Fabricated screenshot fans baseless claim Philippine first lady 'detained' in US
It included two screenshots apparently taken from First Lady Liza Marcos's verified account. One shows four photos of an event taken on March 27.
The other is supposedly a collection of over 2,330 photos posted September 26, 2022 which includes a five-photo collage, including the four pictures as the recent post.
"To those who are pro-Marcos, please answer me this, are you still fighting for the right thing?" the post adds.
Rumours that the first lady was held up by law enforcement in Los Angeles surfaced online in early March after she came back from a working visit to the United States (archived link).
The false claims spread after President Marcos's government handed over former leader Rodrigo Duterte to the International Criminal Court to face a crimes against humanity charge tied to his drug war in which thousands were killed (archived link).
The presidential palace dismissed the rumours on March 13 and there have been no official reports that the first lady has been detained in the United States as of April 22 (archived here, here, here).
The images spread elsewhere on Facebook and were cross-posted across multiple platforms such as X, Threads, TikTok and Instagram.
Keyword searches found one of the screenshots corresponds to a March 29 post on Liza Marcos's verified Facebook page (archived link).
The caption read: "Cocktail reception to celebrate Women's Month with lady ambassadors & female spouses of heads of diplomatic missions in the Philippines. Kalayaan Hall, Malacañan Palace, Manila. 27 March 2025."
A corresponding video of the event was also posted on the same day (archived link).
But the other screenshot supposedly showing the older post has been fabricated.
A review of the photos and video of the event shows foreign envoys who began their assignment in the Philippines after the supposed September 26, 2022 date in the fabricated post.
Ambassadors Yuliia Fediv of Ukraine, Emma Hickey of Ireland, Saija Nurminen of Finland and Megawati Dato Paduka Haji Manan of Brunei can be seen in one of the photos (archived here, here, here and here)
Fediv was posted to the Philippines in March 2025; Hickey and Nurminen in September 2024; and Manan in March 2023.
A review of the video found more ambassadors whose posting came after 2022.
These include Marie Fontanel of France and Constance See Sin Yuan of Singapore appointed in 2023; Catherine McIntosh of New Zealand posted in 2024; and Smiljana Knez of Slovenia who arrived early this year in February (archived here, here, here and here).
Six of the envoys seen in the first lady's Facebook posts also attended an event at Manila's De La Salle University on the same day of the first lady's cocktail party on March 27 (archived link).
The other photo in the fabricated collage came from a post from March 28 and showed the first lady in an inter-agency meeting at held at her office the day before (archived link).
A further review of Liza Marcos's Facebook timeline from August 2022 -- when the page was created -- to December 2022 found that social media posts with photos only included a maximum of four pictures.
There are no posts that carried thousands, contrary to what's displayed in the fabricated screenshot.
AFP has debunked another post that falsely claimed Liza Marcos was "detained" in the United States.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
New York Post
18 minutes ago
- New York Post
Prisoner on the run after making dramatic escape from Seattle airport — the second in three months
A jailbird flew the coop from the Seattle airport — again. A prisoner made a daring escape from corrections officers at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport and was still on the run Wednesday — the second case of an inmate breaking free at the travel hub since May, authorities said. Burglary convict John Nino, 20, was with two officers on the fourth floor of the airport garage Tuesday morning when he bolted toward the light rail train system, according to Port of Seattle officials. Advertisement 3 Burglary convict John Nino, 20, was with two officers on the fourth floor of the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport Tuesday morning when he escaped. Washington State Department of Corrections / Facebook Nino, who was being transported from prison in New Mexico to community supervision in the Evergreen state, crossed a pedestrian bridge and darted onto a major highway and vanished, reported. Officials are asking people to report sightings of Nino, who landed back in custody for failing to report to meetings with his community corrections officer in his burglary case. Nino was arrested in New Mexico when he allegedly made his bold escape. Advertisement The fugitive has a cursive tattoo above his right eyebrow, was wearing a red coat when he fled, and was last seen crossing railroad tracks and heading towards Highway 99, ABC News reported. He i 6 feet, 2 inches tall and weighs 154 pounds. 3 Nino ran towards the light rail train system at the airport, officials said. Kyo46 – On May 4, Sedric Stevenson, 29, — who'd been charged with assaulting a law enforcement officer, possession of methamphetamine and a handgun — was being transported to Kentucky when he escaped from corrections officers at the same airport. Advertisement 3 It's the second time a prisoner has escaped from the airport since May. Nate Hovee – Stevenson was captured on camera boarding the airport's light rail train in shackles and was on the lam for more than six weeks before he was recaptured in June.
