Iran launched drones and missiles at Israel on April 13, but subsequent claims about Russia’s support for the Islamic Republic don’t reflect news reports about the attack.
“BREAKING: Russian President Vladimir Putin has declared that RUSSIA will SUPPORT IRAN if the United States attacks Iran’s soil in support of Israel,” read the text in an April 13 Facebook post, above an image of Putin and Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi smiling and shaking hands.
This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
We found no credible news reports that Putin made such a declaration.
Rather, on April 16, Putin’s first public comments about the attack called for a ceasefire and urged “all sides” in the Middle East to “show reasonable restraint and prevent a new round of confrontation fraught with catastrophic consequences for the entire region,” according to the Kremlin.
Iranian state media, meanwhile, quoted Putin as saying Tehran’s response to Israel was the best way to punish the country, Reuters reported.
The photo of Putin and Raisi predates Iran’s attack on Israel. It was taken in December, when the two presidents met in Moscow.
We rate the claim that Putin has declared that Russia “will support Iran if the United States attacks Iran’s soil in support of Israel” False.
E.T. will not be phoning home a second time — a supposed movie poster advertising an “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” sequel is fabricated.
The image, shared in an April 13 Facebook post, shows what looks like an older, wizened E.T.
The words “E.T. The Return To Earth” appear above him and “Summer 2025” below him.
This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
This poster image appears to have originated on a Facebook page that posts fabricated movie images and describes itself as “100% satire and fake news.”
The entertainment website ScreenRant said in April that plans for an E.T. sequel were tabled “to preserve the original’s integrity and reputation.”
We found no credible news reports claiming that an E.T. sequel is forthcoming.
It’s no secret that Congress hasn’t exactly been very productive lately.
Between the time spent on political disagreements and infighting, it’s seemed as if there hasn’t been a lot of time to debate and pass legislation.
There have been disagreements over who will serve as speaker of the House, a border deal reached and then nixed, stalled aid for Ukraine and arguments over the funding to keep the government running. And that’s not to mention the political divide between the Republican-controlled House and the Democratic-controlled Senate.
At a March 27 event, U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan, a Democrat from the town of Vermont in Dane County, talked about how hard it has been this session to get things accomplished.
“We passed 27 bills last year, which is the fewest since the Depression.”
Let’s take a closer look at that claim.
The 72nd Congress passed only 21 bills during the Great Depression
The Great Depression took place from 1929 to 1941, marking one of the deepest plunges of America’s industrial economy.
During the early years of the Depression, the 72nd Congress (which ran from 1931 to 1933) only sent 21 bills to President Herbert Hoover for a signature.
But Congress didn’t actually meet when the session started, due to 14 members dying between the election and that start of the session, according to a Jan. 23 story from NBC News. The number of deaths and subsequent elections actually ended up flipping the control of the House from Republicans to Democrats.
The 72nd Congress did pass some significant measures — the 20th amendment, which set the beginning and ending dates for the terms of the president, the vice president, and members of Congress; and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation Act, which provided loans to banks, according to NBC News.
But, with 21 bills passed as the benchmark, let’s look at more recent terms.
118th Congress passed 27 bills in 2023
For the 118th Congress (which runs from 2023 to 2024), things aren’t exactly moving smoothly. According to a Dec. 19, 2023, report from The New York Times, though there were more than 700 votes in 2023, only 27 bills made it across the finish line.
That number is low, compared to other recent Congressional sessions, according to a report from the Pew Research Center.
For example, the 93rd Congress (which ran from 1973 to 1974), passed 772 bills. The 104th Congress (1995-1996) passed 337. The 116th (from 2019 to 2020) passed 344. And according to a report from ABC News, the 117th Congress (from 2022 to 2023) passed 362 bills in total.
Among the votes taken so far by the 118th Congress last year was one to officially end the national emergency related to the COVID-19 pandemic, create a commemorative coin for the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Marine Corps and several bills regarding benefits for veterans, the Times story said.
In the 118th Congress, Republicans have struggled with a small majority that requires virtual unanimity, deep party divisions preventing that unanimity, and conservative members who want to rein in government and not pass new laws to broaden its reach, according to another Dec. 19, 2023, report from The New York Times.
