No, Obama Didn't Tweet This About Trump's Birth Certificate
A fake tweet mocked up to look like it was written by former U.S. President Barack Obama went viral, likely because if it were real, it would have represented quite a clap back. The image, posted on March 31, 2022, is a screenshot of what looks like Obama's verified Twitter account and a tweet that states, "I think most Americans would agree that I'm a level-headed individual, not a man who's prone to indulging in conspiracy theories. I've certainly had a fair number directed at me. But has anyone checked to make sure Donald Trump doesn't have a Russian birth certificate?" posted   birther The tweet also plays on news stories that took off after Trump took office, reporting the latter's campaign had received help from the Russian government. When Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, Trump referred to Russian President Vladimir Putin's military strategy as "genius." stories referred The Obama tweet doesn't appear on his Twitter timeline, nor does it appear on PolitiWoops, a database of deleted tweets by political figures operated by the non-profit news organization ProPublica.
Claim:  A bill currently before Congress would require that all handgun owners list their guns on federal income tax returns.  Example:  [Collected via e-mail, May 2009] Senate Bill SB-2099 will require us to put on our 2009 1040 federal tax form all guns that you have or own. It may requirefingerprints and a tax of $50 per gun. This bill was introduced on Feb. 24. This bill will become public knowledge 30 days after it is voted into law. This is an amendment to the Internal Revenue Act of 1986. This means that the Finance Committee can pass this without the Senate voting on it at all. The full text of the proposed amendment is on the U.S. Senate homepage, https://www.senate.gov/  You can find the bill by doing a search by the bill number, SB-2099. Variations:  An August 2009 version of the Handgun Safety and Registration Act e-mail combined it with the Blair Holt e-mail that truthfully claims a bill before Congress would prohibit ownership of handguns by those who have not obtained firearms licenses. ownership Origins:  The item quoted above about a pending Congressional bill requiring gun owners to list their guns on federal income tax is both outdated and contains a good deal of misinformation. The referenced bill, SB 2099 (the Handgun Safety and Registration Act) is not currently before Congress  it was introduced to the Senate back in February 2000 (not 2009), and it was referred to the Committee on Finance, where it languished without ever coming to a vote.  It also had no provisions for requiring handgun owners to list their guns on federal income tax returns. The issue back in 2000 was Senate Bill 2099, introduced in February of that year by Senator Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island.  S. 2099 was titled the "Handgun Safety and Registration Act of 2000" and sought "to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to require the registration of handguns, and for other purposes."   Senate Bill 2099 Jack Reed The National Firearms Act of 1934 established (among other things) a tax on both the manufacture and the transfer of firearms, required that each person who transfers a firearm file an application  National Firearms Act (complete with photograph and fingerprints) with the internal revenue authorities, and authorized the creation of "a central registry of all firearms in the United States which are not in the possession or under the control of the United States."  However, the definition of "firearm" used by the 1934 act did not include standard rifles, shotguns, or handguns. It applied only to specialized weapons such as short-barrelled rifles and shotguns, machine guns, silencers, and other "destructive devices" (e.g., grenades, bombs, rockets, missiles, mines). S. 2099 would have expanded the definition of "firearm" to include handguns, thus subjecting them to these requirements as well.  The upshot of the Handgun Safety and Registration Act, if passed, would have been the imposition of a $50 tax on the manufacture of all handguns, a requirement that all gun owners register their handguns within one year of the Act's passage (but not, as claimed, list them on their federal income tax returns), and the provision that registration information be made available to federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies.  In practical terms, every handgun owner would have had to obtain a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms registration form and an FBI fingerprint form, then complete and submit both forms (along with a 2x2 of himself and a $5 payment) to the BATF.   That the intent of this bill was to effect nationwide registration of handguns is unmistakable.  As stated in apress release about Senator Reed's bill: press release The bill would require registration of all handguns, including those currently in private possession, and would make it a felony for any person to transfer a handgun to another individual without prior law enforcement approval. Background checks would be performed on all primary and secondary transfers of handguns, including retail sales, gun shows, Internet sales and all private sales. The claim that this bill could have been passed into law without Congress voting upon it was not true: The Handgun Safety and Registration Act, like any other Congressional bill, would have had to be passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the President (or passed again over his veto) in order to become law. Furthermore, the $50 tax specified in the bill would have applied only to gun manufacturers, not gun owners.   As noted above, the Handgun Safety and Registration Act of 2000 languished in committee without ever being brought to a vote, and even Senator Reed himself said at the time he submitted the bill that he was not optimistic about its chances of success: I am under no illusion that this legislation will be approved by this Congress or next Congress ... But we must begin the process to create a law that Americans overwhelmingly believe is necessary. Additional information:       Misleading E-mail   (gunregistration.org)  Last updated:  13 August 2009 Debate over raisingthe minimum wageis heating up. President Obama is advocating for it, Democrats in Congress are promoting it and their Republican counterparts are warning that it would have a negative impact on the U.S. economy. Adding fuel to that fire was Tuesday'sCongressional Budget Office report, which predicted that increasing the minimum wage would lift 900,000 people out of poverty but cost 500,000 jobs. U.S. Rep. David Cicilline, D-RI, went on thefloor of the House on Feb. 11to argue that