Not Real News: A look at what didn’t happen last week

Not Real News is a weekly fact check of widely circulated but inaccurate stories.

Photo altered to include judge who approved Mar-a-Lago warrant

FALSE CLAIM: A photo shows Ghislaine Maxwell, the former girlfriend of Jeffrey Epstein who was convicted of sex trafficking, with U.S. Magistrate Bruce Reinhart, the judge who approved the FBI search warrant for Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.

THE FACTS: This image has been manipulated by combining two separate, unrelated photos. Social media users are sharing the manipulated image that puts Reinhart and Maxwell together, making it appear she is rubbing his foot as he holds a bottle of bourbon and package of Oreos.

“Ghislaine Maxwell and Judge Bruce Reinhart … looking awful cozy!” read one tweet of the image shared by hundreds.

But reverse image searches show the original photo of Maxwell was with Epstein, not Reinhart. That photo was released in 2021 as evidence in her trial and published by various news outlets. Maxwell was sentenced in June to 20 years in prison for helping Epstein sexually abuse underage girls.

The AP identified the original photo of Reinhart as from a Facebook profile under his name. The caption indicates he was watching a football game.

The manufactured image is circulating amid attention on Reinhart for approving the FBI search warrant for Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.

The search at Mar-a-Lago was part of an investigation into whether Trump took classified records from the White House to his Florida residence. According to court documents unsealed by a judge Friday, the FBI did find and seize classified and top secrect material during the search, and Trump may be under investigation for mishandling government records and potentially compromising national security information.

Monkeypox wasn’t found in Georgia drinking water

FALSE CLAIM: A news report shows that monkeypox has been detected in drinking water.

THE FACTS: The clip comes from an Atlanta-area news broadcast explaining how wastewater — not drinking water — can be tested for evidence of monkeypox’s spread. But the July 26 broadcast is being mischaracterized online to push the false claim that monkeypox has been found in residents’ tap water.

The video shows a reporter explaining that the public works department in Fulton County, which encompasses Atlanta, is launching new efforts to try to detect monkeypox in the community. While the news report is playing in the video, a viewer filming a TV screen can be heard in the background saying “there’s monkeypox in the water.”

TikTok and Twitter users are sharing the clip out of context to suggest it means that drinking water is contaminated intentionally or unintentionally.

But the county’s tests have nothing to do with drinking water. The virus was found in wastewater, but not the drinking water supply.

The virus isn’t spread through drinking water, which comes from separate reservoirs and go through quality and treatment processes to make it drinkable.

“That’s a totally different department. We only handle wastewater,” said Patrick Person, a Fulton County water quality manager. He added that wastewater also is eventually sanitized before being returned to the environment.

“The testing that we’re doing in wastewater for monkeypox DNA is completely separate from drinking water,” said Marlene Wolfe, an environmental microbiologist and epidemiologist at Atlanta’s Emory University, who is involved in the testing initiative.

Wolfe said people infected with monkeypox excrete virus DNA through skin lesions, saliva, feces and urine, which, much like COVID-19, can enter wastewater through sewage that is produced after showering, flushing toilets and more. That water can be tested using PCR technology to determine whether certain viruses are being spread.

WHO chief is vaccinated against COVID-19, contrary to false claim

FALSE CLAIM: Video shows World Health Organi-zation Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebrey-esus saying he isn’t vaccinated against COVID-19.

THE FACTS: The clip is from a documentary and shows part of an interview, filmed weeks after Ghebreyesus was vaccinated, in which he says at one point that he waited for better global vaccine equity before receiving his own shot.

But the clip is circulating on social media without context to falsely claim that it shows the WHO leader expressing that he had not been vaccinated against COVID-19.

“Tedros not jabbed?” reads one tweet, which garnered more than 8,000 likes.

In a June 12, 2021, interview, Ghebreyesus says he was vaccinated on May 12, according to the Science article by Jon Cohen that followed the documentary. Ghebreyesus also publicly posted a photo on Twitter showing him receiving his vaccine that day, which he followed with a post about vaccine equity.

Earth spinning faster is no cause for concern, scientists say

FALSE CLAIM: The Earth is spinning faster and days are getting shorter, a change that is noticeable and cause for immediate concern.

THE FACTS: While the Earth on June 29 did indeed record its shortest-ever day since the adoption of the atomic clock standard in 1970 — at 1.59 milliseconds less than 24 hours — scientists say this is a normal fluctuation.

News of the faster rotation led to misleading posts on social media about the significance of the measurement.

“They broke news of earth spinning faster which seems like it should be bigger news,” claimed one tweet that was shared nearly 35,000 times. “We so desensitized to catastrophe at this point it’s like well what’s next.”

Some Twitter users voiced worries about how it would affect them.

But scientists told the AP that the Earth’s rotational speed fluctuates constantly and that the record-setting measurement is no cause for panic.