"A dangerous mix of fear and fake news about the coronavirus has sparked violent protests in Ukraine, despite there being no confirmed cases in the country"

Buzzfeed:

Protests and clashes with riot police have broken out in several places after a mass email claiming to be from Ukraine’s health ministry spread false information that there were five cases of coronavirus in the country, on the same day a plane carrying evacuees from China arrived. Protesters have smashed the windows of buses carrying evacuees and set fire to makeshift barricades.

...

Only two Ukrainians have been infected with the coronavirus and they are aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship docked in Japan, and they've already recovered.

For those just listening on @Bbcos. This is the scene here in central Ukraine. The riot police have cleared away most of the villagers and we await arrival of buses of people from Wuhan. pic.twitter.com/Bl2b0tOyeY

— Jonah Fisher (@JonahFisherBBC) February 20, 2020

"Baltimore's Famous National Chess Champion Isn't A National Chess Champion"

Ds:

The biggest chess story of the year is uplifting—and bogus.

On May 31, the Baltimore Sun ran a feature on a seventh-grader whom the paper identified in the headline as a “national chess champion.” According to the Sun’s story, the 12-year-old learned to play the millennia-old board game in a local barbershop and, while representing Roland Park Elementary and Middle School, a K-8 public school in the city system, came back from a Tennessee tournament earlier in the month as “Baltimore’s first national chess champion.”

...

The Sun ran at least two more pieces on the 12-year-old, always identifying him as a national chess titlist. The Washington Post ran the Sun’s story on its site the same day.

...

The tale of how reality got checkmated by fiction in Baltimore is not nearly as cinema-ready or heartwarming as the story the Sun told. After well-meaning, chess-naïve grownups turned an unwitting kid into a media star by making him out to be something he wasn’t, nobody who knew the real score—including the news outlets who were told the facts after the fake news about a national champion broke, and chess officials who knew the whole truth the whole time—was willing or able to stop the story’s spread.

"Tale of Brexiter who claimed his son bet £500 on far-right candidate to win French election amused many – but it was not true"

TG:

With a background in PR, the man said he had “duped a lot of reporters in the past” and knew how to make a hoax story such as this spread.

He created the account last month and attempted to make it look as legitimate as possible, retweeting leading Brexiters and tweeting in support of Le Pen.

“I wanted to try to create a story: obnoxious Brexiteer backs Le Pen, taunts liberals while endearing himself to [Andy] Wigmore, [David] Vance, [Arron] Banks etc (I hoped to get public support from them), loses bet and then throws a fit,” he said.

"Wikipedia bans Daily Mail as 'unreliable' source"

"The proposal was made by an editor known as Hillbillyholiday early in January"

"Don’t believe the story about hackers locking guests in their rooms at a luxury hotel"

"the hotel’s managing director, confirmed that not only were guests not locked in their rooms, the rooms were not remotely locked at all"

"Story of Santa Claus with dying child can't be verified"

"Since publication, the News Sentinel has done additional investigation in an attempt to independently verify Schmitt-Matzen’s account."

Relatedly:

In case you don’t remember: In 2015, there was an incredible viral photograph, a “lucky” shot, that showed a raccoon perched on the back of a swimming alligator. A man named Richard Jones told the local news that he’d snapped the picture himself, and a lot of Florida news outlets ran with it. The story spread to larger publications. It went viral.

...

“I staged the raccoon and the alligator,” Zardulu said. The animals are taxidermied; she sprayed each with a commercial product used to waterproof leather to protect them from the water. Zardulu showed us photographs of the setup, and some of herself, in costume, clutching the animals.

...

Yes, Zardulu has said that Pizza Rat was performed by a trained rat as well

Link roundup

1. "About 20 million years ago a single flea became entombed in amber with tiny bacteria attached to it, providing what researchers believe may be the oldest evidence on Earth of a dreaded and historic killer – an ancient strain of the bubonic plague."

2. "The story about the events surrounding Kitty Genovese’s death, as most people know it, is a myth."

3. "Tesla's new Model X has a 'bioweapon defense mode' button"