inflation has eroded the value of the minimum wage, now $7.25 per hour, over time. It's been five years since those working for the minimum wage have seen an increase in the minimum wage, and according to one study, the minimum wage today is worth $2 less than in 1968. This is shameful, and we have the responsibility to address growing income inequality by increasing the minimum wage immediately, he said. In other words, a worker in 2014 would need to earn $9.25 an hour to have the same buying power a minimum-wage worker had in 1968. We wondered whether that was true. Cicilline's office wouldn't say what study the congressman was referring to. When we asked Cicilline about it during a Feb. 18 news conference, he said couldn't recall. Instead, his chief of staff said a Google search had just uncovered a June 2013 Huffington Post article headlined, The Minimum Wage Is Worth $2 Less Today Than It Was In 1968: Study. The Huffington Post article citesa study from the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal Washington, D.C. think tank funded by organized labor, that quotes the $2 figure but doesn't analyze the minimum wage directly. Instead, it quotesanother EPI studythat did, looking at the minimum wage value from 1968 through 2012. It reports that the 1968 minimum wage of $1.60 per hour was essentially worth $9.25 in 2012 dollars, precisely two dollars less than $7.25. But what was the difference when Cicilline gave his speech this month?The latest EPI study, issued Dec. 19 byDavid Cooper, puts that difference at $2.15. When we tried to confirm that calculation by going to theonline inflation calculatorfrom the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, we came up with an amount that was even higher: It said that today's $7.25 minimum wage is worth $3.46 less than in 1968, a much bigger difference than what Cicilline cited. Why the difference? The online calculator, Cooper said, uses the conventional Consumer Price Index, known as CPI-U. He and other researchers use a variant of that, called theCPI-U-RS, which tries to take the modifications that have been made to the CPI-U over the years and apply them to previous years. Although the government doesn't claim one index is better than another, he said the CPI-U-RS is designed to do a better job of accurately capturing the changing value of the minimum wage. If you adjust an old minimum wage for inflation using the traditional CPI, its value appears much higher today. In summary, Cicilline says he was quoting a report, but we're not sure what report that was. There is a report that supports his claim, as his staff noted, but it's out of date. He said the buying power of the minimum wage in 1968 was, in effect, $2 higher than its value today. The difference in 2013 dollars, by one measure, is actually $2.15. That's pretty close. By another measure, it's even more: $3.46. His underlying point -- that the minimum wage has significantly less buying power than it had 45 years ago -- is correct, and the erosion in the minimum wage is even more dramatic if you use the conventional cost of living index. We rate his statementMostly True. (If you have a claim youd likePolitiFact Rhode Islandto check, email us at[email protected]. And follow us on Twitter: @politifactri.) A popular trope used by those seeking to recast the shark as a misunderstood beast is to compare the risk sharks pose to humans to the purported risk posed by ripening coconuts. These sweet-tasting, nutrient-rich tree nuts  the logic goes  kill more people by falling out of trees than do sharks. This is an ostensibly simple question to investigate, as it requires knowing only two things: the annual death rate from unprovoked shark attacks and the annual death rate from falling coconuts. trope The annual death rate from sharks is pretty straightforward. The University of Florida runs a comprehensive database of shark attacks and fatalities: The International Shark Attack File. According to their research, there has been an average of six deaths annually over the past decade. research Problems emerge, however, when one tries to get a handle on how many people die each year as a direct result of injuries sustained by falling coconuts. The most commonly cited figure is that 150 people die each year from falling coconuts. No published research, however, has come up with any reliable estimate of this statistic whatsoever. Perhaps ironically, it appears that this number, as well, gained a sense of legitimacy from the University of Florida's International Shark Attack File, when a researcher there quoted the statistic in a press release for a local event: press release "Falling coconuts kill 150 people worldwide each year, 15 times the number of fatalities attributable to sharks," said George Burgess, Director of the University of Florida's International Shark Attack File and a noted shark researcher. "The reality is that, on the list of potential dangers encountered in aquatic recreation, sharks are right at the bottom of the list," said Burgess, who was one of three scientists participating Tuesday in a National Sea Grant College Program and NOAA Fisheries sponsored press briefing on sharks and the risks of shark attacks at the National Press Club. Investigating the specific claim of 150 coconut deaths each year, syndicated skeptic column The Straight Dope reached out to Burgess in 2002 to ask what his source was for that statistic, and discovered that, ultimately, it came from a British travel-insurance firm named Club Direct: reached out When I called Burgess, he told me he had gotten this statistic off the Internet  specifically, from a widely reported press release from the British travel-insurance firm Club Direct, saying that "holidaymakers hit by falling coconuts will be guaranteed full cover under their travel insurance policy. The news follows reports from Queensland, Australia, that coconut trees are being uprooted by local councils fearful of being sued for damages by people injured by coconuts.  