Facts Matter: More than empty folders seized at Mar-a-Lago
Former Vice President Mike Pence last week turned over classified documents found in his Indiana home. This follows news over the past months that classified documents were found in the possession of former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden.
Trump recently suggested the FBI, which he refers to as "the Gestapo," didn't seize actual documents, but rather just the folders they were kept in.
"Remember, these were just ordinary, inexpensive folders with various words printed on them, but they were a 'cool' keepsake," Trump wrote Jan. 18 on his Truth Social platform. "Perhaps the Gestapo took some of these empty folders when they Raided Mar-a-Lago, & counted them as a document, which they are not."
But there is no evidence this is the case. In court filings, the Justice Department listed empty folders among the documents recovered at Trump's Florida residence, according to CNN.
An inventory lists 103 classified government documents, along with 88 empty folders, noting 46 of those were marked "CLASSIFIED" and 28 others labeled "Return to Staff Secretary/Military Aide."
According to a September court filing, "The FBI would be chiefly responsible for investigating what materials may have once been stored in these (empty) folders and whether they may have been lost or compromised."
No evidence robots killed scientists
Recent tweets include a claim that robots murdered 29 scientists. The posts include a video of Linda Moulton Howe, who has written books about aliens, speaking in 2018 in Los Angeles.
"At a top robotics company in Japan this week, four robots being developed for military applications killed 29 humans," Howe says in the clip. "The scariest part is that lab workers deactivated two of the robots, took apart the third, but the fourth robot began restoring itself and somehow connected to an orbiting satellite to download information."
Some posts said the incident happened in Japan while others claim it was in South Korea.
But this didn't happen anywhere. There is no evidence or credible news reports of robots killing scientists.
"To our knowledge there is no basis in fact regarding the matter you inquired about," the Robotics Policy Office of the Japan Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry told Reuters.
Cooling period taken out of context
Recent social media posts, claiming global warming isn't real, include a portion of a graph from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration showing eight years in which the Earth's temperature cooled.
"Last 8 years ... global cooling ... at a rate of 0.11°C/decade ... despite 450+ billion tons of emissions worth 14% of total man-made CO2 in the atmosphere. CO2 warming is a hoax," read a tweet that was shared nearly 10,000 times.
But this post doesn't tell the whole story, according to the Associated Press.
The NOAA graph in the post covers 2015 to 2022. The full graph, which has been recording temperatures on the Earth since 1880, shows a rise in the average temperature over that 142-year period.
University of Georgia professor John Knox told the AP the temperature during those years was affected by El Niño and La Niña cycles, phenomena that influence global weather.
"It's a very short period of time, which reduces the statistical significance of claims of a trend," he said. "The rising temperature trend over the decades is obvious."
Celebrities not cloned, as video purports
A video making the rounds on Instagram shows current celebrities alongside a person from history they resemble, and it asks if these contemporaries were cloned, if they're time travelers or if it is just a coincidence.
It's just a coincidence.
The video doesn't name the people in the images. The clip includes: actor Leonardo DiCaprio alongside Judy Zipper, a girl in a 1960 yearbook; Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Philip IV, who ruled Spain in the 1600s; talk show host Ellen DeGeneres and writer Henry David Thoreau; and actor Orlando Bloom and 19th-century artist Nicolae Grigorescu.
The internet has allowed people to more easily find images of other's doppelgängers and match them up on social media, PolitiFact said.
• Bob Oswald is a veteran Chicago-area journalist and former news editor of the Elgin Courier-News. Contact him at boboswald33@gmail.com.