Category: Fact Checking

On January 1, 1959, troops of the revolutionary 26th of July Movement marched into the Cuban capital of Havana, toppling the American-backed government of dictator Fulgencio Batista. Two weeks later, the leader of the revolution, former lawyer Fidel Castro, was sworn in as Prime Minister. Almost immediately, Castro began implementing a program of sweeping socialist reforms, nationalizing Cuba’s sugar and oil refining industries, confiscating land from private owners and redistributing it among the peasantry, and seeking closer diplomatic and economic ties with the Soviet Union. These actions incensed and frightened the United States, who saw the Caribbean island as a dangerous communist outpost in the Western Hemisphere. Over the next six decades, Cuba’s beard-sporting, fatigues-wearing, cigar-chomping leader would remain a veritable obsession of the American CIA, attracting dozens of coup and assassination attempts. But while some of these plots were well-organized and came lose to succeeding, others were so improbably absurd they sound like something Wile E. Coyote would dream up after browsing the Acme Products catalogue – involving such exotic killing methods as exploding seashells, poisoned diving suits, and LSD-laced cigars. This is the story of the of the many hilarious ways the CIA tried – and failed – to kill Fidel Castro.

The first recorded attempt to undermine the Cuban revolution took place in early 1960, a year after the fall of the Batista government. According to former U.S. Air Force Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, who revealed the plot in 1975, the U.S. Defense Department’s Office of Special Operations chartered a small Air Force liaison aircraft to fly two CIA-trained Cuban exiles from Elgin Air Force Base in Florida to a road just outside Havana. The exiles planned to infiltrate a building in Havana overlooking Castro’s daily commute and assassinate the leader with a sniper rifle. But while the plane returned safely to Florida, the two operatives were never heard from again, having likely been captured by Cuban forces en route to Havana.

Finding it increasingly difficult to infiltrate outside agents into Cuba, the CIA enlisted the help of a person with very close ties to Fidel Castro: his former mistress Marita Lorenz. The German-born daughter of an ocean liner captain, Lorenz arrived in Havana in February 1959 and soon met and began an affair with the new Cuban leader – who immediately proceeded to knock her up. Seven months later, Lorenz was given a glass of drugged milk, passed out, and awoke in a local clinic with her baby nowhere to be found. Shortly thereafter, she was recruited by CIA agent Frank Sturgis, who gave her a package of poison capsules and convinced her to return to Cuba and kill her former lover. Unfortunately, the plan immediately went awry. Paranoid that the pills would be discovered by Cuban customs, Lorenz hid them in a pot of cold cream. Later, when she tried to recover them:

“…they were all gunked up. I fished them out and flushed them down the bidet.”

Things only got worse when Castro finally appeared, as Lorenz later recalled:

“‘Why did you leave so suddenly?’ he asked. “Are you running around with those counterrevolutionaries in Miami?’ I said yes. I tried to play it cool. The most nervous I have ever been was in that room, because I had agents on standby and I had to watch my timing. I had enough hours to stay with him, order a meal, kill him, and prevent him from making a speech that night, which was already pre-announced.

He was very tired and wanted to sleep. … He was chewing a cigar, and he laid down on the bed and said, ‘Did you come here to kill me?’ Just like that. I was standing at the edge of the bed. I said, ‘Yes. I wanted to see you.’ And he said, ‘That’s good. That’s good.’ He asked if I was working for the CIA. I said, ‘Not really. I work for myself.’ Then he leaned over, pulled out his .45, and handed it to me. I flipped the chamber out and hit it back. He didn’t even flinch. And he said, ‘You can’t kill me. Nobody can kill me.’ And he kind of smiled and chewed on his cigar. … I felt deflated. He was so sure of me. He just grabbed me. We made love. I contemplated staying—to try talking to him later, after his speech, but it would be too late, because he rambles on for 8, 10, 12 hours. That was the hardest part. I wanted him to beg me to stay, but he got dressed and left. I just sat there by myself awhile. I left him a note. I told him that I would be back.”

Shortly after this encounter, Lorenz left Cuba, only returning once to visit Castro in 1981.

The CIA’s next major assassination attempt targeted not Fidel Castro but his younger brother Raúl, then leader of the Cuban Armed Forces. In July 1960, José Raúl Martínez, a pilot for national airline Cubana and secret CIA operative, revealed that he had been chosen to fly Raúl Castro to a meeting in Prague, in the then-communist republic of Czechoslovakia. Seizing a rare opportunity to eliminate a key figure in the Cuban government, the CIA wired $10,000 to William Murray, its operative in Havana, and instructed him to arrange for Castro to have an “accident.” The plot was a rush job in the extreme; indeed, Murray’s only chance to discuss the mission with Martínez was while the pilot was driving to the airport. And while Martínez was eager to eliminate Castro, he was unsure of how to do so without also killing everyone on the plane. In the end, he asked Murray:

“If I die, will you make sure that my two sons have their college education paid for?”

The CIA agreed, and Martínez set off on his mission. Minutes later, however, Murray received new orders: Do not pursue. Would like to drop matter. But it was already too late; the plane had already taken off, and Murray had no means of contacting Martínez. In the end, however, Martínez found no opportunity to arrange the CIA’s desired “accident”, and returned Raúl Castro to Cuba, safe and sound. A few months later, Martínez defected to the United States.

Just one month after this hastily-organized assassination attempt, the CIA concocted a more sophisticated scheme to poison Fidel Castro by contaminating his favourite cigars with botulinum toxin – one of the most powerful poisons known to science. According to official reports from the CIA’s Technical Services Division, the poisoned cigars were ready by October 7, 1960 and delivered to an unidentified operative in Cuba on February 13, 1961. For unknown reasons, however, the cigars never made it into Castro’s hands. At around the same time, the CIA also toyed with the idea of overthrowing Castro not by assassinating him, but by undermining his credibility. One such scheme involved clandestinely dosing Castro with LSD or a similar hallucinogen prior to his delivering a television or radio broadcast to make him behave erratically. Another plot, timed to coincide with a planned address before the United Nations in New York, involved poisoning Castro with Thallium salts. The salts, which would be slipped into Castro’s shoes when he set them outside his hotel room to be polished, would, it was hoped, cause Castro’s iconic beard to fall out, making him look weak on the world stage.. In the end, however, neither plan was carried out.

The next offensive against Cuba would be a much more substantial affair. In March of 1960, U.S. President Dwight D Eisenhower authorized the CIA to arm and train a force of exiled counter-revolutionaries to land in Cuba and lead a coup against the Castro government. Though Eisenhower left office later that year, his successor, John F. Kennedy, gave the operation the go-ahead. On April 17, 1961, a force of 1,400 Cuban exiles known as Brigade 2506, sailing from bases in Guatemala and Nicaragua, landed in the Bay of Pigs in southwest Cuba. The operation was a complete disaster. Due to confusion over time zones, the expected American air support came an hour late, and Brigade 2506 found itself pinned down on the beach by Cuban revolutionary forces. And when the world learned of the illegal invasion, President Kennedy cancelled further airstrikes. Within two days 100 exiles were killed and the rest captured. The Bay of Pigs Invasion was a major embarrassment for the Kennedy Administration, further souring relations between the United States and Cuba. In late 1961, Fidel Castro officially declared himself a Marxist-Leninist and publicly sought closer cooperation with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.

In the wake of the Bay of Pigs disaster, the CIA and Department of Defense launched Operation Mongoose, a multi-phase, coordinated program of military and intelligence operations designed to undermine and topple the Cuban government. The plan, authorized by President Kennedy on November 30, 1961, included the dissemination of anti-Castro propaganda, the training and infiltration of counter-revolutionary guerrilla units into the country, the assassination of key government figures, and:

“…all other political, economic and covert actions, short of inspiring a revolt in Cuba or developing the need for US armed intervention… in order to help Cuba overthrow the Communist regime…while [remaining] consistent with US overt policy, and [remaining] in position to disengage with minimum of loss in assets and US prestige.”

Operation Mongoose was placed under the directorship of CIA operative Edward Lonsdale, and given an initial budget of $100 million. Over the next two decades, the project would consume $50 million per year and involve some 2,500 Cuban and American personnel.

In June 1962, American lawyer James B. Donovan – most famous for arranging the exchange of Soviet spy Rudolf Abel for CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers – was sent to Cuba to negotiate the release of the 1,113 Cuban exiles taken prisoner during the Bay of Pigs invasion. In the lead-up to the mission, the CIA prepared a special scuba diving outfit which Donovan was to present to Castro as a gift. The wetsuit had been treated with spores of the fungus Eumycetoma, which causes the disfiguring skin disease Madura Foot, while the breathing apparatus was infected with tuberculosis bacteria. But in another stroke of bad luck, Donovan revealed that he had already gifted Castro with a diving suit, and the infected suit never left the United States. In the end, Donovan managed to secure the prisoners’ release in exchange for $52 million in medical supplies and baby food.

With their assets in Cuba swiftly dwindling, the CIA next turned to another group with a major grudge against Castro: the American Mafia. Prior to the revolution, the Mafia had enjoyed a lucrative presence in Cuba, running a chain of successful hotels, nightclubs, brothels, and casinos catering mostly to American tourists. When Castro came to power, however, he seized the Mafia’s assets and expelled them from the country. The CIA’s collaboration with the Mafia had begun back in 1960, when the agency sent former FBI agent and private intelligence contractor Bob Maheu to make contact with Chicago mob bosses Johnny Rosselli, Salvatore Giancana, and Santos Trafficant. The mobsters eagerly agreed to cooperate, even waiving their regular fee to carry out the assassination. Despite this, Maheu soon dropped out of the plot, later stating:

“I was not very happy about the project in the first place. I felt that I was building up my business, I had a good business going, the demands on behalf of the [Howard] Hughes interests were increasing progressively. On the other hand, I felt that I had an obligation to my country, and I recognized the fact that the Agency had been good to me in the early stages of my business. . . . I was anxious to get back to work. My recollection is that I phased out of the project as soon as it could be accomplished after the Bay of Pigs, or after the invasion was not successful.”