Even in other years with a divided government — such as 2013, in which Republicans controlled the House and Democrats controlled the Senate — more work was being accomplished. During that year, 72 bills were passed, according to the New York Times, a low number for the number of bills passed. The 113th Congress ended up passing 296 bills between 2013 and 2014, according to Pew.
Our ruling
Pocan claimed that Congress last year passed the fewest number of bills since the Great Depression.
It turns out the last time Congress passed so few bills was during the 1931-1933 session, during which only 21 bills made it to the president’s desk — over a two-year period.
This Congress last year passed 27 bills, not many more than that slow 1930s Congress.
Former President Donald Trump spread false and misleading statements about his Manhattan criminal trial as lawyers haggled over choosing jurors and the judge faced a new request to skip a day on Trump’s behalf.
Trump is charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records in an alleged scheme to cover up a hush money payment to adult film actor Stormy Daniels before the 2016 presidential election.
Unusual scenes played out in and out of the courtroom during the first criminal trial of a former U.S. president.
Defense lawyers and prosecutors examined jurors’ social media posts and probed them about their feelings on Trump. Meanwhile, reporters described the Republican presidential nominee at times dozing off in court, which Trump’s campaign denied. After Trump appeared to mutter in the direction of a juror, Judge Juan Merchan told defense attorneys to speak to him: “I will not have any jurors intimidated in this courtroom,” Merchan said.
Trump spoke to gathered reporters before and after each day of jury selection, making familiar and baseless accusations about what he called a “conflicted” judge and calling the trial a “political persecution.” On his social media platform, Truth Social, he repeated his misleading characterization of the matter as a “Biden case.”
Here’s a look at some of Trump’s misleading statements about the trial.
Donald Trump discusses his request to have his trial delayed a day to attend his son’s graduation in Florida. (AP, YouTube)
Trump says judge prohibited him from attending son’s graduation
On the first day of jury selection, Trump asked Merchan not to hold trial on May 17 so he could attend his son Barron’s high school graduation. The school ceremony at Oxbridge Academy in Palm Beach, Florida, is scheduled for 10 a.m. that day and the trial is expected to last six to eight weeks.
Trump made some conflicting comments to reporters and on Truth Social about the judge’s response. Trump sometimes said the judge “likely” wouldn’t allow him to attend but at other times described it as a decision already announced: Merchan “is preventing me from proudly attending my son’s Graduation,” he wrote April 15.
Merchan has ruled on neither Trump’s request, nor a separate request from a Trump lawyer whose own son is graduating June 3, The Associated Press reported.
Merchan seemed open to the idea of adjourning for one or both days.
“It really depends on how we’re doing on time and where we are in the trial,” Merchan said, according to The Associated Press.
Criminal law experts cited legitimate reasons for Merchan to wait on that decision. Merchan will likely consider how a temporary adjournment would affect the trial’s participants, including the lawyers, witnesses and jurors.
Nancy S. Marder, a jury scholar and professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law, said the judge has scheduling discretion.
“The judge might consider where they are in the trial, what other breaks or days away from the trial have already been taken,” Marder said.
Sharon R. Fairley, a former federal prosecutor and current professor at the University of Chicago Law School, said it can be awkward to take whole days off during trial, potentially breaking up the “flow of the evidence.” “For example,” she said, “May 17 could fall right in the middle of the cross-examination of an important witness.”
Evan Gotlob, a white-collar criminal defense attorney and former prosecutor, said the trial may even be over before May 17. “Why make a decision you do not have to make?”
Protesters for and against Donald Trump demonstrate April 15, 2024, outside Manhattan criminal court in New York. (AP)
Trump omits the limits of the gag order
Trump continued to criticize Merchan’s gag order, which barred Trump from speaking about witnesses, court staff or their family members. The order said he is also not allowed to speak outside of court about counsel in the case, except for Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney. Trump is also free to criticize Merchan away from court, and has.
