Reuters World News - Royal photo, Islamic State probe, Trump’s cash woes and Detroit's auto win

Episode Date: March 20, 2024

A second royal photograph distributed by Kensington Palace is discovered to have been edited in eight places. The UN mission probing ISIS crimes in Iraq is forced to shut down early. Donald Trump’s failure to secure a bond for the $454 million he owes in a New York case has become an issue in the presidential race. And the Biden administration’s decision to ease up on its electric vehicle push solves one political dilemma but creates another. Visit the Thomson Reuters Privacy Statement for information on our privacy and data protection practices. You may also visit megaphone.fm/adchoices to opt out of targeted advertising. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, another doctored photograph lands the British royal family in trouble. UN investigators in Iraq are in a race against time. Trump scrambles for cash as Biden wooes Michigan auto workers with relaxed EV rules. And the World Happiness Survey puts the Nordics at the top again. It's Wednesday, March 20th. This is Royce's World News, bringing you everything you need to know from the front of lines in 10 minutes every weekday. I'm Kim Vinal in London. Britain's royal family is at the centre of another doctored picture controversy. Kensington Palace released the photo last April to mark what

would have been the Queen's 97th birthday. It showed the former monarch surrounded by some of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren and had been taken by Kate. But Reuters' editors discovered it had been digitally altered in eight places. Suzanne Plunkett is Reuters' chief photographer for the UK. Suzanne, why did Reuters not pick this up at the time? We have certain sources that we trust, like Kensington Palace and Buckingham Palace. Those are sources that we receive the pictures,

and we'll put them out. And then we have a visual verification team for sources that we might not trust or new sources. So we would have missed it the picture in the first time because we trusted Kensington Palace. And we did just yesterday, had a meeting with the King's Press Secretary, and we spoke to him about going forward, how they'll distribute their pictures. So they will be sending us the original file along with a picture, and they will let us know anything that they've done to change the photo. How do you look for digital alterations? Is there an

AI program that does that? Or does somebody physically sit down and get a. magnifying glass. We expand the picture to 100% resolution so that we can see every single pixel. And it's whenever pixels are moved around. As Rödish photographers, we talk about selecting the picture, cropping the picture, making minimal adjustments. But we would never move pixels around. And that's what we're looking for. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defying a plea from Joe Biden to call off a planned ground assault of Rafa. Netanyahu told lawmakers he had informed Biden that a ground invasion into Rafa was crucial

to eradicating Hamas. Rafa is the last refuge for more than a million displaced people. U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is heading to the Middle East today for a sixth visit since Israel's war against Hamas began in October. Last year, every major global climate record was broken. and 2024 could be worse. That's the message from the World Meteorological Organization, which says it has particular concern about ocean heat and shrinking sea ice.

A law allowing Texas to arrest people suspected of crossing the U.S. border illegally has been blocked just hours after the Supreme Court cleared the way for it to come into effect. A late-night ruling from the New Orleans-based Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals halted the enforcement of the law ahead of oral arguments on the issue, scheduled for today. Markets are on edge waiting for the Federal Reserve to conclude its latest policy meeting today. No change in rates is expected. But investors are watching to see whether policy makers will trim the number of anticipated rate cuts this year to two 25 basis point cuts from the three projected in December.

There's only six months left on the clock before a UN mission investigating alleged Islamic State war crimes is forced to shut down. Iraq's decision to end Unitad, the UN investigative team to promote accountability for crimes committed by Daesh, throws into question what's next in the quest for justice. Justice for victims like these Yazidi mourners, whose family members were killed by Islamic state, their bodies exhumed from mass graves by Unitad. Timor Azari is in Iraq. Timor, how did we get to this point? A lot of the issues between this mission and Iraq were sort of baked in from the beginning. Unitad was in the awkward position of gathering all of this evidence in Iraq and using it in trials abroad,

but it couldn't actually use it within the country. That led to a lot of frustration among the Iraqi side, who felt basically that they had these foreign investigators in their country going around, gathering witness testimony, but then they weren't actually benefiting from it here. Where does this move leave the outstanding cases and the victims who are still seeking justice? We spoke to the head of the mission, and he was very clear that by September, they will not finish all of their investigative lines. And they've contributed to convictions abroad, including the first ever conviction of an Iraqi ISIS fighter, for genocide in Germany in 2021.