'Coconuts kill around 150 people worldwide each year, which makes them about ten times more dangerous than sharks,' says Brent Escott, managing director of Club Direct." According to the column, this press release also cited a 1984 study from the Journal of Trauma titled "Injuries Due to Falling Coconuts". That study  the recipient of a 2001 Ig Nobel award for research that "cannot or should not be replicated"  did not set out to calculate the global annual death rate from falling coconuts, however. Instead, using simple physics and four years of data collected from a remote Papua New Guinean hospital, it sought to demonstrate that the risk to human health from falling coconuts was a real one. From a physics standpoint, the paper argued: 1984 study recipient If a coconut weighing 2 kg falls 25 meters onto a person's head, the impact velocity is 80 km/hr. The decelerating force on the head will vary depending on whether a direct or glancing blow is received. The distance in which the coconut is decelerated is also an important factor. Thus an infant's head lying on the ground would receive a much greater force than that received by the head of a standing adult, that dropped as it was struck. For a stopping distance of 5cm and a direct blow, the force would be 1,000 kg. From a number of fatalities standpoint, however, the data did not actually directly identify a single fatality, though it did anecdotally report one death: Nine trauma admissions resulted from falling coconuts during the 4-year study period; during this time a total of 355 trauma cases were admitted. Thus 2.5% of trauma admissions were caused by falling coconuts. Injuries were to the back, shoulders, or head. [...] The health worker who referred Patient 1 for craniotomy informed us about another person in the same village who had died instantly a few years earlier when struck on the head by a falling coconut. While it might perhaps be possible to use this limited data to come up with a rough global estimate, no study has actually attempted to do this with systematic methodology. As such, there is no way to debunk the claim with 100 percent certainty. We can say, though, that newspaper reports of death from falling coconuts are far more sparse than reports of death from shark attacks. A 1973 article in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin detailed the tragic death of a 2-year old girl struck by a large number of falling coconuts on a beach, while claiming that as far as they could tell, this was the first newspaper report of such an incident in the area:    Honolulu Star-Bulletin. 28 July 1973. Credit: Newspapers.com  The fact that this 1973 story has been cited decades after the fact (for example from a 1999 edition of the Honolulu Advertiser below), at least superficially reinforces the notion that death from falling coconut is a rare (but real) occurrence:    The Honolulu Advertiser. 14 January 1997. Credit: Newspapers.com  We rank this as unproven because accurate, published estimates on the global annual rate of death from falling coconut do not yet exist. Given the dearth of firsthand accounts of death from falling coconut, however, it seems unlikely that they pose more of a threat to human health than do sharks  even if death from either event is extremely unlikely. Turnbull, Leslie.  "How to Avoid Being Eaten by a Shark."
  This Week.  29 May 2017. Florida Museum.  "International Shark Attack File"
  Accessed 30 May 2017. UniSci.  "Falling Coconuts Kill More People Than Shark Attacks."
  Accessed 30 May 2017. Barss, Peter.  "Injuries Due to Falling Coconuts."
  Journal of Trauma.  November 1984. Improbable Research.  "Portrait of an Ig Winner: Dr. Barss."
  Accessed 30 May 2017. Honolulu Star-Bulletin.  "Baby Dies After Being Hit by Falling Cluster of Coconuts."
  28 July 1973. The Honolulu Advertiser.  "Coconut Danger in Park."
  14 January 1997. A meme of uncertain origin alerted readers in March 2019 to the growth of the Muslim population within the U.S., warning that "in twenty years there will be enough Muslim voters in the U.S. to elect the President":  The literal interpretation of this message  that by the year 2040 Muslims will comprise a large enough proportion of the U.S. population they could elect a particular person to the U.S. presidency regardless of how the rest of the country voted  is woefully wrong according to current estimates and projections. The Pew Research Center estimated in January 2018 that about 3.45 million Muslims of all ages were living in the U.S. in 2017, constituting about 1.1% of the total U.S. population. Pew also projected that by 2050  well more than the 20-year period posited by the meme  the U.S. Muslim population would reach 8.1 million, or 2.1% of the nations total population. estimated While 2.1% of the total population may constitute a significant voting bloc, obviously such a bloc would not be nearly large enough to determine the results of a nation-wide election all on its own. Even under the United States' electoral college system for electing presidents, which does not directly depend on popular vote totals, a candidate would still require the support of at least 23 percent of voters to reach the White House. Even that modest figure is more than 10 times greater than the projected Muslim proportion of the U.S. population in 2050. electoral college Moreover, even the modest Muslim population is at a disadvantage when it comes to the electoral college system, as Muslims are not evenly distributed around the U.S. According to Pew, some metropolitan areas such as Washington, D.C., have sizable Muslim communities, and "certain states, such as New Jersey, are home to two or three times as many Muslim adults per capita as the national average." But other states are home to far fewer Muslims. Regardless, without radical changes in immigration laws and patterns (or fecundity), it's simply not plausible that "in twenty years there will be enough Muslim voters in the U.S. to elect the President." Even if such a huge shift in the religious make-up of the U.S. population were possible in such a relatively short timeframe, it's unclear what readers could or should do in response to the meme's exhortation for them "to make a difference." Repeal the First Amendment's religious liberty protections in order to bar Muslims from voting? Encourage non-Muslim women to engage in a "baby race" to out-populate Muslims? Pass legislation against demographics? For those truly curious about Muslim voting patterns in the U.S., we note the Pew Research Center reported in November 2018 that, "Many more U.S. Muslims identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party than the GOP (66 % vs. 13 %), but the share who are Republican has held steady over the last 10 years, including after the election of President Donald Trump ..." So Muslim voters could conceivably tip an election in favor of a particular major-party candidate in conjunction with that party's base of voters, but they will not be sufficiently numerous to elect a candidate on their own any time in the next few decades. voting patterns https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/01/03/new-estimates-show-u-s-muslim-population-continues-to-grow/ https://www.npr.org/2016/11/02/500112248/how-to-win-the-presidency-with-27-percent-of-the-popular-vote https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/11/06/republicans-account-for-a-small-but-steady-share-of-u-s-muslims/ Mohamed, Besheer.  "Republicans Account for a Small But Steady Share of U.S. Muslims."