“This conflicted, Trump Hating Judge won’t let me respond to people that are on TV lying and spewing hate all day long,” Trump said in an April 16 Truth Social post. “I want to speak, or at least be able to respond. Election Interference! RIGGED, UNCONSTITUTIONAL TRIAL! Take off the Gag Order!!!”
Trump’s lawyers have challenged the gag order, and courts will have the final say. Legal experts said Trump should not be allowed to make comments that incite violence.
Jon Sale, a Miami white-collar criminal defense attorney, said one potentially unfair aspect of the order is that although Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, has frequently talked about the case on television, Trump cannot rebut what Cohen says unless he does so in court. Cohen was convicted of multiple offenses.
However, experts told PolitiFact the law supports gag orders.
“This case law goes back decades,” said Stephen Gillers, a professor at New York University School of Law. “Merchan followed it.”
In this courtroom sketch, former President Donald Trump smiles to the jury pool April 15, 2024, as he is introduced at the beginning of his trial in Manhattan state court. (AP)
Trump misfires on practice for removing jurors
Trump criticized how prospective jurors were removed — or struck — from the pool.
“I thought STRIKES were supposed to be ‘unlimited’ when we were picking our jury?” Trump wrote in an April 17 Truth Social post. “I was then told we only had 10.”
There are two paths by which prosecution and defense may seek to remove or strike prospective jurors.
The first is “for cause,” which means for a stated and qualified reason such as bias. The second is “peremptory,” which means the prosecution or defense doesn’t need to give a reason, Marder said. The cause strikes are unlimited, but the peremptory strikes for each side are capped based on the level of felony charge in this case. In Trump’s trial, they’re set at 10 for each side for the regular jurors.
The prosecutor or defense can raise a challenge for cause, but that doesn’t mean it will be granted, and the judge can raise a for cause challenge on his own, Marder said. The lawyers get to decide how to exercise their limited number of peremptory challenges. Jurors may not be challenged based on their race, religion, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation.
Why limit peremptory challenges? It speeds up finding the final jury.
Lawyers, Gotlob said, “would just be kicking off people all day long, you would never have a jury.”
Trump’s defense challenged some jurors based on their social media posts. Merchan struck a prospective juror who cheered on social media after Trump lost a court challenge to his Muslim travel ban: “Get him out and lock him up,” the person’s post had said. But Merchan declined to strike a prospective juror who wrote “Republicans projected to pick up 70 seats in prison.”
“She was pretty open and honest that she has disagreements with his political views,” Merchan said after agreeing with the prosecution’s argument that the woman’s posts were satirical. “But the question is whether she can be fair and impartial.”
RELATED: A fact-checker’s guide to Trump’s first criminal trial: business records, hush money and a gag order
RELATED: Read all of PolitiFact’s coverage on Donald Trump indictments
RELATED:Timeline: What Donald Trump has said about Stormy Daniels and $130,000 payment
Part of President Joe Biden’s election year pitch to Latino voters includes a promise to lower health care costs.
Online, a Biden campaign ad warned in both English and Spanish that former President Donald Trump called the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, a “disaster.” Another ad appealed to “abuelos” (grandparents) and highlighted the cost of insulin under Biden.
In an interview that aired April 9, Enrique Acevedo, anchor for Univision News’ Spanish-language news show, “El punto,” asked Biden about how health care expenses affect Latinos: “What specifically is your administration doing to try to help ease that burden?”
In his response, translated into Spanish, Biden hit on two matters we’ve rated before. He said people in the U.S. can get the same prescription for “40(%) to 60% less” than in other countries. (Mostly True.) And he said that people “only have to pay $35 a month now” for insulin instead of $400 a month. (Half True.)
Biden also cited changes that, as of 2025, will cap out-of-pocket drug costs. He said that under this shift, “No matter what your total bills are for prescription drugs, you’ll never have to pay … more than $2,000 a year, because some of these cancer drugs are 10(,000 to) 15,000 bucks a year.”
We found that Biden is largely accurate about the cap’s effect. One caveat is that some expensive cancer drugs delivered in doctors’ offices — as with chemotherapy — are not subject to the cap.
