A Storm, a Spill and a Disaster for the Black Sea’s Beaches
When a 28-year-old volunteer named Nikolai stepped onto a sandy beach on Russia’s Black Sea coast in a hazmat suit just before New Year’s Eve, he was so overwhelmed by the amount of thick oil film that he almost broke down.
He and other volunteers were tasked with shoveling away the oil-drenched sand, but “the scale is just too big,” he said.
Two weeks into the new year, and four weeks after the spill, President Vladimir V. Putin acknowledged the extent of the disaster and dispatched senior officials to deal with Russia’s largest oil spill in years, which has befouled some of the country’s most popular beaches.
The oil was released by two aging Russian tankers that were damaged during a heavy storm in the Kerch Strait on Dec. 15. At least 2,400 metric tons of oil spewed into the sea, Russian officials said.
The disaster in the strait, which separates the Crimean Peninsula from mainland Russia, raised questions about whether the vessels were part of the so-called shadow fleet that Moscow uses to evade sanctions on its oil industry, sometimes employing ships in shoddy conditions.
One of the vessels, the Volgoneft-212, split in half and sank, killing one crew member. The other, the Volgoneft-239, ran aground near the port of Taman. The two vessels were loaded with a total of 9,000 tons of heavy fuel oil, and the authorities are now working not only to clean up the shores, but also to try to contain additional spills from the ship that ran aground.
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A Hardened Detective and an Angry Rock Star: How a Vast Art Fraud Was Cracked
Two art fraud rings in a remote Canadian city produced thousands of paintings sold in galleries as works by Norval Morrisseau, Canada’s most celebrated Indigenous artist.
Tim Tait put two and two together when he went to sell some of his paintings to a law firm in downtown Thunder Bay two decades ago. He spotted one of his other works already there — but with somebody else’s signature on it.
And not just anybody’s. It read “Copper Thunderbird,” a.k.a. the “Picasso of the North.” Real name Norval Morrisseau, Canada’s most famous Indigenous artist whose original style shattered the country’s idea of art and elbowed its way into its most important museum.
“I called the cops,” said Mr. Tait, a local artist in Thunder Bay, Ontario, who is also Indigenous. “All they did was laugh at me and ridicule me on the phone.”
“And I said, ‘When it comes out, I’ll be singing like a bird.’”
By the time it all came out — decades later — two criminal rings in Thunder Bay had knocked off thousands of bogus Norval Morrisseaus that collectively fetched millions of dollars across Canada. The fakes, which included rebranded paintings by Mr. Tait and other Indigenous artists, made it onto the walls of the country’s top galleries and universities. They were purchased by retired schoolteachers, billionaire art collectors and even a rock star.
The leaders of the Thunder Bay rings have pleaded guilty to fraud in the past year and are now imprisoned. Thunder Bay — an isolated city on Lake Superior’s north shore that drug dealers from Toronto have turned into Canada’s homicide capital — has also emerged as the epicenter of the biggest art fraud in the country’s history.
The convictions came a quarter-century after the authenticity of many Morrisseaus was first publicly questioned — and only after a series of unusual events linking the rock star; a cold-case murder of a teenager; his aging, grieving parents; and the hard-boiled homicide detectives initially skeptical of art fraud. The detectives ended up mastering the finer points of Morrisseau’s Woodlands style of art.
“None of us knew anything about art,” Det. Jason Rybak of the Thunder Bay Police Service said during a recent drive through the city, whose muted colors were further drained by fresh snow and a cloud-filled sky.
Recalling the first raid of a ringleader’s house, Detective Rybak, who led the investigation, said: “Next thing you know, we have these paintings. And we’re like, ‘Oh yeah, what now?’”
The police knew of Morrisseau, though. A member of the Ojibwe First Nation, he was born on a reserve northeast of Thunder Bay. But Morrisseau had long been a fixture on the city’s streets where he hawked his artwork.
Morrisseau became famous for creating the Woodland School of painting, a fusion of Ojibwe and European styles. His paintings touched on Indigenous beliefs, depicting people, animals and the physical and spiritual worlds in bright colors and X-ray-like motifs.