Rosselli, Giancana, and Trafficant, however, carried on plotting, and in 1963 they managed to smuggle a batch of botulinum toxin pills into Cuba, disguised in a bottle of aspirin. The perfect opportunity to deploy them soon arrived when Castro visited the Havana Libre Hotel, which served his favourite chocolate milkshakes. Interestingly, Castro was such an ice cream aficionado that in 1966 he spearheaded the construction of Havana’s famous Coppelia, a massive ice cream parlour which seated 1,000 guests and served a then impressive 26 different flavours. Yet despite the mob having found the perfect delivery mechanism for Castro’s poison, once again the plot quickly unraveled. When the would-be assassin went to retrieve the poison capsule from the freezer where he had hidden it, he found it frozen to the wall. His attempts to free the capsule caused it to rupture, scuppering the assassination attempt. It was the closest they came to actually killing Fidel Castro.

But this failure was not for lack of trying, for over the next decade the agency would hatch a dizzying array of harebrained assassination schemes, each more outlandish than the next. One such plot involved planting a conch shell packed with explosives near a reef where Castro liked to scuba dive. The shell was even painted in bright colours to make it especially attractive. Other schemes involved blowing Castro’s head off with exploding cigars, pushing him into a vat of molten metal while he toured a steel mill, injecting him with a poison-tipped needle disguised in a pen, shooting him with a gun hidden in a television camera, or killing him with a grenade disguised as a baseball – another of Castro’s favourite pastimes.

Of course, none of these attempts proved successful, and in 1976 the findings of the Church Committee – a U.S. Senate group established to investigate abuses by the CIA, FBI, NSA, and IRS – prompted President Gerald Ford to pass a series of Intelligence Services reforms which, among other things, banned the assassination of foreign leaders. This effectively brought Operation Mongoose to an end. Like the Bay of Pigs Invasion, Mongoose had turned into an embarrassing failure for the U.S. Government, swallowing countless millions of dollars while accomplishing little of substance. Meanwhile, the U.S. government had found more effective ways of containing Cuban influence. Following the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, the United States imposed a complete trade embargo against Cuba.

But while the CIA was no longer allowed to assassinate Castro directly, they continued to work with Cuban exiles and other anti-Castro forces. As recently as 2000, former CIA operative Luis Posada was arrested in Panama for planting explosives in a podium where Castro was scheduled to speak. Castro’s security detail found and removed the explosives, and Castro’s speech proceeded as planned. In 2004, Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso pardoned and released Posada, who subsequently fled to the United States.

According to former Cuban Intelligence officer Fabian Escalante, over his lifetime Fidel Castro survived a whopping 638 assassination attempts. This number, however, is highly debated, with declassified CIA records confirming only 8 officially-sanctioned plots. Nonetheless, Castro’s apparent invulnerability became a part of his public image, with the leader once claiming that:

“If surviving assassination attempts were an Olympic event, I would win the gold medal.”

On another occasion, Castro was offered a Galápagos tortoise as a gift. But upon learning it would live for 100 years or more, he declined the offer, quipping:

“That’s the problem with pets. You get attached to them and then they die on you.”

Indeed, for a man forever in the world’s crosshairs, Castro lived an astonishingly long life, with the leader stating on his 90th birthday that:

“Never would such an idea have occurred to me. It was not the fruit of any effort, it was the whim of fate. Soon I will be like all the rest.”

These words would prove prophetic, for three months later on November 25, 2016, Fidel Castro finally died – not from an exploding cigar or poison milkshake, but the killer that gets us all in the end: time.

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In July 2024, after U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris entered the race to become president, a claim that her father was a marxist economist began to circulate online (archived):

The X post, which had gained 1.7 million views and 4,900 likes, came from Maxine Fowé, a political economist and an economic policy adviser at the German Federal Parliament, according to her LinkedIn profile. 

The claim is true. Taking a closer look at Harris’ work and the economics school of thought he professed, we were able to confirm that he inscribed himself in Marx’s intellectual tradition.

Starting with Fowe, we found her biography on the website of one her previous employers, the German think tank Das Progressive Zentrum, which described her focus on “issues in the field of democratization of the economy and post-Keynesian economics in times of financialization dynamics.” 

This detail is important because Donald J. Harris, a professor of economics at Stanford University, also did his research from a post-Keynesian perspective. Fowé was noting his line of inquiry admiringly. Keynesians stipulate that markets alone cannot ensure full employment and instead advocate for government intervention. Post-Keynesians agree, but argue that in intervening, the government should focus on equality and redistribution of wealth.

The post-Keynesian school of economics finds its roots in “The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money” — a 1936 book by economist John Maynard Keynes. In his book, Keynes attacked classical economics, which was the orthodoxy — that is, the mainstream — of the time. 

Keynes’ main argument was that, contrary to classical economics’ assumption, markets alone would never ensure full employment because employment depends on demand — that is, the amount of money people and companies spend on available goods and services. He said that the psychology of markets was too volatile to manage. Instead, Keynes advocated for government intervention to stabilize the economy. For example, his recommendation for getting out of the 1930s Great Depression was that governments should simultaneously spend more and cut taxes.

From Keynes, three schools of thought emerged: Neo-Keynesians, new Keynesians and post-Keynesians. Neo-Keynesianism supporters, who focus on growth and stability rather than full employment, were the mainstream — or the orthodoxy — in the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1980s and 1990s, new Keynesians took the spotlight. New Keynesians argued that due to the fact that prices and wages are “rigid” — they don’t move easily as others schools of thought assume they do — unemployment and monetary policy (interest rates and money supply) have a much larger impact on demand.

Post-Keynesianism, which also evolved from Keynesianism, is in the heterodoxy — outside of the mainstream. Like Keynesianism, it assumes that markets alone cannot ensure full employment, and that the government must stimulate demand. But to post-Keynesians, the dimension of equality, classes and economic power is very important. Therefore, they are very concerned with distribution of income — how a country’s wealth is distributed among its inhabitants.

The title of Harris’ 1978 book, “Capital Accumulation and Income Distribution,” illustrates this concern. Harris was also preoccupied with exploitation and other concepts that came directly from Karl Marx’s theory of capital. For example, The Economist recounts that he once argued that the inequality that beset Black people in the U.S. did not come from a form of “colonial rule” where white people dominate. Instead, he argued that the problem was capitalism. In this sense, Harris was indeed marxist in his thinking.

In fact, a 2019 paper in Elgar Online argued that “Marx should not be considered as an ‘early post-Keynesian’ but rather as an important forerunner of modern post-Keynesianism, with certain similarities, but also some important differences, and several areas of compatibility.”

Would you allow your baby to be held in a cage suspended outside your apartment building? That’s what families were allegedly doing in the 1920s, when they placed their toddlers in wire-enclosed “baby cages” hung outside of windows in order to give children “proper fresh air.”

Photographs and videos of the supposed invention have been shared on social media platforms for years. In late July 2024, we found a fresh post about the claim being shared on X:

We fact-checked this claim in November 2023 and found the peculiar contraption was indeed real, despite its apparent dangers.

Snopes conducted a keyword search of “baby cage patent 1922” and found the invention was genuine. U.S. Patent 1448235 was described as a “Portable Baby Cage” and was filed on July 19, 1922, by Emma Read, a self-described resident of Spokane, Washington, at the time.

The patent was approved on March 13, 1923, and expired on the same day in 1940. It read, in part:

It is well known that a great many difficulties arise in raising and properly housing babies and small children in crowded cities, that is to say from the health viewpoint. This is especially true with reference to babies and young children, who at present are being raised in large apartments, as a result of not obtaining the proper fresh air, as well as being outdoors, for such air and exercise.

In crowded cities, where the houses are closely arranged, and in large apartments, there is no way for proper ventilation. Back and front yards are small, while those living in apartments have no facilities whatever, to permit the children and babies to receive proper fresh air from the outside.

With these facts in view, it is the purpose of the present invention to provide an article of manufacture for babies and young children, to be suspended upon the exterior of a building adjacent an open window, wherein the baby or young child may be placed. This article of manufacture comprises a housing or cage, wherein the baby or young child together with proper toys may be placed. The baby is enabled to receive fresh air through the screen or wire fabric, and it will be noted that the baby has sufficient room or space for playing with toys…

The description goes on to explain that “suitable bed clothing” may also be arranged in the cage to allow for proper napping facilities made up with “suitable curtains.”

The figures below also accompanied the patent, which provided dimensions and construction information for the cage.

 (Google Patents)

Snopes has a history of investigating the origins of what appear to be bizarre inventions of the past, including a device that enabled its user to smoke an entire pack of 20 cigarettes at once and plastic cone-shaped face masks to supposedly protect people against snowstorms.