Atlantic
19 minutes ago
- Atlantic
Trump Has a New Definition of Human Rights
For nearly half a century, the State Department has reported annually on human-rights conditions in countries around the world. The purpose of this exercise is not to cast aspersions, but to collect and disseminate reliable information. Congress mandated the reports back in 1977, and since then, legislators and diplomats have used them to shape decisions about sanctions, foreign aid, immigration, and political asylum. Because the reports were perceived as relatively impartial, because they tried to reflect well-articulated standards—'internationally recognized individual, civil, political, and worker rights, as set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights'—and because they were composed by professionals reporting from the ground, the annual documents became a gold standard, widely used by people around the world, cited in court cases and political campaigns. Year in and year out, one former official told me, they have been the most downloaded items on the State Department website. Quite a few people will also read the 2024 reports, published yesterday. But they will do so for very different reasons. The original drafts were ready in January, before the Biden administration left office, following the usual practice. In past years, the reports were published in March or April. But this year they were delayed for several months while President Donald Trump's political appointees, including Michael Anton, the MAGA intellectual who is now the State Department's director of policy planning, rewrote the drafts. Some of the changes affect the whole collection of documents, as entire categories of interest were removed. The Obama administration had previously put a strong focus on corruption, on the grounds that kleptocracy and autocracy are deeply linked, and it started collecting information on the persecution of sexual minorities. Over the past few weeks, as the new reports were being prepared, I spoke with former officials who had seen early versions, or who had worked on the reports in the past. As many of them expected, the latest reports do not address systemic discrimination against gay or trans people, and they remove observations about rape and violence against women. But the revisions also go much further than expected, dropping references to corruption, restrictions on free and fair elections, rights to a fair trial, and the harassment of human-rights organizations. Threats to freedom of assembly are no longer considered sufficiently important to mention. In a number of instances, criticism of Israel is classified, crudely, as 'antisemitism.' Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's use of the word genocide to describe the war in Gaza, for example, is listed as an act of 'antisemitism and antisemitic incitement,' even though that term, however disputable or controversial, has also been used by Israelis and in any case violates no international human-rights norms at all. Jonathan Chait: The pro-Israel right is shifting the definition of anti-Semitism Along with the category changes, entries for 20 countries were also flagged for special consideration. These were sent for review to Samuel Samson, a political appointee in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Dozens of professionals have been fired or removed from that office, widely known as DRL; Samson—who is, according to NPR, a recent college graduate and an alumnus of a program designed to put conservative activists into government jobs—remains. The end result of his and others' efforts are reports that contain harsh and surprising assessments of democratic U.S. allies, including the U.K., Romania, Germany, and Brazil, and softer depictions of some dictatorships and other countries favored by Trump or his entourage. El Salvador and Israel, I was told, required so much rewriting that these two entries help explain the long delay in the reports' publication. Reading the results, you can see why. The new Israel report is simply far shorter than the original draft, with no significant discussion of the humanitarian crisis or high death toll in Gaza. El Salvador is a blatant whitewash. 'There were no credible reports of significant human rights abuses,' the latest report claims. By contrast, the previous report spoke of 'significant human rights issues' and specifically mentioned harsh, even lethal prison conditions. An Amnesty International report also covering 2024 speaks of 'arbitrary detentions and human rights violations' in El Salvador, as well as 'serious failings in the judicial system.' In overcrowded prisons, 'detention conditions were inhumane, with reports of torture and other ill-treatment.'Here, the State Department's motivation is not hard to guess. Because the Trump administration is sending prisoners to El Salvador, the department massaged the report to avoid the glaring truth: The U.S. is endangering people by sending them to Salvadorean prisons. The report on Germany, a highly functional democracy, is equally strange. The State report speaks of 'significant human rights issues,' including 'restrictions on freedom of expression.' One specific example: German law 'required internet companies, including U.S. internet platforms, to take down hate speech within 24 hours or face stiff fines.' Germans, in other words, are being called human-rights abusers because they continue to outlaw Nazi propaganda, as they have done since 1945. The Trump administration's motives are clear here too. The goal is to please U.S. tech companies, notably X, that find it convenient or profitable to spread Nazi propaganda, and perhaps to help the Alternative for Germany, the far-right party publicly praised and courted by J. D. Vance. But the details of the reports are less important than the overall impact. Several former officials pointed out that the U.S. has not only abandoned internationally accepted definitions of what is meant by rights, but also any objectivity or consistency. Original reporting from embassies has been removed, replaced with language clearly—and in a few cases ludicrously—manipulated by political appointees. This is very bad for human-rights defenders in places like Cuba or China, where activists in the past used U.S. language and reporting to make arguments to their own governments or to international institutions. From the May 2025 issue: America's future is Hungary None of them can now claim that the State Department Human Rights Report has any factual standing, or indeed that any U.S.