In the New York Times‘ "Caucus" blog today, Kate Phillips offers a well-documented and thorough analysis of a lingering controversy: Did Winston Churchill really say about torture what President Obama says he did?
There has been considerable back-and-forth elsewhere regarding this passage in the president’s "100 days" news conference:
Obama, April 29: I was struck by an article that I was reading the other day, talking about the fact that the British during World War II,
Q: Was H.R. 1388 passed “behind our backs”?
A: This latest e-rumor is a double-header. It recycles one false claim and alludes to another. We’ve debunked both before.
Half of single-race Asians 25 and older in the U.S. had at least a bachelor’s degree in 2007, compared with 28 percent for all Americans in that age group.
Source: Census Bureau
The Library of Congress is the world’s largest library, containing about 650 miles of bookshelves.
Source: Library of Congress
The Asian population in the U.S. grew by 2.9 percent between 2006 and 2007, when it totaled 15.2 million residents.
Source: Census Bureau
At President Obama’s April 29 news conference, he claimed that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has "already saved or created over 150,000 jobs." Wait a minute. Isn’t the number of jobs actually plummeting?
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the economy lost more than 1.3 million jobs in the two months after he took office, and it has probably lost at least another half-million in April. The day after Obama spoke, the Department of Labor announced that another 631,000 workers (seasonally adjusted) had filed new claims for unemployment insurance the previous week.
May is Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month. It began as a commemoration of the arrival of the first Japanese immigrants to the U.S. in May 1843 and the work done by Chinese workers on the transcontinental railroad.
Source: Census Bureau
Q: Did Oliver North warn Al Gore about Osama bin Laden at Senate hearings in 1987?
A: This ridiculous hoax has been circulating since 2001, even though the secretary of the U.S. Senate and North himself have debunked it.
The Spanish Flu of 1918 is the most deadly in recent history. Twenty to 40 million people worldwide died from the disease.
Source: National Institutes of Health
When we posted a FactCheck Wire item last week about a dispute between White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs and longtime correspondent Helen Thomas, we were surprised that Gibbs didn’t know President Obama had taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago’s law school. That’s a fact that had come up many times during the campaign, after all, including during a kerfuffle about whether Obama had the right to call himself a "professor."
Well, sometimes you have to walk a story back so far it falls off a cliff.