  Pew Research Center.  6 November 2018. Mohamed, Besheer.  "New Estimates Show U.S. Muslim Population Continues to Grow."
  Pew Research Center.  3 January 2018. Kurtzleben, Danielle.  "How to Win the Presidency with 23 Percent of the Popular Vote."
  NPR.  2 November 2016. In his 1948 book The Affairs of Dame Rumor, Jacobson mentions this rumor "flooded the Atlantic states in 1934" and notes the story had been published in the Boston Traveler a few years earlier: Example: [Brunvand, 1984] This teen age girl, growing up in a California coastal town, was obviously pregnant  stomach starting to swell, morning sickness, etc. She, however, tearfully insisted to her mother that she couldn't possibly be pregnant. She had never "done it" with a boy and it just wasn't possible. As time went on, however, the signs continued. Her stomach continued to grow, her appetite increased, and so forth. Her mother insisted she was pregnant. The girl insisted it wasn't possible. She was still a "good" girl. Finally x-rays were taken and the girl was vindicated. She had a large tumor in her stomach and surgery was performed immediately. To everyone's amazement the surgeons removed not a tumor but a small, live octopus that had fastened itself to the lining of the girl's stomach. What happened to this girl supposedly is really possible. Octopus eggs are microscopic in size and laid in clusters of tens of thousands. They are usually affixed to kelp at the ocean bottom by a sticky secretion. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that a few could escape and float to the surface where they could be swallowed by an unsuspecting swimmer . . . Anyway, don't scoff, because the girl was a close friend of my older brother's girlfriend. Fishbein's 1930 book Shattering Health Superstitions includes the text of the Traveler piece: A London factory girl is reported to have swallowed something while taking a swim, and immediately after was seized with terrible pains. A local doctor and a specialist both failed to diagnose the case, but an X-ray examination finally showed that she had swallowed an octopus egg, which had hatched out inside her anatomy. Folklorist Jan Brunvand points out there is a traditional folk motif assigned to this type of tale:  B784.1.4  Girl swallows frog spawn; an octopus grows inside her with tentacles reaching to every part of her body. How an octopus can grow from frog spawn remains unexplained, however. There are numerous versions of the basic legend:  All of these tales might be considered variations of the "bosom serpent" legend, described by Harold Schecter as a tale in which "through some unfortunate circumstance or act of carelessness . . . a snake. . . is accidentally ingested by, or grows inside the body of, the unlucky individual, where it remains until it is expelled or in some way lured out of the victim's body." This motif remains popular in films such as Alien, which features a crew member "impregnated" by an alien creature; once the incubation period is complete, the alien lifeform is "born" by bursting out through his chest. As Schechter notes, "like the traditional, oral versions that have been popular for hundreds of years, [the] only purpose [of the birth scene in Alien] is to produce emotional response: shock, revulsion, morbid fascination." In June 2004 the Iranian daily Etemaad reported that an unnamed woman from the south-eastern city of Iranshahr had given birth to a frog. According to that paper, the woman's gynaecologist confirmed that the lady in question, whose period had stopped for six months, had undergone sonography in May which showed she had a cyst in her abdomen and that following severe bleeding, she gave birth to a live grey frog accompanied with mud. Numerous news outlets subsequently carried the story, but in the manner of reporting that an Iranian paper had run the item, not as a confirmation of the facts of the account. If the photo of the frog (as initially provided by the BBC  it was later stripped from their online article and replaced by a map of Iraq) was accurate, it disproved the theory that the purported mother of Kermit came by her amphibian pregnancy through having swum in or drunk frog spawn, because the lily pad jumper so pictured was of a species not native to Iran. In any event, it was always a case of news outlets repeating a weird story that had come to them, not of vetting the tale's claims. Humans cannot give birth to frogs, or snakes, or fish, or lizards, or octopuses  our biology rules it out.  Also told in:   The Big Book of Urban Legends.  New York: Paradox Press, 1994.  ISBN 1-56389-165-4  (p. 77).  The Big Book of Urban Legends   Brunvand, Jan Harold.  The Choking Doberman.
  New York: W. W. Norton, 1984.  ISBN 0-393-30321-7  (pp. 110-111). The Choking Doberman   BBC News.  "Iranian Woman Gives Birth to Frog."
  27 June 2004.   Dale, Rodney.  The Tumour in the Whale.
  London: Duckworth, 1978.  ISBN 0-7156-1314-6  (pp. 74-75). The Tumour in the Whale   Fishbein, Morris.  Shattering Health Superstitions.
  New York: Horace Liveright, Inc., 1930  (pp. 90-97).   Jacobson, David J.  The Affairs of Dame Rumor.
  New York: Rinehart & Co., 1948  (p. 23). The Affairs of Dame Rumor   Schecter, Harold.  The Bosom Serpent: Folklore and Popular Art.
  Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1988. Item:  Texas doctor pens opinion piece about the treatment of prisoners captured in Afghanistan. Example:  [Collected on the Internet, 2002] I was just reading Yahoo news and the San Antonio Express newspaper. You know what upsets me?  People with absolutely nothing to do with their lives, so they complain on how the U.S.  is treating the prisoners or "Detainees" from Afghanistan. Do you know why they are complaining?  They see a picture on the news or the Internet and they see someone who is shackled and blindfolded and walking with two armed guards behind razor wire.  This picture tells them they are treated unfairly. Here is what I see . . . I see a thin, sickly looking person who under severe mental duress from being bombed, was cleaned up, given a haircut to prevent infestation of parasites, and given new clothes and shoes to wear.  I see a person who is given three nutritious meals per day and a bed to sleep in a tropical climate, not the cold desert floor of Afghanistan, eating worms, bugs, and goat.  I see a person who will be able to get relief from their pains and illnesses without paying a dime for medical expenses.  They will get rest, educated, and their mental stress levels will have dropped tremendously because they were taken out of a combat area and will not be shot at again. I see these people blindfolded and shackled behind razor wire.  I have the intellectual ability to understand why they are this way.  For those that do not have this ability, let me explain it to you.  They are blindfolded to protect OUR U.S. SOLDIERS from further harm.  These people can not plan to destroy something if they can not see it.  They are shackled because these same people have proven they will easily give up their lives to kill just ONE AMERICAN.  We are protecting their life as well as our own.  The razor wire is a mental deterrent, just like the little alarm company warning signs most of you out there have on your home, but don't have the actual alarm system.  You would think many times over before actually trying to cross that razor wire.  For all of you people out there thinking how bad these poor detainees have it under such strict guard, you need to do a lot more thinking about other things in your life. I was born on September 11th, 1966, and every birthday I have from now on will never be a happy one.  Why, do you ask?  Because as I am out somewhere trying to have a nice dinner, someone will have a candle or a ribbon or something, crying about the anniversary of a national tragedy. And then I will think, about how insignificant my one little birthday actually is compared to everything else that had happened on that one day. It boggles my mind that there are actually people out there in this world, in leadership positions, head of companies that actually think that we are doing something wrong when it comes to protecting our nation and our people.  These same people will be the first ones to complain about something that happens to them when they are vacationing outside this country.  They will ask why the U.S.  does not do anything about their misfortune. These are the same people that complain about taxes and how bad their lives actually are. If you receive this email, please pass it on to everyone in your address book.  I am not afraid or ashamed to speak my peace.  I am an American, my father fought for this country, and was willing to die for it. Dr.  Steven TomaselliUvalde, TexasUnited States of America Origins:  This item is another entry difficult to categorize with a simple "true" or "false," as it's merely an opinion piece, not an article asserting any factual claims.  Even though this item was not written by an established journalist or published as an editorial in any newspaper (even as a letter to the editor), it has been circulated widely because a great many people seem to give anything authored by someone identified by the title of "Dr." a good deal of unwarranted credibility.   If the good Dr. Steven Tomaselli holds that title because he has earned a doctorate in a field such as political science, his opinions might be expected to offer informative insights; if he's a dentist or a mathematics professor, there's no real reason to expect his opinions to be more noteworthy than those of millions of other citizens.  (For the record, "Dr." Tomaselli is a chiropractor.) chiropractor As of mid-February 2002, the Taliban and al-Qaeda prisoners (or "detainees") held in Camp X-ray at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, numbered 220.  The U.S. drew criticism from representatives of European nations and human rights organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross for maintaining that captured Taliban and al-Qaeda soldiers did not qualify for prisoner of war status under the Geneva Convention, and for asserting that the captives were being treated humanely while nonetheless denying the Red Cross permission to visit the  camp.   The issue at the heart of the dispute has been the application of Geneva Convention treaties, which provide international safeguards for the humane treatment of battlefield captives.  The United States asserted that under the terms of the 1949 agreement, to which the U.S. was a signatory, Taliban soldiers did not qualify as prisoners of war because they wore no uniforms or insignia, nor did they have an organized command structure established according to the "laws and customs" of war.  Al-Qaeda combatants were even further removed from this classification, the U.S.stated, because they operated in different countries and targeted civilians as well as military forces, and lumping all these captives into one "prisoner of war" category would blur important distinctions between legitimate national military forces and armed terrorist groups.   (Granting captives POW status entitles them to additional legal rights, such as the right to legal representation; the right to respond to interrogation by providing no more than name, rank, and serial number, and the right to be sent home when military hostilities have ceased.) The International Committee of the Red Cross in Switzerland said it considered both the Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters held by U.S. forces to be prisoners of war under  revisions made to the Geneva Convention treaties in 1977, although those revisions were never ratified by either the United States or Afghanistan. The Geneva Convention treaties also state that "should any doubt arise" about the status of captives, "such persons shall enjoy the protection of the present convention until such time as their status has been determined by a competent tribunal," and human rights organizations and European nations criticized the U.S. government for refusing to hold such a tribunal.  They were also critical of the treatment some of the captives were reportedly receiving, including being blindfolded, sedated, and held in metal cages.  