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The reports seem largely from right wing sources such as Free Beacon so I'm a bit skeptical, especially since this seems to be coincidentally a big deal around the time a U.S. president has again deployed military forces against citizens, justifying it by citing statistics at odds with the actual published ones, but I'm also willing to admit my own bias. The District of Columbia has quietly settled a lawsuit from a sergeant who accused Metropolitan Police Department leaders of misclassifying ...| Recent Questions - Skeptics Stack Exchange
I saw this claim on the politics stack exchange in a highly upvoted post... And I have to ask, is this true? It's only been since the 1990s that people have started talking about illegal entry into the US, and that was mainly a matter of drug enforcement: people trying to circumvent import controls to bring in illegal substances, not illegal immigration per se. -- Ted Wrigley politics.stackexchange If this is not the case, does anyone know the earliest reference to illegal immigrants or illeg...| Recent Questions - Skeptics Stack Exchange
Hubert Aiwanger, leader of the German party Freie Wähler (Free Voters) and Bavarian minister for Economy, State Development and Energy, claims that Germany has the highest wolf density in the world. This claim has been disputed. Reasons to doubt it: Germany has a high human population density, and the interests of humans and wolves often conflict. On the other hand, Germany has a lot of forest and a lot of deer. His claim fits in a political context of a debate on expanding wolf hunting or n...| Recent Questions - Skeptics Stack Exchange
The last couple of days rip currents are in the news in the Netherlands, because it's the summer holidays, hot weather, and there was a recent casualty. And maybe because it's silly season? There was an item in the news broadcast yesterday evening that the rip currents are strongest in August because of the position of sun and moon. And today the claim was repeated in an article about a training how to swim with rip currents on one of the most popular news websites. Rip currents occur 365 day...| Recent Questions - Skeptics Stack Exchange
William Bergman of the Institute for New Economic Thinking published this working paper on 30 July. The original paper is very long but there's some short and more readable commentary from Yves Smith. It claims that the Federal Reserve has been losing on the order of $100B / yr through interest payments on bank reserves and been hiding these losses through accounting practices that are outside the norm or somehow untoward in some way I don't understand. It has something to do with things like...| Recent Questions - Skeptics Stack Exchange
On Triggernometry interview Major Andrew Fox makes the claim: However, if we look at the statistics, twice as much food has gone into Gaza during the war as beforehand, over 3,000 calories per person per day, which should be enough to survive on. Um during the ceasefire period in early January, uh we saw enough food going into Gaza that should have lasted between 3 and 6 months for every person in Gaza. We know Hamas is hoarding the aid supplies. We know that they have warehouses full of aid ...| Recent Questions - Skeptics Stack Exchange
In April 2025, multiple mid-reliabilitysources reported that former Israeli Ambassador to the US Michael Herzog told Israel's Channel 13 News: “God did the State of Israel a favour that Biden was the president during this period. We fought for over a year and the administration never came to us and said, ‘ceasefire now.’ It never did. And that’s not to be taken for granted.” https://13tv.co.il/news/ displays in Hebrew and I was unable to locate the original report. Is there video or...| Recent Questions - Skeptics Stack Exchange
This somewhat unexpected claim appears in Sir James George Frazer's The Golden Bough, Chap. 49; I'd have thought neither the man nor the book needed any introduction. The book is to 20th C. anthropology roughly as Max Weber's Protestant Ethic is to 20th C. sociology, and to 21th C. anthropology roughly as Newton's Opticks is to quantum electrodynamics: both indispensable and completely outdated. As for the man, he pioneered the study of myth and ritual, contributed 9 entries in the Encyclopae...| Recent Questions - Skeptics Stack Exchange
On 5 February 2025, United Nations News wrote about World Food Programme aid deliveries to Gaza: https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/02/1159796 Over the past two weeks, the World Food Programme (WFP) delivered more than 10 million metric tonnes of food to the Strip That sounds like a lot! Gaza has a population of approximately 2 million, so that's 5 metric tonnes of food per person. A metric tonne is 1000 kg, so that's 5000 kg of food per person. Two months later on 25 April 2025, the World Foo...| Recent Questions - Skeptics Stack Exchange
A 2016 article in The Australian says that there is an increase in youth ED, and furthremore that it's due to porn: You couldn’t make it up, right? Wrong: erectile dysfunction in men in their teens and 20s — coupled with an inability to maintain erection or achieve climax — is now “massive”, according to a leading sexual psychotherapist. “The number of young men with performance issues has escalated in the last five years,” says Angela Gregory, who has treated men with erectile ...| Recent Questions - Skeptics Stack Exchange
Sometime ago I'd heard someone trained in child psychology claim that crying for emotional reasons (as opposed to getting something in your eye for example) released toxins from the brain and/or bo...| Skeptics Stack Exchange