Sources

From the dawn of history we humans have been obsessed with measurement, striving to gauge, rank, and quantify every part of our world from the tallest mountain to the tiniest grain of sand. It is an obsession which led to the development of the precise mathematics and science which underpin our modern world. But one unfortunate result of this millennia-long quest has been to saddle us with a bewildering array of disparate weights and measures, many of which to modern eyes appear completely arbitrary and illogical. Much of this apparent arbitrariness stems from these systems of measurement having been created in an era before precise measuring instruments, when people had to rely on everyday objects and observations to make sense of their world. For example, the mile, now defined as 5,280 feet or 1,609.344 metres, derives its name from the Latin word for “one thousand,” and once corresponded to a thousand standard paces of a marching Roman soldier. Similarly, the acre, now defined as 43,560 square feet or 4,047 square metres, was traditionally the average area of land which could be ploughed by a team of oxen in one day. Slightly more modern but equally based in everyday agrarian life is horsepower, developed by engineer James Watt in the late 18th Century to measure the output of steam engines. Defined today as 745.7 watts, one horsepower originally referred to the mechanical power needed by a draft horse to lift a 550 pound weight a distance of one foot over one second. Essentially Watt wanted a way to show people how economical it would be to replace their draft horses with his engines.

It isn’t known exactly how he came up with the numbers he did, as there are conflicting accounts of the experiments he ran. And, in truth, that’s a very generous estimate as very few horses could maintain that kind of power for a full workday, but getting a perfect figure wasn’t that important to what Watt was trying to do. Further, by overestimating what a horse could do, whether intentionally or not, he made sure that his product would always over deliver what he said when trying to get people to buy it, which is a great word-of-mouth marketing trick.

Moving on from there, other common systems of measurement are baffling on an entirely different level, and one of the most widespread and confusing is the concept of “gauge.” While the term originates from the use of a standardized measuring tool or gauge for inspection, the various measurement systems known as “gauge” are as different as the objects they measure.

The most common use of “gauge” is to measure the thickness of sheet metal and the diameter of metal wire. The gauge scale works opposite to what one might expect, with 1-gauge sheet measuring 0.28 inches thick but 10 gauge sheet only 0.14 inches. Similarly 1-gauge wire measures 0.3 inches in diameter and 10-gauge wire 0.128. This system, however, starts to make a lot more sense once you consider how these materials are actually manufactured. Sheet metal is produced by passing thick sheet steel through heavy rollers, while wire is manufactured by pulling metal rods through a draw plate – a hardened metal die with a series of precise holes drilled in it. The gauge number refers to the number of times a sheet is passed through the rollers or a wire through the draw plate, with the metal getting progressively thinner with each pass. Thus, the higher the gauge, the thinner the metal. Originally, the exact thickness of each gauge number was based on the standard thickness of the original – or 0-gauge – starting material: 0.2813 inches for sheet metal and 0.324 inches for wire. Later, smaller gauge numbers, written as 2/0, 3/0, 4/0 and so on were added to accommodate thicker materials. Nowadays, however, sheet metal and wire are typically measured by simple thickness or diameter in millimetres or fractions of an inch, while the gauge systems still in use have been rationalized to make them more consistent. For example, in the British Standard Wire Gauge or SWG system, introduced in 1883, wire sizes are fitted to a pre-calculated exponential curve wherein the weight per unit length changes by 20% per step. This, in turn means that wire diameter decreases by approximately 10.6% between gauge numbers.

Gauge is also used to measure hollow tubes, though in this case gauge refers not to the diameter of the tube but rather its wall thickness. As in other gauge systems, the higher the gauge number, the thinner the tube walls. This again derives from the manufacturing process, with the walls getting thinner each time a tube is drawn through a tool called a swage. In industry, tube dimensions are typically given as a combination of outer diameter and gauge. However, this applies only to larger structural tube sizes; in the Birmingham Gauge System, commonly used for hypodermic needles, gauge numbers refer not to wall thickness alone but rather to a standardized combination of outer diameter and wall thickness. Wall thickness also does not consistently decrease with diameter, with some higher gauges actually having thicker walls than lower gauges. The Birmingham scale ranges from 00000 gauge, with a diameter of half an inch, down to 36-gauge, with a diameter of 0.003 inches, with 19-26 gauge being the most common diameters for hypodermic needles. Further adding to the confusion, intravenous catheters, though inserted using hypodermic needles, are measured using an entirely different system called French Gauge. Unlike in Birmingham Gauge, a higher French Gauge number indicates a thicker catheter, with the numbers corresponding to three times the diameter of the catheter tube in millimetres. Thus a 3 French Gauge tube has an outer diameter of 1mm.

And if all this wasn’t enough, Gauge only applies to seamless drawn tubing; for welded pipes like those used to carry water and sewage, yet another system known as Pipe Schedule is used. Each standard pipe size is available in up to 11 standard pipe schedules, ranging from 5 to 160, each defined by a particular ratio between the internal pressure of the pipe and maximum allowable stress in the pipe wall. Thus, as schedule increases, so does the thickness of the pipe wall compared to its outer diameter, meaning that the higher the schedule, the more internal pressure a pipe can carry. But as pipe schedule is based on calculations of mechanical stress, the ratio between pipe thickness and pipe diameter is not constant across each schedule. For example, for a 1-inch schedule 30 pipe the ratio is 13.5% while for a 3-inch schedule 30 pipe it is only 5%. Thus, in most practical applications it is easier look up the dimensions of a particular pipe size on a standard chart rather than calculate it.

Yet another way in which gauge is commonly used is to measure the barrel diameter or “bore” of firearms, particularly shotguns. As in other gauge systems, the higher the gauge, the smaller the diameter, with a 16-gauge barrel, for instance, being smaller than a 12-gauge barrel. However, unlike with sheet metal, wire, or tubing, this system is based not on the manufacturing process of the barrel, but a totally different and archaic system involving lead, the metal traditionally used to make shotgun projectiles. If you were to take a pound of lead, divide it into 12 equal pieces, and form those pieces into perfect spheres, each of those spheres will have a diameter of 0.729 inches or 18.53mm – the exact inner diameter of a 12-gauge shotgun barrel. Thus, shotgun gauge refers to the number of pieces into which that pound of lead is divided; the higher the number, the smaller the resulting spheres, and the smaller the barrel diameter. The only common exception to this is .410 gauge, commonly used for hunting small game like rabbits or grouse. In this case .410 is not actually a gauge but simply the calibre or internal diameter of the barrel in inches.

But while gauge is used to measure the diameter of the barrel, the actual pellets or “shot” fired by a shotgun are measured using an entirely different system. As with gauge, a higher number corresponds to a smaller pellet diameter, but as there are multiple different classification systems still in use, things get very confusing very quickly. In the British system shot is classified according to the number of pellets per ounce, with, for example, AAA shot corresponding to 35 pellets per ounce, A shot 50 pellets per ounce, BB shot 72 pellets per ounce, and No.2 shot 87 pellets per ounce. The American and European systems are similar but differ in the actual diameter of each shot type, the American system being based on hundredths of an inch and the European system on millimetres, with each number corresponding to a 0.25mm decrease in diameter. This system, incidentally, is the origin of the “BBs” traditionally used in children’s BB guns. “BB” in this case does not stand for “Ball Bearing” as is sometimes claimed but rather BB-size shot, once defined as .180 inches but now standardized at .177 inches or 4.5mm. Buckshot, used against larger game, is measured using a similar – but once again slightly different – system. As with birdshot, the British system is based on shot weight, with SG or “small game” shot corresponding to 8 pellets per ounce. Each subsequent size, designated as SSG, SSSG and so on, is half the weight of the last. The American system is centred around #0 buck, with larger pellets designated by additional zeroes – as in the ubiquitous “double-aught-buck” – and smaller pellets by larger numbers like #1 buck, #2 buck, and so on. These sizes in turn correspond to an increase of approximately 2-3 pellets per ounce. However, given the long and complex history of these measures and the inexact methods used to create them, most of these sizes are more a matter of tradition than any rational system.

And finally, we come to the last common use of gauge: as a measure of the width of railroad tracks. Unlike other gauge-based systems, railroad gauge is not based on any overarching system of measurement but rather evolved over time to meet the ever-changing needs of railway rolling stock. The earliest common track gauge of around 4 feet 4 inches was based on the width of the wagons and horse teams used to haul coal and other minerals out of mines. But as steam locomotives continued to grow, so too did track gauge. What is now known as a standard gauge of 4 feet, 8-1/2 inches was first used on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830, while the broad gauge of 7 feet, 1/4 inch was first used on the Great Western Railway in 1833 to give trains greater lateral stability. However, the use of different gauges on competing rail lines lead massive compatibility problems within the British rail system, and in 1846 the Regulating Gauge of Railways Act mandated that all lines be converted to standard gauge. Today, Standard Gauge is the most commonly-used railway gauge in the world, though Broad Gauge – defined as any gauge significantly wider than 4 feet, 8-1/2 inches – is widely used in India and Russia, while Narrow Gauge is used in parts of Africa, Southeast Asia, Central and South America, and in industrial settings like mines and factory complexes.

And so we reach the end of our journey through the arcane and confusing world of gauge. After all that, all I can say is: I, for one, welcome our Metric overlords.

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In a fenced-off field near Langdon, North Dakota stands a strange and enigmatic object: a 24-metre high truncated concrete pyramid, looming over the prairie. Scattered around its base are other strange forms cast in concrete and steel, and a cluster of low, prefabricated buildings, now empty and slowly rusting away. These are the remains of the Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex, a massive effort by the United States Military to defend its nuclear arsenal from missile attack. The culmination of 20 years of cutting-edge research, the complex took 6 years and $6 billion (about $60 billion today) to build. Yet only one day after the system came online, the United States Congress pulled the plug on the entire project. Within four months, the sprawling, high-tech complex was shuttered, decommissioned, and abandoned, becoming a crumbling monument to Cold War paranoia. This is the story of Project SAFEGUARD, the missile defence system that never was.

