added, “it’s about life and death.”

Palestinians carry seawater home from the beach in Deir al Balah, Gaza Strip, Thursday, Nov. 2, 2023.
| Photo Credit:
AP

And in Gaza, death is everywhere.

Here are just a few of the 3,648 Palestinian children and minors who have been killed in the war.

Aseel Hassan was an excellent student, said her father, Hazem Bin Saeed. She devoured classical Arabic poetry, memorizing its rigid metric and rhyme scheme, and reveling in its mystical images and florid metaphors. During the war, when Israeli bombardments came so close that their walls shook, she would regale her relatives by reciting famous verses from Abu Al Tayyib al-Mutanabbi, a 10th-century Iraqi poet, her father said.

“When I asked her what she wanted to do when she grew up, she would say, read,” said 42-year-old Bin Saeed. “Poems were Aseel’s escape.”

An airstrike on Oct. 19 leveled his three-story home in Deir al-Balah, killing Aseel and her 14-year-old brother, Anas.

The explosions terrified Majd, said his father, 45-year-old Ramez Souri.

He missed playing soccer with his school friends. He was devastated that the war had canceled his Christian family’s much-anticipated trip to Nazareth, the town in Israel where tradition says Jesus grew up.

“Baba, where can we go?” Majd asked again and again when airstrikes roared. The family, devout members of Gaza’s tiny Christian community, finally had an answer — St. Porphyrius Greek Orthodox Church in Gaza City.

Souri said Majd calmed down when they arrived at the church, where dozens of Christian families had taken shelter. Together, they prayed and sang.

On Oct. 20, shrapnel crashed into the monastery, killing 18 people. Among the dead were Majd and his siblings, 9-year-old Julie and 15-year-old Soheil. Israel says it had been targeting a nearby Hamas command center.

In pictures | Gaza’s biggest refugee camp in shambles after Israeli raids

Palestinians search for casualties at the site of Israeli strikes on houses in Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, October 31, 2023.

The Jabaliya refugee camp is located in a densely built-up area of small streets on Gaza City’s outskirts. The camp has been the scene of much violence in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

Jabaliya is the closest camp to the Erez border crossing between The Gaza Strip and Israel. After the 1948 War, refugees settled in the camp, most having fled from villages in southern Palestine.

Israel’s military confirmed striking Gaza’s Jabaliya refugee camp Tuesday, saying the operation succeeded in killing a key Hamas commander linked to the October 7 attack on Israel by the Palestinian militant group.

In this frame grab from video, Palestinians are seen inside a heavily damaged apartment building following Israeli airstrikes at the Jabaliya refugee camp on Gaza City’s outskirts, on Oct. 31, 2023.

Israel aggressively defended the attack, with military spokesman Jonathan Conricus saying the targeted commander had also been a key planner of the bloody October 7 rampage that started the war, and that the apartment buildings collapsed only because the vast underground Hamas complex had been destroyed.

Before the strike on Jabaliya, the Health Ministry in Gaza said 8,525 people have been killed in the narrow strip of land since Israel launched its bombing campaign on October 7.

The toll from the attack in the Jabaliya camp was not immediately known. The director of the nearby hospital where casualties were taken, Dr. Atef Al-Kahlot, said hundreds of people were wounded or killed.

In the Jabaliya refugee camp — a densely built-up area of small streets on Gaza City’s outskirts — dozens of rescuers searched for survivors amid a series of obliterated buildings and others that had partially collapsed. The Israeli military said it carried out a wide-scale strike in Jabaliya on Hamas infrastructure “that had taken over civilian buildings.”

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Majd was found beneath the rubble with his hands around his mother’s neck. His face was completely burned.

“My children just wanted peace and stability,” said Souri, his voice cracking. “All I cared about was that they were happy.”

Karam al-Sharif, an employee with the U.N. Palestinian refugee agency, could barely speak Wednesday as he knelt over his children’s small shrouded bodies at the hospital. Gone were his daughters, 5-year-old Joud and 10-year-old Tasnim.

A Palestinian woman cries as she carries her wounded son following an Israeli airstrike in Bureij refugee camp, Gaza Strip, Thursday, Nov. 2, 2023.
| Photo Credit:
AP

Also gone were his twin 18-month-old sons, Kenan and Neman. Al-Sharif sobbed as he hugged Kenan and said goodbye. Neman’s body was still lost beneath the rubble of the six-story tower where the family had sought refuge in the Nuseirat refugee camp, in central Gaza.

“They had no time here,” Sami Abu Sultan, al-Sharif’s brother, said of the baby boys, a day after the building was destroyed. “It was God’s will.”

On Oct. 25, Al Jazeera’s livestream caught the chilling moment when its Gaza bureau chief, Wael Dahdouh, discovered that an Israeli airstrike had killed his wife, 6-year-old daughter, infant grandson and 16-year-old son, Mahmoud.

Swarmed by TV cameras at the hospital, Dahdouh wept over his teenage son, murmuring, “You wanted to be a journalist.”

Mahmoud was a senior at the secular American International High School in Gaza City. Set on becoming an English-language reporter, he spent his time honing camera skills and posting amateur reporting clips on YouTube, Dahdouh said.

A video that Mahmoud filmed days before he died showed charred cars, dark smoke and flattened homes. He and his sister, Kholoud, took turns delivering a monologue, straining to be heard over the wind.

“This is the fiercest and most violent war we have lived in Gaza,” Mahmoud said, chopping the air with his hands.

