Bank didn't file foreclosure notice on Mar-a-Lago

Former President Donald Trump has spent a lot of time in court recently while facing various indictments, bringing about an increase in social media posts involving his finances.

A post on X appears to show a problem with Trump's home.

"BREAKING FOX NEWS: Deutsche Bank has filed a notice to foreclose on Mar A Lago. The Trump property is part of a larger estate lien that is 190m$ delinquent. Court documents show a 3.4b$ loan that's in default. Trump hasn't respond to repeated attempts for comment. Developing story," the post read.

But this claim is false, according to The Associated Press. The post originated on a parody account and was then shared as real news.

The account that posted the false claim is self described as a "Raw & Unfiltered Parody Account."

There is no public record of Deutsche Bank issuing a foreclosure on Mar-a-Lago, there are no news reports to support this and Fox News spokesperson Connor Smith told the AP that this item was not reported by the network.

The value of Mar-a-Lago has been an issue at Trump's New York civil fraud trial. The judge in that case said the reported worth of the property had been overvalued by as much as 2,300%, the AP reported.

Bodycam video is not new

George Floyd died on May 25, 2020, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during an arrest. Police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of second-degree murder following the event, in which Chauvin had Floyd's head pinned down for several minutes.

Commentator Megyn Kelly's Sirius XM podcast "The Megyn Kelly Show" recently posted on Facebook that she had "new police bodycam footage" of the arrest "that changes the narrative completely."

But there is nothing "new" about the body camera clip she presented, according to PolitiFact. It has been available to the public since August 2020 and a transcript of the audio was published before that.

The producer and director from a new film about Floyd's death, "The Fall of Minneapolis," were interviewed Nov. 15 on Kelly's podcast, and they presented bodycam video showing an interaction between Floyd and a police officer, while Floyd was in his car.

During Kelly's broadcast, the clip is not presented as new, as was promised in the Facebook post, but rather there is discussion that it took nearly two and a half months for the footage to become public.

A transcript of the audio from the interaction was first made public on July 8, 2020, and the video was released on Aug. 10, 2020. A leaked recording of the video came out on Aug. 3, 2020, and that's the version shown on Kelly's podcast.

The clip was also part of the evidence presented in March 2021 at Chauvin's trial.

River Nile didn't turn red

A video appearing recently on social media claims the River Nile in northeastern Africa has turned red, which is a sign of impending doom.

"You mean to tell me on November 9, 2023, the Nile River looks like this," a narrator says in a clip superimposed over a video of a red body of water. A quote taken from the Bible Book of Revelation is displayed over the video before the narrator wraps up with, "Now I don't know about you guys, but I can tell you without a doubt, this is another sign of the end times."

But that's not quite right, according to Reuters. That's not the Nile.

The clip showing red colored water and mountains in the background is actually a video of Laguna Roja, or Red Lagoon, in Chile, not the River Nile.

Chilean officials don't have a conclusive explanation for the crimson color of the lagoon, but researchers suggest it is "due to the presence of sediments and the Chlamynodephris microalgae," according to the tourism site Chile Travel.

The moon only reflects light

Since the U.S. landed on the moon in 1969, conspiracy theories have claimed it didn't actually happen. A recent social media post sheds a different light on those theories.

"If the moon is bright enough to give light to 'half the earth' at night, wouldn't the astronauts be absolutely blinded that landed on it, like to the point of not even being able to see." reads a Nov. 8 Facebook post, which included the hashtag #MOONlandingHOAX.

No, as USA Today points out, the moon doesn't emit light; it reflects it, just like Earth. It would not have been too bright for astronauts to land.

"Everything reflects visible light to some extent," University of Central Florida Physics professor Yan Fernandez told USA Today. "You go outside on a dark night and shine a flashlight on some rocks, they will reflect the light, and that's why you can see them. The moon is no different. It's just that the source of the light is the sun."

• Bob Oswald is a veteran Chicago-area journalist and former news editor of the Elgin Courier-News. Contact him at boboswald33@gmail.com.