Canada’s artistic establishment had long considered works by Indigenous artists to be ethnography, not fine art. But Morrisseau’s work changed that starting in the 1960s, as it earned acclaim in Toronto, the United States and France, where he became known as the Picasso of the North.
In 2006, a year before his death at 75, the National Gallery of Canada, the country’s most important museum, held a retrospective of Morrisseau’s art — the first time a contemporary Indigenous artist was given such a spotlight. But the homage was marred by news reports of the proliferation of suspected knockoffs. Morrisseau himself had spoken out against the fraud and identified fakes with his forged signature.
The stories never led anywhere because gallery owners, auctioneers and others with a financial stake in counterfeit Morrisseaus fiercely denied the existence of widespread fraud, said Jonathan Sommer, a lawyer who represented three people who sued galleries for selling them counterfeits.
Many wealthy collectors were too embarrassed to admit they had bought fakes, Mr. Sommer said. But one client happened to be a rock star: Kevin Hearn, the keyboardist for the Barenaked Ladies, a Canadian band that has sold more than 15 million albums.
Mr. Hearn, a onetime choirboy, loved “the bold colors and the black lines” in the paintings of Morrisseau, whose work was influenced by stained-glass church windows. In 2005, he bought a painting of animals in a circle on a green canvas called, “Spirit Energy of Mother Earth,” paying 20,000 Canadian dollars, about $16,500 at the time, at a Toronto gallery that reassured him of its authenticity.
After learning a few years later that it was a fake, Mr. Hearn successfully sued the gallery even as he weathered online attacks from people at risk of losing financially by the exposing of sham Morrisseaus.
“I was scared for my family,” Mr. Hearn said in an interview. “They were posting photos of my special-needs daughter online saying that I was a bad father for pursuing this litigation.”
Mr. Hearn also backed the making of a documentary, “There Are No Fakes,” on the broader fraud involving Morrisseau.
“I feel like the relationship between an artist’s work and the people that take that work into their heart is sacred,” he said.
The documentary featured information on Gary Lamont, a Thunder Bay man convicted of sexual abuse who was also, according to the police, a small-time drug dealer and a suspect in the 1984 killing of a 17-year-old named Scott Dove.
When Scott’s parents learned he had been mentioned in the documentary, they reached out to an investigator who had been looking into the cold case: Detective Rybak, who said that Mr. Lamont was still a suspect in the murder.
Detective Rybak, 49, had spent his career on homicides and drugs. When the detective called Mr. Hearn and his lawyer, Mr. Sommer, he was focused on the cold case and showed little interest in the fake Morrisseaus, Mr. Sommer said. But that changed when the detective became aware of the potentially strong case against Mr. Lamont — for art fraud.
“Once he got it,” Mr. Sommer said, “he became like a pit bull.”
Detective Rybak and two colleagues, Det. Sean Verescak and Det. Kevin Bradley, said they carried out their investigation by reconstructing Morrisseau’s life so they could understand how and what he painted, and how he signed his works.
Morrisseau, who was sexually abused at the Roman Catholic residential school he was sent to at 6, according to biographies, battled alcoholism for most of his life and, at one point, was homeless in Vancouver.
“He had lots of demons,” Detective Rybak said.
After his international success, Morrisseau returned to Thunder Bay in the 1970s.
It was a blue-collar town where people worked at paper mills and grain elevators. Toronto was a 16-hour drive, a place children visited for the first time on eighth-grade field trips. Few in Thunder Bay were aware of Morrisseau’s accomplishments. Locals knew him simply as the Indigenous artist who milled around downtown offering his drawings outside a bank in exchange for money, food or alcohol.
During one winter storm, Peter Kantola was driving when Morrisseau appeared out of nowhere and flagged him down. The artist had his hands deep in the pockets of a flimsy jacket.
“He was half frozen, the snow was blasting his whole face,” recalled Mr. Kantola, 84, a retired high school science teacher.