The roots of SAFEGUARD go back to the development of the Nike-Ajax and Nike-Hercules missiles in the early 1950s. These weapons were designed to shoot down Soviet Tu-95 and M-4 manned strategic bombers, which at the time were the only means of delivering nuclear weapons. But a new generation of nuclear weapons in the form of intermediate-range and intercontinental ballistic missiles were just around the corner. Missile-launched warheads were far smaller and faster than bombers, plunging down on their targets from outer space at speeds of 6 kilometres per second. It thus became clear that a new type of defense system would be needed to counter this coming threat: an anti-ballistic-missile or ABM. So, in 1955, the U.S. Army commissioned a research group composed of Western Electric, Bell Labs, and Douglas Aircraft to develop an anti-ballistic missile system known as Nike-Zeus.

Nike-Zeus consisted of six basic components. The first was the missile itself, developed from the older Nike-Hercules, which could travel at 4 times the speed of sound and reach a maximum altitude of 280 kilometres, allowing it to intercept enemy reentry vehicles above the atmosphere. Steering was via a set of moveable fins while inside the atmosphere, while exhaust gasses vented through the fins allowed for maneuvering in the vacuum of space. The missile was armed with 400-kiloton W50 enhanced-radiation nuclear warhead, which destroyed the target through a combination of blast and radiation effects.

But the most challenging aspect of Nike-Zeus development was the radar system, which detected and tracked incoming warheads and guided the anti-ballistic missiles to interception. This system comprised five basic components: the Acquisition Radar, which detected incoming warheads at long ranges and alerted the rest of the system; the Target Track Radar, which determined the warheads’ position and trajectory with greater accuracy; the Discrimination Radar, which separated out the warheads from the remains of the rocket booster and other clutter; the Missile Track Radar, which guided the Nike-Zeus missiles to interception; and the Data Processing Centre which tied the whole system together. These systems were marvels of 1950s electronics engineering, incorporating some of the first large-scale applications of the then-new technologies of transistors and modular architecture. The target-track radar was able to scan some 4 million cubic kilometres of space while keeping track of multiple different targets and interceptor missiles.

In 1958, testing of the Nike-Zeus system began at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico and Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific Proving Grounds. While initially the missiles suffered from a variety of issues, including excessive frictional heating of the guidance fins, these were eventually ironed out, and by 1963 the system had successfully performed 9 consecutive intercepts, both of Nike-Hercules missiles launched from Kwajalein and Atlas ICMBs launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Meanwhile, a prototype of the Target Track Radar tracked the Echo 1 communications satellite at an altitude of 3,600 kilometres and successfully received a signal bounced off the moon.

But just as the Nike-Zeus system was poised to enter service, it was abruptly cancelled by the Department of Defense. There were many reasons for this decision. Firstly, Nike-Zeus was developed under the assumption that Soviet ballistic missile deployment would remain relatively low. However, as the USSR continued to field ever greater numbers of increasingly advanced missiles, it became clear that an all-out attack would quickly overwhelm the Nike-Zeus system. Worse still, advancements in nuclear warhead miniaturization allowed missiles to carry multiple inflatable radar-reflector decoys, which would further clutter the radar image and overwhelm the system. Indeed, Army calculations predicted that at least 20 Nike-Zeus missiles would be needed to ensure the destruction of a single enemy warhead. Finally, experiments like Operation Fishbowl in 1962 had revealed that nuclear explosions in the upper atmosphere created large radio blackout zones, meaning the first few missile intercepts would effectively blind the whole system – and for more on this phenomenon, please check out our previous video Do Real EMP Weapons Actually Exist, or Are They Only a Thing in Movies?

There was also considerable skepticism as to the practicality of ABM systems in general, with Herbert York, head of the Advanced Research Projects Administration or ARPA, stating:

“The problem here is the usual problem between defense and offenses, measures, countermeasures, counter-counter measures, et cetera, in which it has been my judgment and still is that the battle is so heavily weighted in favor of the offense that it is hopeless against a determined offense and that incidentally applies to our position with regard to an anti-missile that they might build. I am convinced that we can continue to have a missile system that can penetrate any Soviet defense.”

Nonetheless, the Department of Defense directed the Nike-Zeus’ team to develop an even more advanced anti-ballistic-missile system, which became known as Nike X. The Nike X system incorporated a number of advances over Nike-Zeus. Firstly, instead of traditional rotating-antenna radars, the system incorporated the new technology of phased arrays, which allowed the radar beam to be steered electronically instead of mechanically, vastly increasing speed and accuracy. And instead of four radars, the system only used two: a Perimeter Acquisition Radar or PAR to detect incoming warheads at long ranges, and a Missile Site Radar or MSR to track the targets and guide the interceptor missiles. The system could track up to 40 objects simultaneously and detect objects as small as a baseball. Even more important to future technological development, the data processing system for these radars made extensive use of another major advancement in electronics: the integrated circuit.

Secondly, the Nike-X system used not one but two different interceptor missiles. The first of these was the Spartan, an upgraded version of the Nike-Zeus designed for greater speed and altitude and armed with a 5-megaton W71 warhead. This was designed to intercept warheads shortly after they were detected by the PAR, while they were still above the atmosphere. However, thanks to the deployment of radar-reflective decoys and other countermeasures, at least a few warheads were expected to get through this initial defence. Thankfully, these countermeasures would be quickly slowed down by atmospheric friction, causing the real warheads to become decluttered – that is, separated from their decoys and easier to detect. Unfortunately, due to their tremendous speed, the time between the warheads entering the atmosphere and reaching the ground was measured in seconds, creating a very narrow interception window. This secondary, low-altitude interception was performed by a second type of missile, the Martin-Marietta Sprint. Measuring 8 metres long and weighing 3,500 kilograms, the cone-shaped Sprint was one of the most impressive weapons ever developed. Gas-launched from an underground silo, the two-stage missile accelerated at a whopping 100 Gs, going from 0 to Mach 10 in less than 5 seconds. So fast was the Sprint that within seconds of launch, atmospheric friction made its casing glow white-hot. This blistering performance allowed the missile to intercept incoming warheads at altitudes of up to 30 kilometres within 15 seconds.

As with Nike-Zeus, the components of Nike-X were tested at White Sands and Kwajalein, where they performed practice intercepts on Polaris intermediate-range missiles launched from Navy ships and Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles launched from Vandenberg. Between 1963 and 1975, 150 test intercepts were conducted from Kwajalein with a 90% success rate, the last 21 intercepts being complete successes. As the system was expected to be able to survive a nuclear strike, all the major components – especially the above-ground radar antennas – had to be hardened against the effects of blast and radiation. Much of this research was carried out at Canadian Forces Base Suffield in Alberta, Canada, where in 1964 large piles of conventional explosives were used to simulate the blast wave from a nuclear weapon. Components were also exposed to underground nuclear detonations to test their radiation resistance.

While Nike-X was being developed, world events were making the system’s deployment increasingly urgent. On October 16, 1964, the People’s Republic of China successfully detonated its first atomic bomb, while on June 17, 1967 it tested its first thermonuclear or hydrogen bomb. Suddenly, the bi-polar nuclear contest between the United States and Soviet Union had become a tri-polar one. In response to this new threat, on September 18, 1967, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara announced the creation of Project SENTINEL, a system of 17 Nike-X sites scattered around the United States to defend the country against the small anticipated Chinese ICBM fleet or a limited strike by the Soviets. To ensure an adequate workforce for construction and easy access to utilities and other resources, the sites would be built just outside major metropolitan areas, with the whole system coordinated from NORAD headquarters in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado via a system of hardened microwave-tower links.

Construction soon began on the first Perimeter Acquisition Radar site at Sharpner’s Pond, just outside of Boston. But almost immediately, the entire project became mired in controversy, receiving fierce opposition from multiple sectors. Predictably, residents of communities where Sentinel sites were planned feared that the installations would turn their homes into targets, and mass protests were held in several cities to oppose their construction. Meanwhile, government scientists continued to question the wisdom of ABS systems – not only because they might be ineffective, but because they might paradoxically increase the risk of nuclear war. This argument was based on the prevailing nuclear doctrine at the time: Mutually-Assured Destruction or MAD, which depended on the ability of both superpowers to annihilate the other to deter either from launching a first strike. An effective ABM system would dramatically shift this delicate balance of power, allowing one power to destroy the other while remaining impervious to counter-attack. This in turn, the scientists argued, might provoke the other power – in this case, the Soviet Union – into launching a first strike before the ABM system became operational. Many politicians also opposed Sentinel on the basis of cost, including Pennsylvania Democratic representative Daniel Flood, who argued that fallout shelters would be more effective than ABMs at saving American lives:

“It is estimated that a shelter system at a cost of $2 billion would save 48.5 million lives. The cost per life saved would be about $40.00. An active ballistic missile defense system would cost about $18 billion and would save an estimated 27.8 million lives. The cost per life saved in this case would be about $700….I personally will never recommend an anti-ICBM program unless a fallout program does accompany it. I believe that even if we do not have an anti-ICBM program, we nonetheless should proceed with the fallout shelter program.^”

The debate over Sentinel reached its peak in 1969 with the election of President Richard Nixon, who agreed to hold a thorough review of the system. This culminated in the Senate authorizing the construction of Sentinel on August 7, 1969, the resolution passing by only a single voice. However, the scope of the system was considerably narrowed, with the number of missile sites being reduced from 17 to 12 and the system’s mission shifted from protecting the U.S. population to defending the nation’s offensive weapons installations. In this new guise, Sentinel was re-named SAFEGUARD. Construction of the Sharpner’s Pond PAR site was halted, and development efforts refocused on a pair of sites in North Dakota and Montana to defend the area’s 1,000 Minuteman ICBM sites – a strategy known as counterforce defense. According to Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, this strategy minimized many of the system’s potential shortcomings:

“When you are looking toward city defense, it needs to be a perfect or near perfect system because, as I examined the possibility of even a thick defense of cities, I have found that even the most optimistic projections, considering the highest development of the art, would mean that we would still lose 30 million to 40 million lives…[but] when you are talking about protecting your deterrent, it need not be perfect. It is necessary only to protect enough of the deterrent that the retaliatory second strike will be of such magnitude that the enemy would think twice about launching a first strike.”