At the end of the clip, the siblings stared straight into the camera.

“Help us to stay alive,” they said in unison.

Sixty years after the onset of Beatlemania and with two of the fab four now dead, artificial intelligence has enabled the release of the last “new” Beatles song.

The track, called Now And Then, was released early on Friday morning (NZ time) as part of a single paired with Love Me Do, the very first Beatles single that came out in 1962 in England.

The single was released to mixed reviews from the media, the public, and of course, outspoken Beatles megafan Liam Gallagher.

The former Oasis frontman and self-identified “rasta-icon” labelled the song “absolutely incredible”.

“Now n Then absolutely incredible biblical celestial heartbreaking and heartwarming all at the same time long live The Beatles,” he wrote on X (formerly Twitter).

When a fan commented if he was worried he wouldn’t like it, Gallagher responded in his typical iconic fashion.

“The Beatles could shit in my hand bag I’d still hide my polo mints in there.”

‘A loving but dreary attempt to recapture the magic’

The Telegraph said while people would have been excited at the potential of a new Beatles song being released within their lifetimes, it would change once they actually heard it.

“Now and Then is a slip of a dreary ballad, only elevated by the quality of the singing and playing, and the spooky notion that it is the work of the greatest group in pop history, reunited across death’s divide.”

“But just as the band find a sensual groove, the McCartney-led chorus arrives as an anticlimactic plod, dropping where the song needs to lift, awkwardly repurposing some snatches of unfinished Lennon phrases into a form that doesn’t quite fit the song’s plaintive mood.

“The chords aren’t interesting, and harmonies pasted in from old Beatle recordings (Here There and Everywhere, Eleanor Rigby and Because) don’t really cut through as they should.“

“And where is George Harrison in all of this? On acoustic guitar, apparently, and a very un-Beatley thin and incongruously funky electric rhythm part, recorded in 1995.”

‘It certainly sounds like a rough and incomplete sketch of a song reassembled’

Variety argued while the song doesn’t measure up to the band’s work when they were together, fans shouldn’t expect it to.

“With all the hoopla around Now and Then – which has been officially billed as ‘The Last Beatles Song’ and erroneously described as the legendary group’s ‘first new song in 50 years’ – some reality-checking is in order.”

“Yes, it is a ‘new’ Beatles song in that all four members, including the late John Lennon and George Harrison, play and sing on a previously unreleased composition.”

“But it is not some long-lost Abbey Road outtake (those were all exhumed long ago), and in reality even Lennon’s part was recorded and presumably written many years after the Beatles broke up.

“So that’s the how and why; the real – unfair – question is whether the song comes close to measuring up to the Beatles or their collective solo works’ towering legacy. Of course it doesn’t, but it’s still an unexpected pleasure that marks the completion of the group’s last bit of unfinished business.”

A highly artificed song, but the emotions it taps into are real.

The Financial Times labelled the track as imagining an alternative future for the band.

“It resembles a big-budget version of a minor-key curio that they might have come up with had they not split up.

“McCartney’s bass and Ringo Starr’s drums give the flimsy song a new solidity.

“Harrison is posthumously present with a guitar part from the failed 1990s studio sessions. Lennon’s warble has been extracted and foregrounded by music-processing software, although it’s still rather thin.

“He’s backed by sumptuous vocal harmonies. A big string arrangement by Giles Martin, son of Beatles producer George Martin, adds a Beatlesy flavour, and also some Hollywood emotional heft.

“With McCartney and Starr both in their eighties, the time when the world ceases to contain a living Beatle is approaching. This inexorable fact separates Now and Then from its fellow bastardised oddities, Free as a Bird and Real Love. It’s a highly artificed song, but the emotions it taps into are real.”

John Lennon is in the room, bright, clear and miraculously alive

Now and Then invokes the feeling that John Lennon is alive and well, according to The Independent.

“If only Harrison could hear it now. With McCartney counting in his austere piano and Harrison’s acoustic backing from 1995, there is a stately, reflective tone to this mid-paced, gently psychedelic ballad.

“John is here in the room, bright and clear and miraculously alive. After Lennon had sounded so muffled and urn-interred on Anthology singles Free as a Bird and Real Love, here is an emotional resurrection treated with the respect and reverence it deserves.

“McCartney gives Lennon’s vocals space and prominence, blending his own voice sensitively into that wondrous brotherly harmony we thought we’d never hear afresh again.

“To compare something elaborately reconstructed from an immutable blueprint to the sheer magnificence of the best pop group ever firing off in their prime would be wrong-headed in the extreme.

“Of course, without the full band experimenting and innovating in a room together, Now and Then is no A Day in the Life, Strawberry Fields Forever or Tomorrow Never Knows. But that’s not its point.”

A poignant act of closure

The Guardian labelled the song a “poignant act of closure” for the biggest band in history.

“Listening to Now and Then, it’s hard to see what Harrison’s objection was in purely musical terms. A moody, reflective piano ballad, it’s clearly never going to supplant Strawberry Fields Forever or A Day in the Life in the affections of Beatles fans, but it’s a better song than Free as a Bird or Real Love.”

“And posthumously reworked as a Beatles track, it definitely packs a greater emotional punch. If you want to be moved, the lyrics provide ample space in which do so.“

“There’s something similarly moving about the sound of a very Harrison-esque slide guitar solo being played by McCartney, who apparently balked at Harrison’s slide guitar additions to the mid-90s sessions as too reminiscent of his 1971 solo hit My Sweet Lord.“