-government document on human rights is an objective measure of anything. 'This essentially says the United States is no longer your ally, that the United States doesn't see clearly beyond the rhetoric of your regime,' one former official who still has relationships with DRL told me. 'And I think that's really, really tragic.' In truth, some of the changes seem designed not so much to shape U.S. foreign policy as to shape U.S. domestic policy. Christopher Le Mon, a former DRL official, told me he thinks that 'the domestic political agenda is really the organizing principle here.' He might be right. The administration is saying, after all, that it no longer finds electoral cheating or manipulation to be a problem; it doesn't think the harassment of civic groups is a bad thing; it doesn't object to discrimination against women or sexual minorities; and it will never demand transparency or accountability from the providers of internet algorithms, no matter what they choose to amplify or promote. The reports' authors, who include some of the most ideological people in the administration, are also telling Americans what they think of the standards that both Republicans and Democrats have held up for years. Now, says Le Mon, 'they're making it that much easier to just erase human rights from what has been a long-standing, relatively bipartisan history in U.S. foreign policy.' Ironically, this shift in American language puts the U.S. directly in alliance with China, whose diplomats have been campaigning for years to change the diplomatic discourse about human rights. Christopher Walker, a co-author of an influential paper on Chinese influence campaigns, which he calls 'sharp power,' told me that the Chinese Communist Party has been seeking to 'neuter or muddy the waters' around international discussions of fundamental human rights. 'From Beijing's point of view, the more such language is emasculated, the greater the CCP's competitive advantage,' he said. Russians, North Koreans, Iranians, Cubans, and others will also find this shift an immense relief. We knew this was coming. In a speech in Riyadh earlier this year, Trump flagged America's new indifference to human rights, promising the Saudis and other Middle Eastern monarchs that America would stop 'giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs.' That made it sound like the administration would be somehow neutral. But as Walker pointed out, in a world of intense ideological competition, there is no such thing as neutrality. Debates about the definition of human rights will continue. The U.S. will simply play a different role in them. Tom Malinowski, a former congressman who once ran the DRL bureau, puts it best. The reports, he told me, show that the 'U.S. still has a values-based foreign policy, but with twisted values.' Americans are giving plenty of lectures to other people on how to live, but to different people and with a different result.
USA Today
an hour ago
- USA Today
Jimmy Kimmel says he obtained citizenship in Italy amid Trump presidency
Jimmy Kimmel said he obtained Italian citizenship in a move seemingly motivated by the United States' current political climate under President Donald Trump. The late-night host revealed the news during an appearance on comedian Sarah Silverman's podcast, "The Sarah Silverman Podcast," on Aug. 7. "A lot of people I know are thinking about where they can get citizenship," Silverman said. Kimmel replied, "I did get Italian citizenship." The "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" host has long been an adversary of the president's policies. Trump, for his part, has openly criticized Kimmel's career over the years. USA TODAY has reached out to Kimmel's reps for comment. Kimmel says 'what's going on' is 'unbelievable' Kimmel didn't specifically cite Trump's presidency for his new Italian citizenship, but he and Silverman did allude to the current state of American politics. "What's going on is as bad as you thought it was going to be," Kimmel said, to which Silverman replied, "Way worse." "It's so much worse. It's just unbelievable," Kimmel said. "Like I feel like it's probably even worse than he would like it to be." Silverman added, "Every once in a while I'll Google Trump regrets or MAGA regrets." The comedians went on to elaborate on the political climate, with Kimmel mentioning Joe Rogan and other Trump supporters who have questioned the administration's policies. Kimmel is latest comedian to consider overseas move If Kimmel opts to move abroad, he wouldn't be the first comedian to do so amid Trump's presidency. Rosie O'Donnell, who notably has a long-standing feud with the president, moved to Ireland in January as Trump entered office. She said in a TikTok video in March that she is relieved not to be "singled out by the President of the United States." "I feel healthier (and) I'm sleeping better without the stress and anxiety over what was happening politically in the country," O'Donnell said. Similarly, Ellen DeGeneres and wife Portia de Rossi also headed across the pond in 2024 and haven't been back to the United States since. "We got here the day before the election and woke up to lots of texts from our friends with crying emojis, and I was like, '(Trump) got in,'" DeGeneres said during an event in South West England on July 20. "And we're like, 'We're staying here.'" Melina Khan is a national trending reporter for USA TODAY. She can be reached at