But just as construction was getting underway, world events once again intervened to change the fortunes of SAFEGUARD. On May 26, 1972, President Nixon and Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty or SALT, which reduced the number of nuclear weapons systems both nations were allowed to field. Under the terms of the treaty, the US and USSR could deploy two ABM systems each with a total of 100 interceptor missiles to defend ballistic missile sites and strategic command headquarters. Consequently, construction was halted on the Montana SAFEGUARD site and the completed infrastructure demolished. For budgetary reasons it was also decided to abandon the site defending Washington, DC. This left a single ABM site in North Dakota, which was named after Lt. General Stanley R. Mickelsen, the first commander of Army Air Defence Command. The entire complex consisted of six separate sites spread out over an area of some 400 square miles. The Perimeter Acquisition Radar, housed in a large concrete cube, was located outside the town of Cavalier, its single radar antenna facing north to detect missiles coming over the North Pole. The pyramid-like Missile Site Radar, with a radar antenna in each of its four faces for 360-degree coverage, was located near the town of Langdon. This site also housed silos for 30 Spartan long-range missiles and 16 Sprint short-range missiles. Finally, scattered around the surrounding countryside were four Remote Sprint Launch or RSL sites with 16 Sprint missiles each. The site finally became operational on October 1, 1975 – just 3 days ahead of the projected deadline. At its peak, the facility employed 500 military and 1,200 civilian personnel, with the Army carrying out major improvements to housing, utilities, and other services in neighbouring towns to accommodate the large influx of people.

But this hyper-advanced shield against a counter-force strike was not to be, for only one day after the SAFEGUARD system became operational, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to shut it down. The reasons given for the cancellation were familiar ones: advances in countermeasures technology and the use of Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicles or MIRVs would overwhelm SAFEGUARD; the system was too expensive; ABMs destabilized the global balance of power. Furthermore, the Chinese ballistic missile force the system was intended to defend against never materialized. The general consensus was that SAFEGUARD was a “system in search of a mission”, while Texas Democratic representative George Mahon stated:

“We have spent $5.7 billion preparing to defend ourselves against the intercontinental ballistic missile. The Safeguard system has not been effective, except perhaps from a cosmetic standpoint. If we had done nothing, it would have been the same.”

Yet contrary to a popular myth, SAFEGUARD did not shut down immediately. It remained active until November, while decommissioning officially began on February 10, 1976. The only part of the system to remain active was the PAR, which is operated by what is now Cavalier Space Force Station. Upgraded and re-designated the Enhanced Perimeter Acquisition Attack Characterization System or PARCS, it is used to track satellites and other objects in earth orbit. The other system sites were stripped of their missiles and electronic equipment and sold to private owners. The MSR site is now owned by the Cavalier County Job Development Authority, which plans to renovate the property and develop an interpretive centre; while the concrete pyramid itself was acquired in 2022 by Bitzero Blockchain Inc, who plan to convert it into a data centre. Finally, one of the three Remote Sprint Launch sites, RSL #3 near Cavalier, is open for private tours.

The SAFEGUARD system was the product of 20 years and $20 billion in research and development – 6 years and $6 billion of which was spent on constructing the Mickelsen complex itself. While the system’s abrupt cancellation after only a day of operation may seem like a colossal waste of money and effort, the project was not without its benefits. Many of the advancements in radar in computer technology developed for SAFEGUARD are still in use today, while the project was a major boost to the local economies and public infrastructure of North Dakota counties surrounding the radar and missile sites. But most importantly, ABM projects like SAFEGUARD served as key bargaining chips in Cold War diplomacy, convincing the Soviets to sign arms limitations treaties like SALT and START. These treaties have arguably done more to secure world peace in a nuclear world than defence systems like SAFEGUARD ever could.

Expand for References

For years, social media users on Reddit, X, Facebook and other social media sites have shared a photo they claim authentically shows a 37-million-year-old whale skeleton found at Wadi Al-Hitan in Egypt.

Reverse image searches on Google and TinEye revealed the image was taken by Associated Press photographer Thomas Hartwell. He captured the photo during a January 2016 visit to Egypt’s Wadi Al-Hitan (spelled “Wati El Hitan” in the AP caption), according to information provided by AP Newsroom.

About 90 miles southwest of Cairo, Wadi Al-Hitan is a UNESCO World Heritage site famous for its abundance of fossils dating to the middle and late Eocene epoch, roughly 38 million to 36 million years ago, when parts of Egypt were still covered by a prehistoric sea. According to a UNESCO World Heritage Datasheet for Wadi Al-Hitan, “over 400 fossil skeletons of archaic whales and other vertebrates” have been found at the site.

Hartwell visited Wadi Al-Hitan for the unveiling of Egypt’s Fossils and Climate Change Museum on January 14, 2016. Various media outlets, including Phys.org and the Daily Mail, used the image for their coverage of the museum’s opening.

Snopes also compared the image to numerous photos posted on Google Maps and Tripadvisor, as well on Flickr, by visitors to the museum. The same S-shaped vertebral column from Hartwell’s photograph could be seen from different angles in numerous traveler snaps. Some of the photos included a museum label reading: “Intact Skeleton of Basilosaurus whale.”

(Tripadvisor user Bob W.)

Paleontologist Philip D. Gingerich explained in a Geological Society of London article that Basilosaurus isis is one of two types of archaic whale most commonly found at Wadi Al-Hitan (the other is the much smaller Dorudon atrox). Basilosaurus’ fossilized skeletons average between 15 and 18 meters in length (roughly 50 to 60 feet), according to a webpage maintained by the University of Michigan’s Museum of Paleontology.

In an email to Snopes, Gingerich, who has conducted research at Wadi Al-Hitan, confirmed the bones indeed belong to the Basilosaurus isis species, which lived around 37 million years ago.

Because the photo authentically depicted fossilized whale bones that date to the middle or late Eocene epoch and were discovered in Egypt’s Wadi Al-Hitan, Snopes rated this claim as “True.”

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“Foreign-Born Celebrities Who Became U.S. Citizens.” Peoplemag, https://people.com/celebrity/celebrities-who-became-us-citizens/. Accessed 31 July 2024.

Friend, Tad. “Ryan Reynolds’s Life Lessons.” The New Yorker, 14 Sept. 2015. www.newyorker.com, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/21/choices-the-pictures-tad-friend.

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Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/accounts/login/?next=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.instagram.com%2Fvancityreynolds%2F%3Fhl%3Den&is_from_rle. Accessed 31 July 2024.

“Kamala Removes Nasty Orange Stains Shirt, Hoodie, Sweater, Longsleeve and V-Neck T-Shirt.” Tee Works USA, https://teeworksusa.com/product/kamala-removes-nasty-orange-stains-shirt/. Accessed 31 July 2024.

Laundry Detergent and Fabric Care Products – Tide. https://tide.com/en-us. Accessed 31 July 2024.

@Nosurrender2022. X. 30 July 2024, https://x.com/Nosurrender2022/status/1818197228327960829.

“Pin on Noah & Brie(Ryan & Blake) | Ryan Reynolds Tattoo, Ryan Reynolds, Blake and Ryan.” Pinterest, https://www.pinterest.com/pin/439663982350181601/. Accessed 31 July 2024.

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“—.” Tattoofilter, https://us.tattoofilter.com/tattoos/ryan-reynolds-tattoos. Accessed 31 July 2024.

RYAN REYNOLDS TATTOOS PICTURES IMAGES PICS PHOTOS OF HIS TATTOOS. https://vanishingtattoo.com/tattoo/celeb-reynolds.htm. Accessed 31 July 2024.

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For years, people online have shared a police strategy that allegedly helps connect officers to a vehicle or location if something happens to them during a routine traffic stop. According to social media posts, officers learn to touch vehicles’ taillights after pulling them over — leaving their fingerprints behind.

A meme about the claim was shared to Facebook in July 2024, for example: 

(Facebook group Weird, Strange and Interesting Things)

Versions of the claim have been shared on platforms including X, YouTube, TikTok and Quora, as well as in publications including Mental Floss, The Mirror and the Daily Mail. Snopes found examples of the claim dating back to 2017, including a Reddit post that had more than 19,000 upvotes:

William Johnson, executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations, a coalition of police unions and associations across the U.S., told Snopes that yes, police officers will touch the taillights and other locations of the vehicle’s rear to leave their fingerprints:

It does not have to be the taillights, but usually somewhere on the rear of the vehicle such as the lid of the trunk or that general area as they approach the vehicle from behind to prove that they were there. And to help identify the vehicle in case something goes wrong, meaning an assault or accident injuring the officer.

He said it is unknown how many academies formally teach this technique, or whether the tactic is informal knowledge “passed along as a training tip by more experienced officers.”

“But it’s definitely something that new officers learn,” Johnson said. Therefore, we rated this claim as “True.”

The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government. However, when there is probable cause a vehicle contains evidence of criminal activity, an officer may “lawfully search any area of the vehicle in which the evidence might be found.”

Traffic stops are conducted for a variety of reasons, such as when a person violates traffic laws or during sobriety checkpoints. According to the Legal Information Institute at the Cornell Law School, a routine traffic stop is also “justified if the police officer has a reasonable suspicion that the occupant is unlicensed or the vehicle is unregistered.”

Snopes had previously looked into other claims related to the police, which can be found here.

A rumor involving U.S. President Joe Biden walking onto an airplane circulated online — primarily on X — following a landmark prisoner exchange with Russia in early August 2024.