revisions On Thursday, 7 February 2002, the Bush administration modified its position and announced that it would apply Geneva Convention rules to Taliban detainees, although it refused to offer the same treatment to al-Qaeda fighters and continued to decline categorizing either group as prisoners of war.  It also allowed Red Cross representatives to visit at Camp X-ray to review the conditions there and interview some of the detainees held there, and it implemented some of the recommendations (allowed prisoners to talk more freely among themselves, changing meal times to allow for earlier prayers, allowing prisoners more exercise) made by those representatives.  (The relaxation of some of the stricter rules regarding prisoners might also have been a by-product of the fact that newer arrivals were generally less dangerous than those who had been captured earlier.) Last updated:  15 April 2008    Sources:   Aurora, Chris.  "Hicks Allowed to Talk with Fellow Prisoners."   The [Sydney] Daily Telegraph.  12 February 2002  (p. 21).     Becker, Elizabeth.  "Red Cross Man in Guantanamo: A 'Busybody,' but Not Unwelcome."   The New York Times.   20 February 2002  (p. A10).     Bender, Bryan.  "Red Cross Disputes U.S. Stance on Detainees."   The Boston Globe.   9 February 2002  (p. A1). In June 2019, scammers attempted to swindle millions of social media users by presenting a movie- and television-streaming service called "PlayJoltz," which spammy, fabricated online posts claimed was "better than Netflix" and was available for free for (you guessed it) a limited time only.  We received multiple inquiries about PlayJoltz after it was promoted on Facebook and Twitter in almost-identical posts, each targeting readers from a different nation.  For example, on 25 June the website worldnews24.co published a post with the headline "There is a Better Service Than Netflix...and It's Free for the Canadian!" The article went on to report that: worldnews24.co "The streaming giant Netflix has lost thousands of Canada users this week because of a new competing service which just came out and is lifetime free for the people living in North America (US & CA). The new service is called Playjoltz and provides an identical streaming service to that of Netflix but with a lot of extras. The users admit it is much faster, cleaner and with many more movies/series than Netflix. They currently give a free access to the first 5,000 people who subscribe even though it seems they have almost reached this number. Playjoltz "With an almost unlimited selection of HD movies and TV series having an incredibly good image quality and that loads up at blazing speeds on all devices (TV, smartphones, computers, tablets), it is not surprising that thousands of people have already switched from Netflix to this new service, Playjoltz, since it has been launched 3 weeks ago. Playjoltz informed us that the last day to subscribe for free is 27 June, 2019." In parallel with that, the website austria-news.co targeted readers in Austria, with the same claims and same text, this time in German. The scammers targeted readers in Australia with another version of the same article, this time on australia-news.co, as well as a poorly produced Facebook video that made the same claims: that the service was "free for Australians," and "100x better than Netflix": austria-news.co australia-news.co   These articles were not only fakes but also appeared to be part of a long-running scam orchestrated from the country of Cyprus, which has caused multiple users to be tricked into trying a "free trial" that they cannot end. Users are encouraged to provide their credit card details for the free trial, on the understanding that they will not be charged if they cancel their subscription by the billing date. However, some users have complained of being charged repeatedly, even after canceling before the end of the free trial.  The various websites on which these articles appeared in June 2019 were littered with spammy links. For example, clicking on any link on any of the sites led the user to the same webpage, www.smushgame.com, which offered users a sign-up form for a streaming service similar to the one described in the PlayJoltz articles.  sign-up   However, the smushgame.com homepage instead advertised a gaming service  "Unlimited access to all your gaming needs." That homepage was registered to "Japalta Consulting" in the city of Nicosia, Cyprus. Another website registered to a company in Cyprus (this time the city of Limassol) was PlayJoltz.com: homepage PlayJoltz.com   Since 2018, consumers from various countries have been reporting in online forums that they were swindled out of repeated, unsanctioned credit card debits after signing up for a "free trial" on both PlayJoltz.com and SmushGame.com. Both are scams.  online forums The wave of PlayJoltz articles published in late June 2019 offered other clues about the unreliability of their claims. For instance, every article contained the same "comments section," which was designed to resemble the Facebook-linked comments section common to many sites. In reality, clicking on a "username" lead only to the SmushGame sign-up page, rather than that "user's" Facebook account  a clear sign that the comments came from fabricated identities rather than the Facebook accounts of real people.  Similarly, every comment was gushing in its praise for PlayJoltz, and the exact same set of "commenters" left their positive reviews in each article, to the extent that they even appeared to comment in German, under the Austrian version of the article. The image below shows the set of comments included under the Canadian worldnews24.co article, and on the right, those included under the Austrian austria-news.co version:   Finally, each of the June 2019 articles included a cover image that was designed to indicate that the existence of PlayJoltz, and the supposed sudden collapse of Netflix as a result, was garnering mainstream television news coverage. The image featured a female news reader standing next to a giant screen that showed the Netflix logo and the flag of whichever country was being targeted in each article, whether Australia, Austria, or Canada:   In reality, these were digitally manipulated images of an Irish news reader, who can be seen below wearing the same outfit as the one shown in the "PlayJoltz" images (she is a co-presenter of the "Six One News," the main evening news broadcast on RT, Ireland's public-service broadcaster). The broadcaster stressed her image was used without consent: "RT can confirm it has not given permission for any use of its copyright imagery for commercial use and the news report featured is false. We urge anyone who sees these misleading ads to report them to the platform they are carried on."  wearing   In short, RT's Six One News has never reported on the triumphant rise of either PlayJoltz or SmushGame, because neither has experienced such a surge in popularity, and both are scams.  Worldnews24.co. "There is a Better Service Than Netflix...and It's Free for the Canadian!"
 25 June 2019. Australia-news.co. "This New HD Streaming Service is the Reason Why Aussies Are Canceling Their Netflix Subscriptions!"