Inflation Reduction Act caps prescription costs for those on Medicare Part D
Biden was referring to the Inflation Reduction Act, part of which targeted prescription drug costs. It passed in 2022 with no Republican support and Biden signed it into law.
One part of the law affects annual out-of-pocket drug costs for enrollees in Medicare, the federal health insurance program for people older than 65, younger people with certain disabilities and people with end-stage renal disease. Medicare’s drug coverage is known as Part D.
Beneficiaries who take a lot of medication or are prescribed very expensive drugs will see their share of the costs lowered and capped at $2,000 a year by 2025.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the Medicare out-of-pocket-cap will cost the federal government about $30 billion over 10 years.
A Biden spokesperson pointed to an analysis by KFF, a nonpartisan source of health care policy analysis. KFF found that, if the $2,000 cap on out-of-pocket drug spending had been in place in 2021, 1.5 million Medicare beneficiaries enrolled in Part D plans would have saved money. Among those enrollees, most 68% spent $2,000 to $3,000 out of pocket, while 20% had spending of $3,000 up to $5,000, and 12% spent $5,000 or more out of pocket.
“In most states, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Medicare beneficiaries will feel relief from the new Part D out-of-pocket spending cap,” KFF wrote.
Part D is voluntary, but has strong financial incentives to encourage people to enroll when they become eligible, unless they have comparable coverage under another plan, KFF Senior Vice President Tricia Neuman said.
The vast majority of Medicare beneficiaries are enrolled in the program’s drug prescription benefit, Part D.
Many Medicare beneficiaries who lack Part D have drug coverage through another source, such as their employer or their spouse’s employer.
“These other forms of coverage are not subject to the $2,000 cap, although some other out-of-pocket limit may apply and implementation of the cap will indirectly tighten the requirements that apply to some retiree plans,” said Matthew Fiedler, senior fellow in economic studies at the Center on Health Policy at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., think tank.
Biden singled out cancer drugs as an example of medications that can exceed $2,000
Biden said cancer drugs can cost $10,000 to $15,000. Research from KFF and a Vanderbilt University study backs that up.
KFF found that for the five drugs with the highest per capita Part D expenditures in 2021 used by more than 10,000 Part D enrollees — Revlimid, Pomalyst, Imbruvica, Jakafi and Ibrance, all cancer treatments — annual out-of-pocket costs per drug in 2023 ranged from more than $11,000 to nearly $15,000.
The White House pointed to another KFF analysis that said three drugs taken to treat different forms of cancer — Lynparza, Ibrance, and Xtandi — cost Medicare Part D enrollees $12,000 for the year.
Stacie Dusetzina, a cancer research and health policy professor at Vanderbilt University, wrote in an article published in 2022 the New England Journal of Medicine that the out-of-pocket cost of one year of some anticancer prescriptions can range from $10,000 to $15,000. That dollar figure comes with a caveat: some patients may not fill the prescription or take it the whole year because of the cost. A U.S. Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson pointed to that journal article.
Dusetzina wrote in a separate study that among beneficiaries without subsidies, about 30% did not fill their prescriptions for anticancer drugs.
“This is really just a very important change, it’s a huge amount of savings for people with cancer,” Dusetzina said.
The change in the law pertains to Medicare’s pharmacy benefit.
About half of the cancer drugs available are on medical benefit and half are on pharmacy benefit, Dusetzina said. In recent years, more newly marketed cancer drugs have been self-administered and therefore fall under Part D.
That means that the cap doesn’t apply to patients who get an infusion of chemotherapy at a doctor’s office — something Medicare Part B would cover. How much patients pay for chemo over a year varies on their benefits, including the terms of their supplemental coverage or whether they have Medicare Advantage, and how much the patients have spent on other medical services that year.
Our ruling
Biden said, starting in 2025, “no matter what your total bills are for prescription drugs, you’ll never have to pay … more than $2,000 a year, because some of these cancer drugs are 10(,000 to) 15,000 bucks a year.”
The Inflation Reduction Act, which Biden signed into in 2022, limits out-of-pocket prescription spending to $2,000 per year starting in 2025 for Medicare Part D enrollees.
One sticking point is that the cap covers only drugs received through pharmacies, not those in a doctor’s office.