The three Americans freed in the exchange were Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Russian-American editor Alsu Kurmasheva. All three arrived by plane in the U.S., landing at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland just before midnight Aug. 1. Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, family members, members of the press and others greeted them on the ground after each of them got off the plane.

Several minutes after Gershkovich, Whelan and Kurmasheva emerged from the plane — and after Biden and Harris fielded questions from reporters — Biden walked up the steps of the aircraft. Around two minutes later, he exited the aircraft and continued speaking with the freed prisoners and their loved ones.

Hours later, on Aug. 2, the X user @amuse posted (archived) a video with the headline “Confusion Reigns as Biden Boards Empty Plane.” The text of the post read, “Joe Biden climbed back up the stairs of an airplane he wasn’t supposed to be on, as Kamala Harris and the Secret Service watched in disbelief. He clearly has no idea where he is or what he’s doing.” The user later pinned the post to the top of their page. It had receieved more than 2 million views and 35,000 likes, according to the social media platform.

The first two words of the @amuse account’s bio reads, “Conservative Headlines.” The bio also shows support for former U.S. President Donald Trump’s reelection, reading, “Trump/Vance 2024.”

Other users on X made similar claims about Biden boarding the plane, including some writing — joking or not — that a confused Biden must have thought he was boarding Air Force One.

However, the truth was Biden boarded the plane to speak to the people who helped bring the three freed prisoners home. We contacted the @amuse account by direct message, asking for evidence Harris and the Secret Service experienced “disbelief,” as they claimed. We also inquired if they were aware of the evidence showing the falsity of their post and asked whether they planned on notifying their followers of their mistake with a correction. We will update this story if they respond.

Evidence Showing Biden Did Not Board ‘Empty Plane’

Mediaite.com published that The Independent’s White House correspondent Andrew Feinberg — who served as White House pool reporter at Joint Base Andrews — confirmed Biden boarded the plane to greet the people still onboard after the freed prisoners had deplaned. Snopes also confirmed these statements in an email with Feinberg:

“If you look at the handout photo of the group that flew back to JBA from Ankara — the one taken on board the plane — it showed ten passengers,” Feinberg told Mediaite. “But only three people got off the plane once it landed: Paul, Evan and Alsu.”

“I was under the wing with the press pool and it was obvious to me that POTUS was boarding to speak to the people who had helped to bring these three Americans home — the pilots and seven other passengers plus whoever took the photo — because they had remained on board while the three former prisoners enjoyed their first moments back on US soil with their loved ones,” Feinberg added.

The official @POTUS account on X had earlier posted the photo referenced by Feinberg:

As another piece of evidence showing the false nature of the Biden “empty plane” rumor, Getty Images hosts a picture (archived) captured by photographer Brendan Smialowski that shows Biden walking up the plane’s stairs at Joint Base Andrews. The caption clearly states Biden stepped onto the plane “to talk to the pilot who flew the former prisoners.”

U.S. President Joe Biden steps onto the plane to talk to the pilot who flew the former prisoners held by Russia to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on Aug. 1, 2024. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)

Video Evidence Showing Plane Was Not Empty

The YouTube channel for journalist Roland S. Martin provided the most clear-cut evidence of all to debunk the Biden “empty plane” rumor. Martin’s channel broadcast a live feed offered by The Associated Press via its AP Video Hub.

In Martin’s video, Biden walks up the plane’s steps beginning at the 44-minute mark. At 44:20, Biden appears to shake the hand of a person inside the plane. Then, he turns left to walk into the cockpit. At 45:50, Biden reappears and exits the plane. A person wearing a suit already inside the plane then walks behind Biden from right to left, toward the cockpit. Later in the video, at the 57:10 mark, a crew member wearing a white shirt — likely a pilot — emerges from the plane to communicate with ground crew members wearing reflective orange vests.

Mediaite.com also reported the following statement from Andrew Bates, the White House’s senior deputy press secretary and deputy assistant to the president, who said of Biden entering the plane: “President Biden wanted to personally thank the flight crew who brought these brave individuals home to their families.” (Bates confirmed to Snopes by email that this quote originated from him.)

In sum, Biden did not board an “empty plane.” Video evidence and information from eyewitnesses show Biden walked onto the plane to visit at least one pilot and possibly other people who were still onboard.

Sources

Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

In defending his “childless cat lady” comments, Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance wrongly claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris “is calling for an end to the child tax credit.” He also incorrectly claimed that Harris said “it was a bad idea to have kids because of climate change anxiety.”

Harris, who is now the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has a record of working to expand the child tax credit, which reduces taxes for families with dependent children. Her tiebreaking vote in the Senate was essential to moving forward legislation in 2021 that temporarily increased the child tax credit and also made it fully refundable, meaning that poor people who don’t owe taxes can still get the money. She has since supported making those changes permanent.

During a college tour last year, Harris said that young climate leaders had spoken to her about “climate change anxiety,” which included their concerns about having kids in the future. But she did not endorse the notion of not having children because of environmental concerns. Rather, she mentioned several ways in which the Biden administration was addressing climate change.

Vance’s claims came in a July 28 interview on Fox News, in which he addressed his “childless cat lady” remarks from 2021 that have now gone viral. In those comments, Vance, then running for a Senate seat in Ohio, referred to prominent Democrats, including Harris and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, as “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made” and argued that the country would be better off being led by people with children.

Harris has no biological children, but is a stepmother of two; Buttigieg adopted twins soon after Vance’s remarks in 2021.

In Vance’s July 28 interview, host Trey Gowdy asked him whether childless people can still be invested in America’s future. Vance, who is a father of three, responded, “of course,” and accused Democrats of blowing his remarks “out of proportion.”

“And if you look at what the American people are most concerned about, Trey, it’s not an out of context quip that I made three years ago. It’s the fact that Kamala Harris, the border czar, opened the American southern border,” he said, using a moniker for Harris that, as we’ve explained, is inaccurate. “It’s the fact that the Democratic Party has become explicitly anti-family in some of their policies. In fact, you just heard Kamala Harris in a surfaced clip recently talk about how it was a bad idea to have kids because of climate change anxiety. So, really, what I’m trying to get at here, Trey, is that it’s important for us to be pro-family as a country.”

“I think a lot of parents and a lot of non-parents look at our public policy over the last four years and ask, how did we get to this place?” he continued. “How did we get to a place where Kamala Harris is calling for an end to the child tax credit?”

Vance made the same child tax credit claim in an interview with Megyn Kelly on July 26: “Why do we have the Harris campaign coming out this very morning and saying that we should not have the child tax credit, which lowers tax rates for parents of young children? It’s because they have become anti-family and anti-kid.”

False Tax Credit Claim

We found no evidence of Harris stating she is opposed to the child tax credit and would like to end it. As we said, she has a long history of supporting the child tax credit and has worked to expand it.

When we asked about Vance’s claim, the Trump campaign pointed us to a July 26 tweet from a Harris campaign staffer.

The tweet, from the Harris campaign’s rapid response director, Ammar Moussa, shares an ABC News story about remarks Vance made on a podcast in 2021, in which he discussed lowering tax rates for people with kids.

“JD Vance’s attacks on childless Americans is even vile,” it reads. “He called for HIGHER taxes on those without children.”

A Vance spokesperson told ABC News, “The policy Senator Vance proposed is basically no different than the Child Tax Credit, which Democrats unanimously support.”

The child tax credit does lower the effective tax rate for people with kids. But it’s always framed as a benefit to those with children, not as a penalty to those without. In his podcast remarks, Vance did not mention the child tax credit. Instead, he spoke of future policy changes that would “reward” some and “punish” others.

“We need to reward the things that we think are good and punish the things that we think are bad. So, you talk about tax policy, let’s tax the things that are bad and not tax the things that are good,” Vance said during a discussion with conservative podcast host Charlie Kirk about how to make “unthinkable” Republican ideas popular and ultimately put them into practice with policy. “If you are making $100,000, $400,000 a year and you’ve got three kids, you should pay a different, lower tax rate than if you are making the same amount of money and you don’t have any kids. It’s that simple.”

The child tax credit began in 1997 as a $400 credit per child under 17 years old and has a history of bipartisan support. Over the years, the amount has increased and eligibility has changed.

Currently, due to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which will expire in 2025, the full credit is $2,000 per child under 17, with $1,400 of the credit being refundable. Households eligible for the full credit are single filers making $200,000 a year or less and joint filers making $400,000 a year or less.

For 2021, the American Rescue Plan, which Harris helped pass, temporarily increased the child tax credit to $3,600 per child under age 6 and $3,000 for older kids under age 18. The credit was fully refundable, which helped poorer people who do not make enough money to be eligible for the full credit. Half of the credit could be received in advance in monthly installments.

The Census Bureau estimated that the 2021 child tax credit lifted 2.9 million children out of poverty, with the expansion accounting for 2.1 million of those children.

Harris has been a vocal supporter of the expanded child tax credit and has advocated for it to become permanent. As a senator, she also co-sponsored bills that increased the credit and made it fully refundable.

Just days prior to Vance’s claim, Harris touted the success of the 2021 child tax credit. “We believe in a future where no child has to grow up in poverty, which is why I helped pass the child tax credit, which cut child poverty in half — and cut Black child poverty even more,” she said in a July 24 speech before a Black sorority.

A bipartisan bill expanding the child tax credit failed to advance in the Senate on Aug. 1. The bill had overwhelming support from Democrats and Republicans when it passed the House in January. Vance, who voted against the American Rescue Plan, which was a $1.9 trillion bill that included many provisions besides the child tax credit expansion, was not present for the vote.