Mr. Kantola gave Morrisseau a lift, and, after that, would do so whenever he ran into him. Morrisseau, Mr. Kantola said, gave him two large paintings that now grace his living room.
Morrisseau also befriended Gary Lamont, the future art-fraud ringleader, in the 1970s, according to Mr. Lamont’s guilty plea statement. During the course of their friendship, Mr. Lamont occasionally set up Morrisseau in an apartment and covered the rent.
Mr. Lamont’s longtime partner, Linda Tkachyk, would take money, food and alcohol to the artist, her niece Amanda Dalby recalled. Ms. Dalby, 40, lived with her aunt and Mr. Lamont when she was a child.
On one visit, Morrisseau gave Ms. Dalby and her sister a painting.
“He said it would be enough to pay for our schooling,” Ms. Dalby said, adding that Mr. Lamont later took it.
According to Mr. Lamont’s guilty plea, he started producing counterfeit Morrisseaus in 2002 and continued until 2015. He was sentenced last December to five years in prison.
In the house where Ms. Dalby stayed, Indigenous artists, including a nephew of Morrisseau’s, painted nonstop inside a tiny room that Mr. Lamont kept locked, she said.
According to his guilty plea, Mr. Lamont also traded money and marijuana for paintings by Mr. Tait — the local artist who vowed to sing like a bird and helped expose Mr. Lamont. Mr. Tait stopped supplying him with paintings after realizing they were being passed off as Morrisseaus.
“He took advantage of me pretty bad,” Mr. Tait said one recent evening as he painted on a large canvas, his granddaughter bounding around their apartment. “That was my biggest weakness, drugs. I’m not like that anymore — 20 years in August.”
Hundreds of paintings produced by the Indigenous artists were rebranded with Morrisseau’s signature in Cree syllabics — “Copper Thunderbird” — and sold for 2,000 to 10,000 Canadian dollars.
By the end of their investigation, the detectives had unearthed a second forgery ring in Thunder Bay. Under its leader, a housepainter named David Voss, fake Morrisseaus were made in assembly-line fashion with Mr. Voss sketching outlines that were colored in by multiple individuals, each responsible for a single hue. Mr. Voss pleaded guilty to fraud in June. The case of a third ring, based in southern Ontario, is still working its way through the courts.
According to the detectives, Mr. Lamont used drugs and alcohol to turn Indigenous artists into Morrisseau forgers.
Gil Labine, Mr. Lamont’s lawyer, said his client was not a drug dealer, though he supplied the Indigenous artists with drugs. Mr. Labine added that Mr. Lamont has denied any involvement in the 1984 murder.
The artists regularly showed up at the arts supply shop in town, the Painted Turtle, to pick up large orders for Mr. Lamont, said the owner, Lorraine Cull.
Late one December, Mr. Lamont showed up with four young men.
“He almost cleaned us out of all the canvases we had,” Ms. Cull said. “I asked him, ‘What are you doing with all this?’ And he said they were Christmas gifts for all the artists up North.”
“And it was after Christmas.”
Here’s the latest.
Jerusalem Jan. 26, 6:09 p.m.
Here’s the latest.
At least 15 people were killed and more than 80 injured by Israeli forces on Sunday in southern Lebanon, Lebanese officials said, as the 60-day deadline for both Hezbollah and Israel to withdraw from the south expired and thousands of Lebanese displaced by the war poured onto roads leading south back to their homes.
The agreement, which was signed in November and halted the deadliest war in decades between the two sides, stipulated that both Hezbollah and Israel withdraw, while the Lebanese Army and U.N. peacekeepers would be deployed in force to secure the area. Negotiators had hoped the cease-fire deal would become permanent, returning a measure of calm to a turbulent region.
But as the deadline passed on Sunday, a very different scenario was taking shape.
Israeli forces remained in parts of southern Lebanon in violation of the cease-fire agreement, stoking fears of a sustained Israeli occupation and renewed hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah. Israeli officials warned Lebanese not to return to their homes in many towns and villages in the south.