 25 June 2019. Austria-news.co. "Es Gibt Einen Besseren Dienst Als Netflix...und Er Ist Kostenlos fr sterreicher!"
 25 June 2019. Claim:  Dee Lee penned a screed opining that blacks 'don't read.' INCORRECTLY ATTRIBUTED Example:  [Collected via e-mail, January 2002]  Blacks Don't Read This is very deep, and unfortunately, very true! This is a heavvvvy piece and a Caucasian wrote it. THEY ARE STILL OUR SLAVESWe can continue to reap profits from the Blacks without the effort of physical slavery. Look at the current methods of containment that they use on themselves: IGNORANCE, GREED, and SELFISHNESS.  Their IGNORANCE is the primary weapon of containment. A great man once said, "The best way to hide something from Black people is to put it in a book." We live now in the Information Age. They have gained the opportunity to read any book on any subject through the efforts of their fight for freedom, yet they refuse to read.  There are numerous books readily available at Borders, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon.com, not to mention their own Black Bookstores that provide solid blueprints to reach economic equality (which should have been their fight all along), but few read consistently, if at all.  GREED is another powerful weapon of containment.  Blacks, since the abolition of slavery, have had large amounts of money at their disposal. Last year they spent 10 billion dollars during Christmas, out of their 450 billion dollars in total yearly income (2.22%). Any of us can use them as our target market, for any business venture we care to dream up, no matter how outlandish, they will buy into it. Being primarily a consumer people, they function totally by greed. They continually want more, with little  thought for saving or investing. They would rather buy some new sneaker than invest in starting a business. Some even neglect their children to have the latest Tommy or FUBU. And they still think that having a Mercedes, and a big house gives the "Status" or that they have achieved the American Dream.  They are fools! The vast majority of their people are still in poverty because their greed holds them back from collectively making better communities. With the help of BET, and the rest of their black media that often broadcasts destructive images into their own homes, we will continue to see huge profits like those of Tommy and Nike.  (Tommy Hilfiger has even jeered them, saying he doesn't want their money, and  look at how the fools spend more with him than ever before!). They'll continue to show off to each other while we build solid communities with the profits from our businesses that we market to them.  SELFISHNESS, ingrained in their minds through slavery, is one of the  major ways we can continue to contain them. One of their own, Dubois said that there was an innate division in their culture. A "Talented Tenth" he called it. He was correct in his deduction that there are segments of their culture that has achieved some "form" of success. However, that segment missed the fullness of his work. They didn't read that the "Talented Tenth" was then responsible to aid the Non-Talented Ninety Percent in achieving a better life. Instead, that segment has created another class, a Buppie class that looks down on their people or aids them in a condescending manner. They will never achieve what we have. Their selfishness does not allow them to be able to work together on any project or endeavor of substance. When they do get together, their selfishness lets their egos get in the way of the goal. Their so-called help organizations seem to only want to promote their name without making any real change in their community. They are content to sit in conferences and conventions in our hotels, and talk about what they will do, while they award plaques to the best speakers, not the best doers. Is there no end to their selfishness? They steadfastly refuse to see that "TOGETHER EACH ACHIEVES MORE (TEAM)! They do not understand that they are no better than each other because of what they own. In fact, most of those Buppies are but one or two paychecks away from poverty. All of which is under the control of our pens in our offices and our boardrooms.  Yes, will continue to contain them as long as they refuse to read, continue to buy anything they want, and keep thinking they are "helping" their communities by paying dues to organizations which do little other than hold lavish conventions in our hotels.  By the way, don't worry about any of them reading this letter, remember,  'THEY DON'T READ!!!!'  (Prove them wrong. Please pass this on!) Origins:  Our earliest sighting of this polemic which excoriates "buppies" and other blacks for their presumed lack of literacy and bling-motivated consumer choices dates to October 2001, when it appeared as an unattributed item in the New York Beacon, a newspaper that focuses on African-American issues. It subsequently arrived in our inbox in January 2002 prefaced by the claim that it had been  written by a Caucasian. In October 2002 we began receiving versions stating radio personality Dee Lee had read the item on air that morning on a New York station. (A "buppie," says the Urban Dictionary, is "A highly sophisticated and upper class black person. Usually a black city or suburban resident with a well-paid professional job and an affluent lifestyle: b[lack] + [y]uppie.") buppie While the question of who wrote the piece remains murky, we can rule out two people who have often been erroneously pointed to as its author. Radio personality Dee Lee, then of Philadelphia's Power 99 FM's "Dream Team" and Saint Louis' 100.3 "The Dee Lee Morning Show," firmly asserts he is neither the item's author nor did he ever read the piece on air. He said in a 28 January 2007 blog post that "I NEVER wrote nor read this article on NYC radio!!," adding that he "would in no way write or support such ignorance, especially degrading my own race." Dee Lee blog post Likely as a result of African-American radio jock Dee Lee's name having become attached to the screed, a Caucasian certified financial planner of the same name has been mistakenly pointed to as the source of the item. (The Internet-circulated piece, after all, always contained the claim that it had been written by a white person.) Dee Lee of Harvard Financial Educators, author of numerous books in the financial planning field, including Let's Talk Money, has seen the piece circulated with not only her name and business affiliation attached, but also her e-mail address and photo. She emphatically denies any association with the screed, stating "I did not author nor did I read the article in question on the radio." denies Although the actual author of the piece is still unknown to us, Dr. Arthur Lewin of the Black and Hispanics Studies Department at Bernard M. Baruch College of the City University of New York claims to have edited the article into its present