Vance has not said if he supports the bill, and his campaign spokesperson did not immediately respond when we asked. Earlier this year, Vance said the bill was “by and large good policy,” but he also considered some Republican objections “reasonable.” Speaking to NBC News about the missed vote, Vance said that “unless we get a better president, there’s almost nothing that Congress can pass that is really going to improve the lives of the American people.” He also called the child tax credit “a great thing,” and said he supported expanding it. Former President Donald Trump has called for, and the GOP platform supports, making the 2017 tax cuts, which doubled the child tax credit, permanent.

Distortion of Harris’ Climate Change Comment

As part of casting Democratic policies as “anti-family,” Vance incorrectly claimed that Harris, in a recently surfaced clip, talked “about how it was a bad idea to have kids because of climate change anxiety.”

A 15-second video clip of Harris mentioning “climate change anxiety” has indeed recently been spreading online.

Donald Trump Jr. shared the clip on X on July 27, falsely claiming Harris was suggesting “young people should not have children due to climate change.” Vance retweeted Trump’s post the same day, adding: “It’s almost like these people don’t want young people starting families or something. Really weird stuff.”

But in the clip, Harris is simply explaining what she had heard from young people — not agreeing that people shouldn’t have kids.

Harris was speaking at Reading Area Community College in Pennsylvania on her “Fight for Our Freedoms College Tour” last year, and she brought up climate concerns after praising a “record turnout in 2020 of young voters” who voted for her and President Joe Biden.

Harris, Sept. 19, 2023: Because young people — and, in particular, young voters — said, “We are going to direct and decide what is the direction of our country” … Because young people said, “We’re not leaving it to other people to decide how we’re dealing with the climate crisis” —  you know, I’ve heard young leaders talk with me about a term they’ve coined called “climate anxiety.”

Right? Which is fear of — of the future and the unknown of whether it makes sense for you to even think about having children, whether it makes sense for you to think about aspiring to buy a home because what will this climate be?
 
But because people voted, we have been able to put in place over a trillion dollars in investment in our country around things like climate resilience and adaptation, around focusing on issues like environmental justice.

Later, she mentioned climate change again, emphasizing that there are things that can be done to mitigate the problem.

“The climate crisis is a threat to us as a species and this planet that God gave us to live on,” she said. “And we need to take this issue seriously and understand that the clock is not just ticking, it is banging. And on this issue, there are things we as human beings can do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, to help communities deal with extreme climate experiences so that they are not facing peril.”

As we have written before, scientists do not think the human species as a whole is at risk of dying out because of climate change, but the warming of the planet from heat-trapping pollution is a real problem that poses risks to many people and ecosystems. Taking aggressive action sooner rather than later will make it easier to address climate change in the future.

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Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has given children’s health and the “chronic disease epidemic” a prominent role in his campaign. We’ve written about some of Kennedy’s claims on chronic disease in the past, particularly as they pertain to the debunked link between autism and childhood vaccines.

But to what degree are Kennedy’s other claims on chronic disease grounded in science?

Recently, Kennedy repeatedly has said chronic disease in children has dramatically increased, while using statistics with unclear sources and putting forward unsupported narratives on the causes. Diagnoses of a variety of chronic conditions in children have increased in recent decades, but likely not to the extent that Kennedy claims or for the reasons he gives.

“When John F. Kennedy was president, 6% of American kids had a chronic health condition,” reads a page on Kennedy’s campaign website detailing his intention to “end the chronic disease epidemic” in the U.S. “Today it is 60%. Rates of autoimmune disease, diabetes, ADD and ADHD, autism, obesity, asthma, food allergies, and other chronic health conditions have been skyrocketing.”

Kennedy recently has repeated the latter statistic on the campaign trail. In a June 4 interview with USA Today, he listed “ending this chronic disease that is now debilitating 60% of our kids” as one of the “issues at the core of people’s concerns about what’s happening to America today.” He told the paper he had a plan for ending the chronic disease epidemic “overnight.”

On June 12, at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, Kennedy spoke of a rise in diabetes and autism in children, before saying, “An entire generation, 60% of these kids — and that’s a conservative estimate — now have autoimmune diseases, neurological diseases, obesity, peanut allergies, food allergies.” 

He went on to say that the cause “has to be” an “environmental toxin” while claiming that “NIH will not identify which exposures are contributing or causing this,” referring to the National Institutes of Health. “Once you do that, once NIH does that, you can end them,” he said.

Certain chronic health conditions — including obesity, both Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, autism and food allergies — have been increasingly reported in American children in recent decades. Incidence of asthma has increased globally in the past half century but recently seems to have leveled off in the U.S. and some other countries.

However, there’s no good way to track chronic conditions in U.S. kids over the more than 60-year span Kennedy refers to, given changes in how chronic conditions are diagnosed, tracked and defined. Nor is there a single, standard definition today of what counts as a chronic condition.

We reached out to the Kennedy campaign to ask for the source of his statistics but did not receive an answer. A possible source of Kennedy’s reference to the current statistic is a 2011 study we covered in a previous article, showing that 43% of U.S. kids had at least one of a list of 20 chronic conditions, as reported by their parents in a 2007 survey. This number rose to 54% under a very broad definition that included those who were overweight, obese or were “at risk” for developmental delay. Children’s Health Defense, an organization founded by Kennedy that spreads anti-vaccine content, has cited the 54% figure, and Kennedy uses the same percentage in a video included at the bottom of his campaign’s chronic disease page.

But experts we consulted considered Kennedy’s 60% statistic to likely be an overestimate — and not a “conservative estimate,” as he claims, nor evidence that chronic conditions are “debilitating” a majority of children. Measures of chronic disease that only count children with conditions that limit their activity or require special support have yielded far lower estimates. And as we have previously written, there is evidence that chronic conditions in children are not necessarily permanent.

Paul Newacheck, a professor emeritus who studied children’s health policy at the University of California, San Francisco for multiple decades, said it was “unrealistic” to claim that 60% of U.S. children have chronic health conditions. “The big growth areas are obesity and mental/behavioral conditions,” Newacheck told us via email. “But they don’t add up to 60% of kids.”

Chronic disease can have different definitions, Dr. James Perrin, who studies chronic health conditions in children and adolescents at Harvard Medical School and MassGeneral Hospital for Children, told us via email. It is difficult to place an upper limit on the chronic disease rate, he said, given that one could include very mild conditions, such as relatively minor allergies. But “most analysts,” he said, would say there have been “really huge increases, but not to the level that Mr Kennedy claims.”

In his focus on an “environmental toxin,” Kennedy also provides an incomplete picture of the causes and suspected causes of these trends.

“The patterns and risk factors do really vary by disease,” said Stephanie Eick, an environmental epidemiologist at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health. For instance, obesity and Type 2 diabetes come with different risk factors than autism, she said, and there have also been improvements over time in diagnosis that mean fewer children with certain chronic conditions are now being missed.

Eick added via email that Kennedy’s promises of ending the chronic disease epidemic overnight appear overblown. “In my opinion, I do not think it’s possible to stop the chronic disease epidemic overnight,” she said.

And she said the NIH does support research into environmental risk factors for chronic disease, including chemical exposures. For example, the NIH Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program is looking at “the effects of early environmental influences—including, for example, biological, behavioral, psychological, chemical, physical, and social factors—on child health and development,” an NIH spokesperson told us via email.

Kennedy is not alone in mentioning chronic disease as part of his agenda. In video from his website — posted over a year ago but shared widely on social media in July — former President Donald Trump discusses “an unexplained and alarming growth in the prevalence of chronic illnesses and health problems, especially in children” — although, as we’ve said, the growth in diagnoses of chronic conditions is not entirely unexplained and unstudied.

Trump vows to “establish a special presidential commission of independent minds who are not bought and paid for by big pharma” to look into the problem, implying without clear evidence or explanation that pharmaceutical companies’ influence is responsible for impeding progress on childhood chronic disease.

Kennedy took note, writing on X, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” and that “talk is cheap.”

Recently, Kennedy has indicated a desire to take his chronic disease agenda to a Trump White House, reportedly discussing a deal in which he might endorse Trump in return for a role involving health issues. In a leaked July 14 phone call between the two men, Trump repeated falsehoods about vaccination and health effects on children.

Unsupported Statistics on Childhood Chronic Disease

The source of Kennedy’s statistical claim — that chronic disease in U.S. children increased from 6% during his uncle’s presidency to 60% today — is unclear.

The Kennedy campaign website links to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention page that states that “more than 40% of school-aged children and adolescents have at least one chronic health condition,” citing data from the 2018 National Survey of Children’s Health.

Christina Bethell, a professor at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, told us in an email that she did not know of data that supports Kennedy’s claim of an increase in the chronic condition rate from 6% to 60%.

It’s “all about” how chronic conditions are “defined and measured and I am not aware of any comparable data between 1960 and today,” Bethell said. Bethell is director of the Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative, founded to support the use of data from the NSCH, versions of which have been conducted since 2003. The NSCH, a survey carried out by the federal government, is the source of the 54% figure cited by Children’s Health Defense.

The most recent NSCH data, from 2022, show that per parent reports, around 41% of children under 18 had “current or lifelong health conditions,” when asked about 25 health conditions. 

These conditions encompass those called out by Kennedy on his website, as well as multiple others. These include some very specific diagnoses, such as cystic fibrosis or Down syndrome, as well as much broader categories such as allergies.

Obesity is the only condition listed by Kennedy as “skyrocketing” that is not included in the NSCH’s 25-condition list. However, “adding in obesity would not increase the chronic condition list to 60%–many with obesity also have another chronic condition among those that are asked about,” Bethell said.

