Photo shows earthquake in Japan in 2024, not from recent Russian jolt
It also shares a photo of a group of people congregating in an area with the ground severely damaged.
Image
Screenshot of the false post taken on July 31, 2024, with the red X mark added by AFP
Several other users on Facebook shared the same claim the day a magnitude 8.8 quake struck off Petropavlovsk on Russia's remote Kamchatka peninsula and was one of the 10 biggest recorded, according to the US Geological Survey (archived link).
More than a dozen nations -- from Japan to the United States to Ecuador -- warned citizens to stay away from coastal regions, but later said they could return after fears of a catastrophe were not realised (archived link).
Russia also lifted the the quake and tsunami spared the sparsely populated far east from casualties and major damage (archived link).
The circulating photo, however, shows a different quake.
Reverse image searches on Google led to a news report that Japanese news agency Kyodo News published on January 2, 2024 (archived link).
The photo's caption indicates that it was taken in Wajima, Ishikawa Prefecture, after a strong earthquake struck central Japan on New Year's Day.
Image
Screenshot comparison of the false post (L) and the 2024 photo published by Kyodo News
It was Japan's deadliest earthquake in over a decade, claiming nearly 470 lives (archived link).
Around half the victims were killed in the disaster itself, which brought tsunami waves and sparked a huge fire in Wajima's city centre, burning down a historic market.
The rest perished later, as hundreds of aftershocks and cold weather compounded stress for survivors, including 40,000 people -- many elderly -- evacuated to shelters in school gyms and community centres.
Other news outlets such as The Los Angeles Times and France24 also published the same photo on January 1, 2024 (archived here and here).
Subsequent keyword searches on Google geolocated the photo to Wajima Junior High School in Japan's Ishikawa Prefecture (archived link).
A Google Maps street view image of the school shows the identical grey building from the false posts.
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Screenshot comparison of the false post (L) and the Google Maps Street View of Wajima Junior High School
AFP has repeatedly debunked misinformation triggered by disasters such as earthquakes.
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France 24
12 hours ago
- France 24
Chaos, gangs, gunfire: Gaza aid fails to reach most needy
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"A truck wheel almost crushed my head, and I was injured retrieving the bag," sighed a man, carrying a bag of flour on his head, in the Zikim area, in the northern Gaza Strip. 'Truly tragic' Mohammad Abu Taha went at dawn to a distribution site near Rafah in the south to join the queue and reserve his spot. He said there were already "thousands waiting, all hungry, for a bag of flour or a little rice and lentils." "Suddenly, we heard gunshots….. There was no way to escape. People started running, pushing and shoving each other, children, women, the elderly," said the 42-year-old. "The scene was truly tragic: blood everywhere, wounded, dead." Nearly 1,400 Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza Strip while waiting for aid since May 27, the majority by the Israeli army, the United Nations said on Friday. Air drops such as those carried out by France are not seen as sufficient © AHMAD GHARABLI / AFP The Israeli army denies any targeting, insisting it only fires "warning shots" when people approach too close to its positions. International organisations have for months condemned the restrictions imposed by the Israeli authorities on aid distribution in Gaza, including refusing to issue border crossing permits, slow customs clearance, limited access points, and imposing dangerous routes. On Tuesday, in Zikim, the Israeli army "changed loading plans for WFP, mixing cargo unexpectedly. The convoy was forced to leave early, without proper security," said a senior UN official who spoke on condition of anonymity. In the south of Gaza, at the Kerem Shalom border crossing, "there are two possible routes to reach our warehouses (in central Gaza)," said an NGO official, who also preferred to remain anonymous. "One is fairly safe, the other is regularly the scene of fighting and looting, and that's the one we're forced to take." 