We rate this statement Mostly True.
RELATED: Biden is right about $35 insulin cap, but exaggerates prior costs for Medicare enrollees
RELATED: For the most part, the US pays double for prescriptions compared with other countries, as Biden says
RELATED: Biden said Medicare drug price negotiations cut the deficit by $160 billion. That’s years away.
Flat-earth conspiracy theorists have long believed photos from space are fake. A Facebook video from the “Bradley Martyn Show” podcast amplified this claim.
In the Facebook video, Martyn says, “Do you know the one thing about flat earth that does trip me out? Google images of satellites. They’re all just like renders. I’ve never seen a satellite that was real.”
Another man then says, “The sun and the moon is real, outer space is not.”
This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
A satellite is any object that orbits a planet or a star, meaning the Earth, moon and spacecraft are all considered satellites. A Google image search of satellites will yield some rendered images, or 3-D modeled realistic images of satellites. But there are also plenty of real photos of satellites.
For example, this image of the International Space Station was taken in 2001 by a space shuttle Discovery crew member. A camera on NASA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory satellite took these photographs in 2015 of the moon in front of the Earth.
A man in the Facebook video also repeats the debunked theory that the Earth is flat and covered by a dome with the moon and sun. The first image of Earth from outer space was taken in 1946. Since then, there have been many more photos of a round Earth taken from outer space, proving that the Earth is not flat. We also know the Earth is a sphere because of the pull of gravity, different time zones and the Earth’s shadow on the moon.
And contrary to the video’s assertion that outer space isn’t real, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has shown that the universe contains at least two trillion galaxies.
We rate the claim that there are no real pictures of satellites on Google Images because outer space is not real Pants on Fire!
A social media post claims the federal government is giving away more than $10,000 to low-income Americans. In fact, the government owes you that money, the post said.
“Exposing the secret worth THOUSANDS! Don’t let them hide this any longer,” an April 15 Facebook post’s caption said.
In the video, a narrator said, “Did you know that the government owes you $8,832?”
The narrator says the government owes that amount to people ages 18 to 64 making less than $50,000, and they’ll also get a $2,000 spending card. The money can be used for medical and personal expenses, he said.
The post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
But claims offering free government money are often not what they seem, the federal government has warned.
(Facebook screenshot)
The Facebook post linked to a website called todayshealthbenefit.com, where a chatbot named “Emily from Subsidy Aid” awaits to ask if you want to find out if you qualify to unlock a “$6,400 health subsidy,” a different figure than the $8,332 mentioned in the video. It said the subsidy can be used “to pay for your medical expenses and provide instant relief for rent, bills and groceries,” and warns that enrollment ends at midnight.
If the $6,400 figure sounds familiar to PolitiFact readers, it’s because we’ve seen these claims before. We have debunked two social media claims advertising $6,400. In December, one Facebook post said the government was giving away $6,400 monthly subsidies after an Inflation Reduction Act update from Congress. Another Facebook post in January also said Congress had passed a $6,400 subsidy for low-income people.
A conversation with the chatbot revealed some red flags. After asking about our income and whether we were on Medicare and Medicaid, we received a telephone number. We called the number and reached an unnamed phone operator in Illinois. He said the subsidy was from Affordable Care Act plans. People with employer-provided health insurance didn’t qualify for the money, the operator said.
The website is not affiliated with the government and misleads about how government health insurance subsidies work. The government often subsidizes Affordable Care Act plans, but the government site does not mention specific dollar amounts — the subsidies hinge on a person’s income.
The subsidies also provide no cash payments to Americans, but pay directly to insurance companies. The subsidies are available as premium tax credits, which can be paid in advance directly to recipients’ insurance companies, or can be claimed when recipients file their tax returns, KFF reported. Another subsidy is a cost-sharing reduction that lowers deductible, copayments and coinsurance under some Affordable Care Act plans. In neither case are the payments made directly to consumers.
Healthcare.gov is the official website where consumers can sign up for the Affordable Care Act marketplace. Brokers and agents can also sign consumers up for a marketplace plan. It’s unclear whether the company behind todayshealthbenefit.com are brokers and agents.