“In the near future, we will continue to inform you about the places to which you can return,” Avichai Adraee, the Arabic spokesman of the Israeli military, posted on social media on Sunday morning. “Until further notice, all previously published instructions remain in effect.”
Lebanon’s Health Ministry said that those killed and injured on Sunday morning had been trying to enter their villages along the border when they were attacked by Israeli forces. Residents of some southern towns had called for their neighbors to gather early Sunday morning and head to their homes in a convoy, despite the warnings from Israel. The Lebanese military said it was accompanying civilians returning to several border towns to try to ensure their safety. The military said in a statement that a Lebanese soldier was among those killed by Israeli fire.
It marked one of the deadliest days in Lebanon since the cease-fire came into effect in November.
The Israeli military said in a statement that it had fired “warning shots” after what it described as “suspects” approached their forces. It also said that an unspecified number of people had been arrested and were now being questioned at the scene.
In the southern town of Aita al-Shaab, much of which now lies in ruin, many began streaming back to their homes on Sunday, arriving to rubble-strewed streets and flattened buildings.
Mohamed Srour, the town’s mayor, was among those returning after being displaced for more than a year. He said that Israeli soldiers had not yet fully withdrawn from the town and claimed that they were firing sporadically at civilians. The claims could not be independently verified. Still, Mr. Srour remained resolute.
“Today, Aita is celebrating the long-awaited return.” he said. “The houses are destroyed and the livelihood is gone, but our will to live is stronger. We will build again.”
In recent days, Israeli officials have cited concerns that Hezbollah remains active in southern Lebanon and doubts about the Lebanese Army’s ability to stymie the group.
Those claims could not be independently verified, and the five-member committee overseeing the implementation of the cease-fire has not publicly released any information regarding Hezbollah’s compliance with the terms of the truce.
The situation poses a critical test for Lebanon’s new leaders, President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister-designate Nawaf Salam, as they seek to wrest back some political control from Hezbollah, the country’s dominant political and military force, and build a functioning state. Mr. Aoun urged civilians to exercise restraint on Sunday, but stressed that the country’s sovereignty was “nonnegotiable.”
Any prolonged Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon could breathe new life into Hezbollah, a group that was founded to liberate Lebanon from Israeli occupation and that has portrayed itself as the only force capable of protecting Lebanon’s borders, experts say.
It also threatens to derail the current political momentum in Lebanon, where for the first time in decades there is a serious push to consolidate all military power within the state and do away with Hezbollah’s justification for its vast arsenal.
The focus in Lebanon now is toward “disarming Hezbollah and transitioning from the era in which Hezbollah was seen as having the right to acquire weapons,” said Mohanad Hage Ali, the deputy director for research at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, the Lebanese capital. Any prolonged Israeli occupation “would put the breaks on that momentum, which is happening organically,” he added.
Hezbollah officials did not respond to Israel’s accusations that the group remained militarily active in southern Lebanon, but said that they were “committed” to upholding the terms of the truce.
On Saturday, Lebanese Army officials said they were prepared to complete their deployment in the south.This month, the American general overseeing the cease-fire monitoring committee expressed confidence in the Lebanese Army’s ability to secure southern Lebanon. The army continues to demonstrate that “it has the capability, intent and leadership to secure and defend Lebanon,” Maj. Gen. Jasper Jeffers said in a statement.
The 60-day truce took effect more than a year after Hezbollah began firing rockets toward Israeli positions in solidarity with its ally Hamas, the Palestinian militant group in Gaza that led the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. Israel retaliated by assassinating Hezbollah’s leadership, leveling towns and villages along the border and invading southern Lebanon.
Even before Sunday’s deadline, thousands of Lebanese who were displaced by the war from homes along the southern border were preparing to return home. On Saturday, the main highway leading from Beirut to southern Lebanon was packed with cars, even as people received automated phone calls from the Israeli military warning them not to return home.
Israeli forces appeared to be continuing efforts that persisted during the 60-day truce to bulldoze and block roads between some villages in southern Lebanon, according to local news media. Israel currently occupies roughly 70 percent of the areas that it captured after invading Lebanon last fall, according to the United Nations peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon.