'Darwinian experiment' Some of the aid is looted by gangs -- who often directly attack warehouses -- and diverted to traders who resell it at exorbitant prices, according to several humanitarian sources and experts. "It becomes this sort of Darwinian social experiment of the survival of the fittest," said Muhammad Shehada, visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR). Palestinians rush towards the aid drops © - / AFP "People who are the most starved in the world and do not have the energy must run and chase after a truck and wait for hours and hours in the sun and try to muscle people and compete for a bag of flour," he said. Jean Guy Vataux, emergency coordinator for Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in Gaza, added: "We're in an ultra-capitalist system, where traders and corrupt gangs send kids to risk life and limb at distribution points or during looting. It's become a new profession." This food is then resold to "those who can still afford it" in the markets of Gaza City, where the price of a 25-kilogramme bag of flour can exceed $400, he added. – 'Never found proof' - Israel has repeatedly accused Hamas of looting aid supplied by the UN, which has been delivering the bulk of aid since the start of the war triggered by the militant group's October 2023 attack. The Israeli authorities have used this accusation to justify the total blockade they imposed on Gaza between March and May, and the subsequent establishment of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a private organisation supported by Israel and the United States which has become the main aid distributor, sidelining UN agencies. 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Aid workers told AFP that during the ceasefire that preceded the March blockade, the Gaza police -- which includes many Hamas members -- helped secure humanitarian convoys, but that the current power vacuum was fostering insecurity and looting. "UN agencies and humanitarian organisations have repeatedly called on Israeli authorities to facilitate and protect aid convoys and storage sites in our warehouses across the Gaza Strip," said Bushra Khalidi, policy lead at Oxfam. "These calls have largely been ignored," she added. 'All kinds of criminal activities' The Israeli army is also accused of having equipped Palestinian criminal networks in its fight against Hamas and of allowing them to plunder aid. "The real theft of aid since the beginning of the war has been carried out by criminal gangs, under the watch of Israeli forces, and they were allowed to operate in proximity to the Kerem Shalom crossing point into Gaza," Jonathan Whittall, Palestinian territories chief of the UN humanitarian office (OCHA), told reporters in May. According to Israeli and Palestinian media reports, an armed group called the Popular Forces, made up of members of a Bedouin tribe led by Yasser Abu Shabab, is operating in the southern region under Israeli control. Food is distributed in chaotic fashion © Omar AL-QATTAA / AFP The ECFR describes Abu Shabab as leading a "criminal gang operating in the Rafah area that is widely accused of looting aid trucks". The Israeli authorities themselves acknowledged in June that they had armed Palestinian gangs opposed to Hamas, without directly naming the one led by Abu Shabab. Michael Milshtein, head of the Palestinian Studies Forum at the Moshe Dayan Center of Tel Aviv University, said many of the gang's members were implicated in "all kinds of criminal activities, drug smuggling, and things like that". "None of this can happen in Gaza without the approval, at least tacit, of the Israeli army," said a humanitarian worker in Gaza, asking not to be named. © 2025 AFP
Local France
a day ago
- Local France
Do the French say 'deja-vu'?