Open enrollment for the Affordable Care Act ended in January; it doesn’t end at midnight April 18 as the website in the Facebook post claims.
The federal government has warned that offers of free money or grants from the government are often scams. Government-funded assistance programs are offered only through official government websites. The Federal Trade Commission offered tips for spotting scams, such as ones that offer government money to pay for personal expenses.
PolitiFact found no evidence the government is paying people $8,832 plus a $2,000 spending card. The claim is False.
Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.
Quick Take
During the April 8 eclipse, people in the path of totality were able to see solar phenomena, including the sun’s corona. But social media posts have shared altered or composite images of these phenomena, claiming one image was “captured by NASA.” It was actually an artist’s rendering of a composite photo of the 2017 eclipse.
Full Story
A total solar eclipse — in which the moon blocked Earth’s view of the sun — occurred April 8 in a narrow path across Mexico, the United States and Canada. Crowds gathered in cities along the path, including Dallas, Cleveland and Montreal, to witness totality, the brief period in which the sun’s light is completely obscured by the moon.
In addition to the sky darkening, those in the path of totality were able to see a part of the sun’s atmosphere, called the corona, which is otherwise impossible to see because of the sun’s bright light.
An actual photo provided by NASA shows the total solar eclipse seen in Dallas on April 8. Photo by NASA/Keegan Barber.
Gary Bernstein, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Pennsylvania, explained the appearance of the corona in an email to us. “The sun is always in the process of ejecting a tenuous stream of gas into space. This gas emits a very faint light compared to the sun’s main body, so while it’s always present in the sky, we can’t see it on a normal day because it’s lost in the glare of the disk of the sun,” he said.
“During a total eclipse, the moon blocks the disk, and the sky becomes dark enough to see the corona. This only occurs during the totality phase,” Bernstein said.
Another phenomenon known as Baily’s Beads — beads of light that appear around the edge of the moon during an eclipse — occurs just as totality begins and ends. “They occur because the moon has mountains and valleys, and the last rays of the sun can pass through the valleys while the mountains block light. This breaks up the very thin final arc of light into pieces,” Bernstein explained.
NASA uploaded a photo album of pictures taken during the recent eclipse, many of which show Baily’s Beads and the sun’s corona.
But some social media posts have shared the painting of a composite image or an altered image of these phenomena, and misleadingly claimed they were photos of the recent eclipse.
A Digital Painting of a 2017 Composite Photo
One image, featuring a dramatic corona, was shared on Facebook on April 9 with the caption, “Most Detailed Image of the Solar Eclipse.” The post received 88,000 likes, but has since been removed.
Several other posts also shared the image on social media, falsely claiming it was a photo taken during the eclipse and “captured by NASA.” Through a reverse image search, we found this image is actuallya digital painting from 2020 by artist Cathrin Machin.
As she wrote in an Instagram caption on July 20, 2020, Machin based her painting on a picture created by astrophotographer Sebastian Voltmer in Wyoming during the 2017 total solar eclipse. Voltmer uploaded his original photo to Flickr in September 2017, and he wrote that the photo was a composite of 35 images taken during the eclipse.
Bernstein explained that many astrophotographers use composite images — that is, an image produced by combining two or more photos — “since we are taking pictures of things the human eye can’t see.” He added: “They’re not what your eye would see but they are ‘real’ in the sense of being an image of what’s truly in the sky.”
Alexei Filippenko, a professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, told us, “Cameras are good at capturing the solar corona, but only with composites made from images having many different exposures. A given exposure doesn’t have a large ‘dynamic range’ the way the human eye does. The human eye can see faint and bright things well simultaneously, but a photo cannot.”
Image ‘Appears to be Altered’
Another image, which shows both Baily’s Beads and the corona, was posted to Facebook on April 10 with a caption misleadingly claiming it was from the recent eclipse. The caption, originally in Spanish, claims that the photo is “one of the best shots of the solar eclipse.”
But a spokesperson for scientists at the National Solar Observatory told us that “this image appears to be altered.”