Hezbollah has not said how it plans to respond to Israel’s continued occupation of Lebanese soil. Some Hezbollah lawmakers have vowed retaliation. But other officials from Hezbollah instead shifted responsibility for responding to Israel to the Lebanese government. The group’s statement on Friday said that it was up to the state “to reclaim the land and wrest it from the grip of the occupation.”
That shifting of responsibility is a tried-and-true tactic for Hezbollah, which just a few months ago had called on the state to provide for thousands of Lebanese displaced by a war it had pulled the country into. Still, the political posturing from a group whose founding principle is resisting Israeli occupation reflects Hezbollah’s current weakened state.
After 14 months of fighting, the Shiite Muslim group’s military ranks are battered, and its loyal support base is weary. Its patron Iran has also been weakened by Israel.And in neighboring Syria, rebels toppled an Iran ally, the dictator Bashar al-Assad, cutting off Hezbollah’s land bridge for receiving weapons and cash from Iran.
These blows have loosened Hezbollah’s once iron grasp on political power in Lebanon, shifting the country’s political sands for the first time in decades. This month, Lebanese lawmakers elected a new president, Mr. Aoun, after years of political gridlock that many analysts had attributed to Hezbollah. Days later, lawmakers named Mr. Salam, a prominent diplomat whom Hezbollah had long opposed, as prime minister.
Still, Middle East experts have warned against writing off Hezbollah’s political weight. And if Israel continues to occupy Lebanon, it could revitalize the group’s mostly Shiite Muslim support base as it looks for a patron and protector against Israeli forces.
“I believe neither parties have an interest in resuming the war,” said Sami Nader, the director of the Institute of Political Science at Saint Joseph University of Beirut. “But as long as Israel is occupying Lebanon, it’s reviving the narrative of Hezbollah.”
Hwaida Saad, Dayana Iwaza and Sara Chaito contributed reporting.
Israel is blocking Gazans from returning north and accusing Hamas of violating the cease-fire.
Israeli troops were preventing Palestinians from returning to their homes in the north of the Gaza Strip on Sunday as Israel and Hamas accused each other of violating the terms of the cease-fire agreement that went into effect a week ago.
Under the terms of the initial phase of the deal agreed to this month, Israel had been expected to withdraw some of its forces to allow hundreds of thousands of displaced Gazans to head north after a hostage and prisoner exchange on Saturday.
But Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, an Israeli military spokesman, accused Hamas on Saturday of violating the deal by not returning captive Israeli civilians first. Israeli officials said that under the agreement, Arbel Yehud, an Israeli held hostage in Gaza, was supposed to be one of the four women released on Saturday.
The hostages released were all soldiers who had been lookouts at a base on the Gaza border and were abducted from there on Oct. 7, 2023, during the Hamas-led attack on Israel that began the war.
The office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said that it would not allow Gazans to head north “until the release of the civilian Arbel Yehud has been arranged,” leaving the timing of the troop withdrawal and the residents’ return unclear.
Hamas on Sunday accused Israel of stalling and of breaching the agreement by preventing displaced Gazans from moving north.
In a statement, Hamas said that it had informed the mediators that Ms. Yehud was alive and had given “all the necessary guarantees for her release,” adding that it was following up with the mediators in the hope of resolving the dispute — one of the most significant between the parties since the cease-fire took effect after 15 months of devastating war.
The cease-fire deal was mediated by the United States, Qatar and Egypt. Israeli officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Hamas’s claims.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
South Korea’s impeached and arrested president, Yoon Suk Yeol, was formally indicted on Sunday on charges of leading an insurrection last month when he briefly imposed martial law, prosecutors said.
Mr. Yoon’s indictment means that his trial is likely to start soon. It follows the indictments of a former defense minister and several military generals and police chiefs, all of whom face criminal charges of helping Mr. Yoon commit the same crime.
He is the first president in South Korean history to face criminal charges while still in office.