The French language has gifted quite a few phrases and expressions to English, but often within France itself these phrases have a slightly different meaning (like voilà or oh là là ) or are simply not used any more ( sacré bleu ). So what about deja-vu? The phrase itself is made up of déjà meaning 'already' (note the accents that appear in the French version) and vu , the past participle of the verb voir , to see. It therefore means 'already seen'. You'll hear the constituent parts all the time in daily conversation, as well as the words together in certain contexts - eg J'ai déjà vu ce film - I've already seen the film. Advertisement But the phrase déjà-vu , written with a hyphen, is also used in French, where it is masculine. The pronunciation is slightly different, leaning more on the second syllable of déjà - more like day-JHA - rather than on the first which is more common in English. Le déjà-vu describes a sense of having already witnessed a scene or a conversation, accompanied by a slight feeling of strangeness or unreality. It's a form of paramnesia, and is essentially caused by the wiring in your brain getting slightly mixed up and filing something as a memory rather than a new experience. It's estimated that around 70 percent of people experience it from time to time. The reason that so many languages around the world use the French phrase is that the phenomenon was first described by the French philosopher Émile Boirac, in his 1876 book L'Avenir des sciences psychiques (the future of psychological science). In everyday conversation, you can distinguish déjà-vu from a more normal sense of having already seen something by the pronoun - if it's le déjà-vu then it's referring to the spooky brain trick. You may also hear une sensation du déjà-vu - a sense of deja-vu. For example Le déjà-vu peut être mineur, de faible durée, de quelques secondes à 1 ou 2 minutes, il apparaît et disparaît rapidement - Deja-vu can be minor, lasting from a few seconds to one or two minutes, appearing and disappearing rapidly Je viens d'avoir un petit air de déjà-vu - I just had a bit of deja-vu Je m'ennuie et j'ai déjà vu Netflix - I'm bored and I've already watched Netflix
AFP
3 days ago
- AFP
Months-old videos depict Myanmar tremor, not Russian quake
"Tonight (July 30), a powerful 8.7-magnitude earthquake struck off the Russian Kamchatka Peninsula, categorised as a 'very shallow earthquake'," reads part of the traditional Chinese caption of a Threads clip shared on July 30, 2025. The clip appears to show CCTV footage of the inside of a shop as a tremor hits, sending shelves crashing down. A similar TikTok video, also shared on July 30, shows staff scrambling for cover under desks as the quake strikes. "Sad news from Russia. An 8.7 earthquake followed by a tsunami happened this morning," reads its Indonesian-language caption. Image Screenshots of the false Threads and TikTok posts captured on July 31, 2025, with red Xs added by AFP They surfaced hours after an 8.8-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Russia's far eastern Kamchatka peninsula, prompting evacuations and tsunami alerts across parts of the Pacific coast (archived link). Fears of a catastrophe subsided, however, with country after country lifting or downgrading warnings and telling coastal residents they could return. The circulating clips were also shared in similar Douyin, Facebook, Instagram and X posts. But the clips in fact show the impact of a different earthquake. Myanmar temblor A closer analysis of the first falsely shared clip shows a timecode in its top-right corner that reads, "2025-03-28", which is when a 7.7-magnitude quake struck northwest of the city of Sagaing in central Myanmar (archived link). were killed in the quake, which destroyed swathes of homes and businesses (archived link). Image Screenshot of the falsely shared clip, with the timecode magnified by AFP A reverse image search on Google using keyframes from the falsely shared clip led to a longer version that was shared on TikTok on March 30 by an account called "Top One Mobile" (archived link). "It's not easy to run within three seconds," reads its Burmese-language caption. Image Screenshot comparison of the falsely shared clip (left) and the TikTok video posted in March (right) The account also shared a similar video from a different angle (archived link). Subsequent keyword searches led to the same footage posted on the YouTube channel "2025 Sagaing Earthquake Archive", which said it showed a shop in Tada-U, Myanmar (archived link). Google Maps images of the Top One store front match other videos posted by the TikTok account (archived here and here). An analysis of the second falsely shared clip shows a decal on the wall that reads, "Lady Bug". A combination of keyword searches and reverse image searches led to a TikTok video posted on May 7, on the account of a salon and cosmetics supplier called Lady Bug (archived link). The video's Burmese-language caption includes a hashtag for the March 28 earthquake, and says the staff shown in the video were safe. The date, "2025-03-28", can also be seen in the video's top-right corner. Image Screenshot comparison of the falsely shared clip (left) and the video posted in May (right) The shop also shared the video on their Facebook page on May 11, alongside an announcement that the branch on 62nd Street in the central city of Mandalay had to be demolished because of damage caused by the quake (archived link). "We are looking for a new location for the shop and we will be back soon," it adds. Google Maps imagery of the location in Mandalay now shows a flattened plot (archived link). AFP has also debunked other misinformation, which often surfaces after natural disasters, related to the July 30 quake.