“The S-shape of the coronal streamers on the left and right of the corona is the most obvious problem,” the NSO spokesperson told us in an email. “The coronal magnetic field does not bend in such sinuous curves. They are angled and curved at times, but a 90-degree bend in the field lines is unrealistic.”
Filippenko also raised concerns about the waviness of the corona in this image. “Although it could in principle look curvy… I’ve never seen it that way. Always, or almost always, the coronal streamers basically go radially outward from the Sun; they don’t curve much.”
The NSO spokesperson also noted that the placement of the Baily’s Beads in this image were unlikely. “They appear all around the sun simultaneously, which is unrealistic except in a very special eclipse (when the moon was exactly the same size as the Sun, so a very brief eclipse). Also, when the Baily’s beads are still present, the corona is not yet so visible and prominent.”
But during the April 8 eclipse, the moon actually appeared significantly larger than the sun, Filippenko said.
Filippenko also told us the image in the April 10 Facebook post could be a composite photo of several previous eclipses, but not of the April 8 eclipse or any single eclipse.
Sources
Bernstein, Gary. Professor of astronomy and astrophysics, University of Pennsylvania. Email to FactCheck.org. 15 Apr 2024.
Dunn, Marcia. “Total solar eclipse wows North America. Clouds part just in time for most.” Associated Press. 9 Apr 2024.
Filippenko, Alexei. Professor of astronomy, University of California, Berkeley. Email to FactCheck.org. 16 Apr 2024.
Was one of President Joe Biden’s relatives eaten by cannibals during World War II? As far-fetched as that scenario might sound, Biden said it was possible while visiting Pennsylvania on April 17.
While visiting Scranton, his family’s hometown, for a speech, Biden sought out a local veterans’ memorial where his uncle, Ambrose J. Finnegan, is honored. Finnegan, who was called “Uncle Bosie,” died during World War II, when the future president was a toddler.
Reporters asked Biden about the memorial visit before he boarded Air Force One at Wilkes-Barre/Scranton International Airport. Biden said his uncle’s plane was shot down over New Guinea — and he floated cannibalism as the reason his remains were never recovered.
“He got shot down in an area where there were a lot of cannibals in New Guinea at the time,” Biden said. “They never recovered his body. But the government went back … and they checked and found some parts of the plane and the like.”
Biden said he was contrasting his uncle’s military service with a reported 2020 statement by his opponent, former President Donald Trump, that service members were a bunch of “suckers” and “losers.” (Trump has denied saying this, but one of his White House chiefs of staff, John Kelly, later corroborated that Trump said it.)
Biden mentioned cannibalism again later the same day, while speaking at the United Steelworkers’ Pittsburgh headquarters.
“He flew those single-engine planes as reconnaissance over war zones,” Biden said. “And he got shot down in New Guinea, and they never found the body because there used to be — there were a lot of cannibals, for real, in that part of New Guinea.”
Could Finnegan have been eaten by cannibals?
Although cannibalism existed in New Guinea, the military record and experts in New Guinea’s history and culture say it is unlikely that Finnegan was cannibalized, because the plane crashed into the ocean, and even if indigenous people had found Finnegan, a U.S. service member wouldn’t have fit into the two categories of people at risk of being cannibalized: enemies and family members.
Details of the plane crash
New Guinea, the world’s second-largest island, consists of two parts today: the independent nation of Papua New Guinea in the east, and the Indonesian provinces of Papua and West Papua in the west.
According to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, a plane carrying a three-man crew and Finnegan, a passenger, was “forced to ditch” in the ocean off the north coast of New Guinea “for unknown reasons” May 14, 1944. The engine in the plane, which had been on a courier mission, failed at low altitude; the account does not specify that it was “shot down,” as Biden said.
“The aircraft’s nose hit the water hard,” the Pentagon agency documentation says. “Three men failed to emerge from the sinking wreck and were lost in the crash. One crew member survived and was rescued by a passing barge. An aerial search the next day found no trace of the missing aircraft or the lost crew members.”
Finnegan was not linked to any remains recovered from the area after the war, and he is officially unaccounted for, the agency said. Finnegan is memorialized on the Walls of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery in the Philippines.