Bethell was a co-author of the 2011 paper — based on 2007 NSCH data — that is the source of the notion that 54% of U.S. children have chronic conditions. As we explained, this was based on a broad definition that included obesity, overweight and “risk for developmental delay.” Bethell said that adding in both overweight and obesity to the current 25-condition list would raise the health condition rate to around 65% for adolescents (12 to 17 years old), but that it would remain “much lower for young children” and would not rise to 60% for children overall. The “risk for developmental delay” item is no longer part of the NSCH, she said.

The expanded definition of chronic conditions was included in the 2011 paper “just to make a point that the majority of children have some high risk or an actual condition,” Bethell said. “This is still true in the US. My point back then was that most children have needs that point to the importance of prevention, health promotion and integrated health and social services to support them.”

Other ways of measuring chronic conditions give more conservative estimates.

One measure, which is part of the NSCH, seeks to identify children with special health care needs. The 2022 data indicate that around 21% of U.S. children have an ongoing health condition that requires above-routine services.

To give a sense of the rate of chronic conditions dating back to when John F. Kennedy was president, Perrin cited data from the National Health Interview Survey, which for many years asked parents about activity limitations in their children caused by chronic conditions — a relatively narrow definition capturing children whose conditions affected their day-to-day lives.

The NHIS data indicate that activity-limiting chronic conditions in children rose over the decades, from around 2% in the early 1960s to 4% in 1981, 7% in 1992 through 1994 and 8% in 2010. The latest available data, from the 2018 NHIS, suggest that 8% of children and 11% of adolescents had activity-limiting chronic conditions. In 2019, the NHIS questionnaire was redesigned, and so the most recent versions lack “a comparable estimate,” a CDC spokesperson told us in an email.

Chronic Conditions Have Increased for Various Reasons

Kennedy often reduces the causes or suspected causes of chronic disease to a list of specific chemicals and other exposures, implying that the solution is simply eliminating these exposures. But while some of these substances potentially play a partial role in certain diseases, experts painted a different and more complex picture of the causes of childhood chronic disease.

In his Nixon library speech, for instance, Kennedy spoke about the rise in diabetes and autism in children, before continuing: “We know what’s causing it. It has to be an environmental toxin. Genes don’t cause epidemics.” As we’ve discussed, he went on to list autoimmune diseases, neurological diseases, obesity and food allergies as affecting 60% of American children.

“All this happened beginning around 1989,” Kennedy continued. “We know what the suspects are. You know, it’s glyphosate [an herbicide], it’s neonicotinoids [pesticides], it’s atrazine [an herbicide], PFOA flame retardants, cell phone radiation, high fructose corn syrup.”

In an interview with Phil McGraw, known as Dr. Phil, Kennedy mentioned a similar list of substances as causes for chronic disease. “It’s not rocket science,” Kennedy said in a podcast episode posted July 9. “It’s glyphosate, which is the active ingredient in Roundup. It’s neonicotinoid pesticides, it’s atrazine, it’s PFOAs — the forever chemicals that are in all of our child’s pajamas, they’re in our furniture.” He went on to mention high fructose corn syrup and “a thousand ingredients in our food that are banned in Europe,” concluding that “we’re mass poisoning an entire generation of kids.”

Some exposures Kennedy mentions may be linked to specific conditions under specific circumstances, but they do not tell the full story of why diagnoses of childhood chronic conditions have increased. And cell phone radiation has not been linked to health effects, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. 

Bethell said there are risks “we know are HIGHLY associated with having health conditions – social risks (poverty, food insecurity, discrimination, unsafe neighborhoods) and family/relational risks (adverse childhood experiences, parents that are mentally unwell and not coping well, etc).”

Eick, the environmental epidemiologist from Emory, emphasized the variety of environmental factors that can be risk factors for disease — including specific chemical exposures but also changes in physical activity, diet, poverty, and changes in diagnosis. “I do think that there is a role for chemicals in some of these things, however I think that chemicals are really not the only risk factors here and it’s really in combination with a lot of these other things,” she said. 

For instance, obesity in U.S. children has increased “dramatically” since the Kennedy presidency, from around 4% in the 1960s to around 20% in 2020, Izzuddin Aris, an epidemiologist at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute, told us in an email. The increase has been especially pronounced in school-aged children, he said.

“The causes of childhood obesity are complex and multifactorial, including social, behavioral, environmental, and genetic factors operating across the life course,” he said.

These causes could include some environmental exposures Kennedy mentions. For example, research from Aris and others has indicated a link between prenatal exposure to PFAS — including PFOA — and obesity. But for the most part, there’s little evidence that the specific culprits Kennedy highlights are driving an increase in childhood chronic disease.

Dietary components can also play a role in obesity. For instance, Aris and colleagues have done work linking obesity risk in children to overconsumption of sugar-sweetened beverages or non-nutritive sweeteners during pregnancy. Eick mentioned more generally the role of eating more processed foods and reduced physical activity, as children spend more time on phones and tablets and less time outside.

Aris’s work has also shown evidence linking obesity in children to “residence in disadvantaged neighborhood environments that lack access to health care services or have higher rates of crime and unemployment.”

“However, I am not aware of any evidence that has linked glyphosate, neonicotinoids, atrazine, or cell phone radiation with child obesity risk,” he said.

Other environmental influences may be implicated in food allergy. One factor is timing of early-life dietary exposures. For many years, experts told parents to avoid feeding their babies peanuts and other potential allergens in order to prevent food allergy. Then evidence emerged that delaying exposure to peanuts and other foods could lead to an increased risk of food allergy. Today, parents are recommended to introduce peanuts and other potentially allergenic foods starting at four to six months of age, when other foods are introduced.

Understanding the rise in mental and behavioral conditions involves still other considerations, Newacheck said. “Clearly some is due to greater awareness on the part of parents, health care providers and schools, such that we are counting conditions that were always present but previously underreported,” he said. “Some would argue the increased availability of public funds/programs for enhanced services over the past half century has contributed to rising numbers of cases. Some of the increase is likely to be environmental or genetic,” he continued, meaning that changing environmental factors could interact with genes to cause disease. “But how much isn’t clear.”

For instance, as we have written previously, there has been an increase in recorded cases of autism in younger generations. But changes in awareness and diagnosis of the condition have played a major role in its growing prevalence.

Known autism risk factors, such as an increase in children born to older parents and an increase in children born with complications who survive, have likely contributed to a small increase in autism. 

A CDC spokesperson told us via email that an increase in ADHD awareness “over the past few decades,” especially in girls, also has contributed to a rise in the condition in children and adolescents. 

There are some possible environmental exposures associated with neurodevelopmental conditions such as autism and ADHD.

For example, Eick said, there’s some evidence “pesticides are risk factors for neurodevelopmental outcomes in kids, so things like ADHD, but again, I think that’s really only in populations that have extremely high levels of exposure,” adding that this is not “a major risk factor on the population level.”

Researchers also expressed confusion about Kennedy’s reference to the year 1989 as a turning point in the chronic disease epidemic. “I can’t think of anything special about the year 1989,” Eick said.

Aris said, “there is nothing special about the year 1989 in relation to child obesity.”

In other contexts, Kennedy has more specifically referred to 1989 as a turning point in the prevalence of autism. But as we’ve discussed previously, the idea that this year marked the beginning of the “autism epidemic” is also unsupported by the data.

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On July 30, 2024, an X user posted a photo (archived) of Billie Joe Armstrong — the frontman and guitarist of Green Day — holding up a replica of Donald Trump’s face while onstage during the band’s concert in Washington, D.C., and claimed the mask represented the severed head of the former U.S. president.

The X user wrote: “Green Day had a concert here in DC last night. They decided it’d be a good idea to hold up a severed Trump head. Just TWO WEEKS after he was sh*t in the head. These people are SICK.”

Nearly 16 million people had viewed the post as of this writing, while several other social media accounts also shared the image, referring to the “severed” or “decapitated” head of the Republican presidential nominee.

However, while the photo was real, there was no evidence Armstrong meant for the mask to represent the “severed” or “decapitated” head of the former U.S. president, as the social media posts stated. Therefore, we rated this claim “Miscaptioned.”

Green Day played a concert on July 29, 2024, at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C., as part of the band’s The Saviors Tour. The show occurred 16 days after the attempted assassination of Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

During the performance, Armstrong held up a Trump mask with the word “Idiot” scrawled across the rubber forehead, likely referencing the band’s 2004 single “American Idiot.” 

However, Snopes found no evidence the singer pulled the same stunt at any past tour stops, which suggested the moment with the mask was impromptu. 

Snopes contacted Armstrong for clarification but he did not immediately respond.

Concert footage appeared to show the incident was not planned. During Green Day’s rendition of “Jesus of Suburbia,” the singer bent down, reached his hand into the crowd and spontaneously took the mask from a concert-goer before holding it aloft to cheers from the audience. Seconds later, Armstrong threw it back into the crowd.

Footage from a different angle further proved the item was a mask and the moment was a spontaneous interaction with the crowd.

Armstrong has been vocal about his views on Trump. Live videos from multiple performances showed him changing the lyrics to Green Day’s song “American Idiot” from, “I’m not a part of a redneck agenda,” to, “I’m not part of the MAGA agenda,” in reference to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan.

Likewise, during Green Day’s performance of their single “Bang Bang” at the 2016 American Music Awards, Armstrong led the audience in chanting: “No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA.” Furthermore, in a 2020 interview with British music outlet Kerrang!, Armstrong said of Trump: “I think that he’s the most divisive leader of a country since Adolf Hitler. It sounds melodramatic to say it, but living in America, it’s just true.”

Snopes has previously fact-checked the anti-Trump sentiments of other musicians, including Kyle Gass of Tenacious D, and the false claim Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus said they would leave the U.S. if Trump wins the 2024 presidential election.