form many years ago and titled it "They Are Still Our Slaves." However, pointing to him as the original author of the piece is problematic, given that he claims his involvement was limited to editing an item titled "How to Make an Economic or Ghetto Slave" into "They Are Still Our Slaves," which he states he "received" (but not how or from whom). As to what to make of the item, some analysts have expressed doubt that it was penned by a white racist, instead finding in the text reason to believe it the work of an African-American laboring to make a point. Said Tony Norman of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: "Besides its didacticism, this letter is full of the racial self-loathing that permeates much so-called 'uplift' literature these days. There is no substantive critique of a community's behavior here. It relies on stereotypes to make what are, at best, questionable points. It was, in all likelihood, written by a black person who was trying a little too hard to be 'deep' and righteous." Barbara "deeply disturbing" Mikkelson Last updated:  22 June 2010    Smokes, Saundra.  "E-Mail Decries Slave Mentality."   The [Syracuse] Post-Standard.  1 December 2002  (p. C2).    The New York Beacon.  "Negativity or a Wake-Up Call: They Are Still Our Slaves."   17 October 2001. During the tour to promote his presidential memoir,Decision Points, George W. Bush defended his fiscal record in an interview with Matt Lauer on NBC'sToday Show. In the interview, Bush said that the ratio of the deficit to gross domestic product during his time in office was lower than Ronald Reagan's by half. Lower than my dad's. And only [worse than] Bill Clinton among modern presidents. ... My debt to GDP was the lowest or one of the lowest of modern presidents. My taxes to GDP was the lowest and my spending to GDP was too. We thought it would be worthwhile to see if Bush was correct. So we turned to a historical table from the Office of Management and Budget that shows tax receipts, spending and the deficit as a percentage of GDP -- essentially, as a percentage of the nation's economy as a whole.The challenge is figuring exactly how to compare recent presidents.Let's start with the deficit. The most obvious way to do it is to add up all of the annual percentages for a president and divide by the number of years served, to produce an average.Calculating it this way -- and beginning our list of modern presidents with President Dwight Eisenhower -- we came up with the following order: Eisenhower (deficits averaged 0.53 percent of GDP), Clinton (0.76 percent of GDP), Richard Nixon (0.93 percent), Lyndon Johnson (1.1 percent),George W. Bush (2.0 percent), Jimmy Carter (2.4 percent), George H.W. Bush (3.98 percent), Reagan (4.23 percent). (We excluded John F. Kennedy and Gerald Ford because of their short tenures. )You can do the same with spending and tax receipts.For spending as a percent of GDP, the ranking from low to high is Eisenhower (18.1 percent of GDP), Johnson (18.7 percent), Nixon (19.2 percent),George W. Bush (19.6 percent), Clinton (19.8), Carter (20.8), George H.W. Bush (21.9), and Reagan (22.4).For tax receipts as a percentage of GDP, the ranking from low to high is Eisenhower (17.5 percent of GDP), Johnson andGeorge W. Bush (tied at 17.6 percent), George H.W. Bush (17.9 percent), Reagan (18.2 percent), Nixon (18.3 percent), Carter (18.4 percent) and Clinton (19 percent).Whether Bush is correct depends heavily on which presidents you consider modern. If you only go back to Reagan -- the earliest president that Bush himself cited by name in the interview -- then Bush is basically correct. Only Clinton did better when measured by deficit as a percentage of GDP, while no president dating back to Reagan scored better on spending or tax receipts as a percentage of GDP.By contrast, if you go back to Eisenhower -- the first fully post-World War II president -- Bush is in the middle of the pack on the deficit and on spending, and he's near the top on tax receipts.But there's another way to look at the deficit -- to compare a president's first deficit as a percentage of GDP to their last. This shows what direction the deficit went during their tenures.And on this one, George W. Bush does the worst of any president dating back to Eisenhower.The younger Bush went from a 1.3 percent surplus to a 3.2 percent deficit, a decline of 4.5 percentage points. The best was Clinton, who moved the deficit from a 3.9 percent deficit to a 2.4 percent surplus -- a positive change of 6.3 percentage points. The other presidents all had changes up or down that were roughly two percentage points or smaller.This suggests that Bush's fiscal record wasn't so sterling if you use a different measure than the one he did. But to analyze the accuracy of his statement, we'll stick closely to the words he used. George W. Bush is correct that he outperformed his father, Reagan and (mostly) Clinton. So if you consider those the modern presidents, he's essentially right. If you broaden the modern presidents to include those serving in the entire post-World War II period, Bush is about average. While we wouldn't have chosen to define the modern presidents to include just the four that Bush mentioned by name, we'll give him some deference in framing the question. So we rate his statement Mostly True. In April 2020, Facebook posts circulating online offered coupons supposedly good for two free large pizzas from the Domino's pizza chain:  Users who clicked on the offer were taken to an external website where they were instructed to answer survey questions in order to receive their coupons:  After completing the questionnaire, however, users were then required to click a button to share the "offer" with their Facebook friends before they could retrieve their coupons. Those who complied by spamming their friends were then allowed to click a "Receive the Coupon" button, but there was no actual coupon to receive. Like innumerable other "free merchandise" offers on Facebook, this offer was another variation of a common scam. other free merchandise offers Facebook We've had many occasions to alert readers to this kind of fraud: These types of viral coupon scams often involve websites and social media pages set up to mimic those of legitimate companies. Users who respond to those fake offers are required to share a website link or social media post in order to spread the scam more widely and lure in additional victims. Then those users are presented with a survey that extracts personal information such as email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, and even sometimes credit card numbers. Finally, those who want to claim their free gift cards or coupons eventually learn they must first sign up to purchase a number of costly goods, services, or subscriptions. The Better Business Bureau offers consumers several general tips to avoid getting scammed: offers consumers