His downfall began when he unexpectedly declared martial law on Dec. 3, accusing the opposition-controlled National Assembly of “paralyzing” his government. The Assembly voted the measure down, forcing him to rescind the order after about six hours. But it has set off South Korea’s worst political crisis in decades.
As people called for Mr. Yoon’s ouster, the Assembly impeached him on Dec. 14, suspending him from office. The country’s Constitutional Court is deliberating whether the parliamentary impeachment was legitimate and if he should be formally removed from office. Separately, criminal investigators detained Mr. Yoon on the insurrection charges on Jan. 15.
From his jail cell, Mr. Yoon has vowed to fight to regain office.
A majority of South Koreans approved of his impeachment and consider him guilty of insurrection, according to public opinion polls. But Mr. Yoon’s die-hard supporters have called his impeachment “fraud.” Some of them shocked the country when they vandalized a courthouse in Seoul after one of its judges approved a warrant to arrest him on Jan. 19. Nearly 60 people were arrested in connection with that unrest.
Prosecutors said that Mr. Yoon committed insurrection during the short-lived imposition of marital law when, they said, he banned all political activities and ordered military commanders to break the Assembly’s doors down “with axes” or “by shooting, if necessary” and “drag out” lawmakers. They said Mr. Yoon sent the troops there to seize the Assembly and detain political leaders.
The nation watched the live-streamed scenes of special forces troops armed with assault rifles storming the Assembly as lawmakers were gathering there to vote against martial law. But Mr. Yoon has rejected the charge of insurrection, saying that he never intended to neutralize the Parliament or arrest political leaders. The troops were there to “keep order,” he said.
Mr. Yoon’s indictment, although not a surprise, came sooner than expected.
State prosecutors have been investigating the former defense minister and generals. The country’s Corruption Investigation Office for High-ranking Officials took on the insurrection case against Mr. Yoon, but by law, only prosecutors can indict him.
Mr. Yoon has refused to cooperate with the inquiry; he and his lawyers have insisted that the four-year-old office has no right to investigate him.
On Thursday, the Corruption Investigation Office handed his case over to prosecutors. The two had earlier agreed that prosecutors had until early February to indict Mr. Yoon, and prosecutors had planned to further investigate Mr. Yoon’s actions.
But on Friday, a judge in a Seoul court ruled that Mr. Yoon must be either be indicted sooner or released because the Corruption Investigation Office had already done an investigation.
Israel Blocks Gazans From North, Accusing Hamas of Cease-Fire Breach
Some troops had been expected to withdraw to allow hundreds of thousands of displaced Gazans to go home. But the military said the hostage exchange before that step had not gone as agreed.
Israeli troops were preventing Palestinians from returning to their homes in the north of the Gaza Strip on Sunday as Israel and Hamas accused each other of violating the terms of the cease-fire agreement that went into effect a week ago.
Under the terms of the initial phase of the deal agreed to this month, Israel had been expected to withdraw some of its forces to allow hundreds of thousands of displaced Gazans to head north after a hostage and prisoner exchange on Saturday.
But Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, an Israeli military spokesman, accused Hamas on Saturday of violating the deal by not returning captive Israeli civilians first. Israeli officials said that under the agreement, Arbel Yehud, an Israeli held hostage in Gaza, was supposed to be one of the four women released on Saturday.
The hostages released were all soldiers who had been lookouts at a base on the Gaza border and were abducted from there on Oct. 7, 2023, during the Hamas-led attack on Israel that began the war.
The office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said that it would not allow Gazans to head north “until the release of the civilian Arbel Yehud has been arranged,” leaving the timing of the troop withdrawal and the residents’ return unclear.
Hamas on Sunday accused Israel of stalling and of breaching the agreement by preventing displaced Gazans from moving north.
In a statement, Hamas said that it had informed the mediators that Ms. Yehud was alive and had given “all the necessary guarantees for her release,” adding that it was following up with the mediators in the hope of resolving the dispute — one of the most significant between the parties since the cease-fire took effect after 15 months of devastating war.
The cease-fire deal was mediated by the United States, Qatar and Egypt. Israeli officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Hamas’s claims.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.