And so a lot of people fear that those processes will basically stop, and that will affect the ability to hold ISIS criminals accountable across the world. On a practical level, what happens next? What happens to the evidence? What the head of the mission said he wants to avoid is that this evidence basically ends up in a dead archive in a UN basement. Iraq wants all of that evidence to be handed over, but because of the concerns about some of the due process issues, death penalty, and also simple things

like capacity and systems that the Iraqi state does not have, that seems unlikely. So we're really in a position where those negotiations are ongoing. And it's a bit of a race against time before the mandate of UNITAD ends in September. Donald Trump's failure to secure a bond for the $454 million he owes in a New York civil fraud case has become a central issue in the presidential race. Trump, who was found liable for inflating his property values to dupe lenders and insurers, wrote on his social media platform that he may be forced to mortgage or sell part of his real estate holdings at buyer-sale prices to secure a bond. Greg Rommeliottis, our U.S. corporate finance editor has been digging through Trump's court filing this week, asking an appeals court to delay

the judgment. What the filing doesn't address is why Trump is not using the substantial equity, as he calls it, in his properties, to raise the cash needed for the bond. So we don't know exactly how much leverage, how much dead Trump has on his properties, but if he doesn't have much, he could go to a bank or private equity firm and borrow against those assets to raise cash that then can be used with an insurance firm to post a bond. So there's a lot of unanswered questions around this narrative that his lawyers have created in the filing, which of course the aim is to convince a judge to reduce the size of the bond required. The Biden administration is easing up on its aggressive push for higher fuel efficiency and a fast transition to electric vehicles.

The decision is a win for Detroit and for Michigan, a key battleground for Biden as he seeks a second term. Global automotive correspondent Joe White is in Detroit. Joe, why are they softening these rules? Last year, the Biden administration put out proposed rules for automotive tailpipe emissions and some related rules that affected how much credit automakers get for selling electric vehicles. And if you put those all together, those rules were going to push the U.S. automakers to increase the share of electric vehicles to 67%, basically two-thirds of the market by

2032. The automakers, and more importantly, the United Auto Workers, the union that represents workers at the Detroit Three, said those were just too aggressive, unrealistic, and not in step with the market. And in the year that has passed, the automakers have basically successfully argued that their businesses would be at risk if they were forced to ramp up EV sales that quickly. It's helped them that EV demand has slowed down in the United States. What's the political angle here for Biden? Michigan is a must win for Joe Biden. It's also a must win for his Republican rival Donald Trump. Michigan is home to tens of thousands of auto workers who built combustion, oil burning, gasoline burning trucks and SUVs. Rightly or wrongly,

many of these voters believe that electric vehicles are threat to their jobs and their livelihoods. And so the Biden administration is very much caught between two important constituencies. One, it's a very large constituency of people who believe that shifting to electric vehicles is essential to containing the damage from climate change. The other constituency are those auto workers and voters in Michigan, and President Biden needs every single one of their votes, basically, in order to win. So it's very much an election year calculation by the Biden administration. The sound of some of the happiest people on the president.

the planet. Residents of Finland enjoying a late-night swim and taking in the northern lights in a country that has once again topped the World Happiness Report. The US is now out of the top 20 at 23rd in the world. That's it for Wednesday's episode. We'll be back tomorrow with our daily headline show. If you want to stay ahead of what's happening in the world, listen in for 10 minutes every weekday. And don't forget to subscribe on your favourite podcast player or download the Reuters app.