The White House did not answer our inquiry for this article. White House spokesman Andrew Bates told CNN that “President Biden is proud of his uncle’s service in uniform” and that he “highlighted his uncle’s story as he made the case for honoring our sacred commitment … to equip those we send to war and take care of them and their families when they come home.’”
Cannibalism existed, but a U.S. service member would be an unlikely target
We asked experts on New Guinea whether cannibalism was prevalent then. The experts said it existed, but added that it was uncommon when the plane crashed in the 1940s and that it almost certainly didn’t factor into the aftermath of the crash that killed Finnegan.
“There were regions of New Guinea where cannibalism was practiced in the past,” said Alex Golub, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii-Mānoa. “The majority, perhaps the vast majority, of the population of the country never practiced it.”
Experts cautioned that outsiders sometimes exaggerated stories of cannibalism to justify colonial rule. By the World War II era, authorities had largely suppressed cannibalism, sometimes by force.
“Explorers from Captain Cook to more recent twentieth-century encounters in the New Guinea Highlands have searched obsessively for evidence of cannibalism,” said Rainer F. Buschmann, a historian at California State University Channel Islands. “Cannibalism then becomes an excuse to annex, exploit, and colonize the ‘other.’”
A U.S. service member wouldn’t have fit the profile of someone who might be cannibalized, experts said.
“The categories of people, and their parts, that were eaten had to do with formalized social relationships, not strangers, or monsters from the air,” said Frederick H. Damon, an emeritus anthropology professor at the University of Virginia.
With cannibalism of family members, the practices were “part of an attempt to reincorporate some of the person back into his or her lineage,” said Courtney Handman, an associate anthropology professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “It is much less likely that it would have been done for an unknown person who crashed his plane nearby.”
Experts said many people in New Guinea knew enough about the war not to consider someone like Finnegan an enemy, especially if they lived near typical military flight paths, said Bruce M. Knauft, an Emory University anthropology professor. Some New Guineans volunteered to fight for the allies.
Even eight decades later, remains of World War II pilots are still being recovered on the island of New Guinea and off its coast. Given the need to cooperate on such searches, Biden is ill-advised to resurface the cannibalism trope, the University of Hawaii’s Golub said.
The people of New Guinea “volunteered to fight in World War II and otherwise aided the allied cause,” Golub said. “They fought bravely and honorably, and very effectively, and their work to fight fascism is what deserves to be remembered, not rumors about cannibalism.”
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Social media users got slammed by a volley of misinformation.
“Venus Williams forfeits match against trans woman: “I’m not playing a man,” said the caption on an April 14 Facebook post that included a photo. The post’s caption pointed readers to a “full story” linked in the comments, but the body of the article included only a few lines of text from another, unrelated article.
This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
Similar posts also were shared on Instagram and TikTok.
But this never happened.
PolitiFact reviewed news on Google and in Nexis news archives and found no reports that Venus Williams has ever forfeited a match to a transgender athlete. And this was not the viral image’s only inaccuracy.
(Screenshot of Facebook post)
In every post, many of which garnered thousands of likes, the tennis player pictured is not Venus Williams, but her sister Serena Williams. The photo comes from Serena’s winning match in the 2022 US Open against Danka Kovinic where Serena wore a black outfit with gold stars.
The other woman depicted in some of the posts is also not a transgender athlete, but Amélie Mauresmo, a retired French tennis player who now directs the French Open.
When the claim first circulated last year, fact-checking outlets found the story had originated on a self-described satire website called “America’s Last Line of Defense,” which has the disclaimer “Nothing on this page is real.” We have fact-checked many claims from this site, and a larger network of sites, run by the same person, Christopher Blair.
The story is now being shared with no sign that it is satire.
The claim taps into the current debate over transgender athletes, specifically trans women, competing in women’s sports. Commenters on the Facebook post, who appeared not to know the information was false, left remarks such as “Good (for) her! All female athletes need to take a stand against this nonsense.”
The number of trans athletes is very small, especially at the professional level.
We rate the claim that Venus Williams “forfeited” a match against a transgender woman, saying, “I’m not playing a man” Pants on Fire!
