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Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, held hearings yesterday to look into fraudulent letters which were sent on behalf of the coal industry to several members of congress. The original hearing was to take place on October 15, but was postponed until yesterday morning. The committee lined up the following witnesses: Rep. Tom Periello (D-Va.) Mr. Jack Bonner, Bonner & Associates Mr. Steve Miller, President and CEO, American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity Ms. Lisa M. Maatz, Director of Public Policy and Government Relations, American Association of University Women Mr. Hilary...

Back when Norman Rockwell ruled Saturday evenings, Adobe wasn't even a gleam in some nerd's eye, but a new book shows that the painter was, nevertheless, a photoshop god. Very few Gizmodo readers were even born when Rockwell painted his last Saturday Evening Post cover, but we all know them. You hear that name and suddenly you can picture those overly detailed, cartoonishly dramatic but ultimately kinda corny depictions of American life. Well, Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera, written and compiled by Ron Schick, has given me immense newfound respect for the man, for the meticulous photography, the real people...

Civil War Generals, c. 1865 Generally regarded as the world's first commercially successful photojournalist, Matthew Brady was also one of the medium's most accomplished manipulators. In this group portrait of William Tecumseh Sherman and his top officers, he added one figure. For the record, the men are, standing, from left: Oliver Otis Howard, William Babcock Hazen, Jefferson Columbus Davis and Joseph Anthony Mower; seated, from left: John Alexander Logan, Sherman, Henry Warner Slocum and Francis P. Blair. The Original Image: Brady added Blair at the far right. One of Sherman's corps commanders in the critical final offensive in Georgia, Blair...

An Article Published in the October/09/ 2009 by newspaper DanTri in Hanoi indicated police arrested two suspects as they committed assault other people are journalist Tran Khai Thanh Thuy and her Husband . http://dantri.com.vn/c20/s20-355166/tran-khai-thanh-thuy-bi-bat-ve-toi-co-y-gay-thuong-tich.htm The photo which shown an injured man Nguyen Manh Diep in the hospital (Anh Nguyễn Mạnh �iệp bị đánh vỡ đầu) actually a fake photo . The photo was taken in 2005 and later photoshop the date imprinted on the photo to Oct/09/2009 In order to make it looks genuinely as the recent date . The said photo above could be opened by using wordpad to...

LOS ANGELES: Software giant Microsoft Corp is apologising for altering a photo on its website to change the race of one of the people shown in t he picture. A photo on the Seattle-based company's US website shows two men, one Asian and one black, and a white woman seated at a conference room table.

I missed this yesterday at Newsbusters but Treacher, rightly aghast, tipped me to it this afternoon. Never will you see a starker example of MSNBC getting away with the sort of deception for which Fox News would be pilloried, especially in the context of race. If you missed Monday’s post about this, go watch the footage (or look at this photo) and see if you can deduce why they wouldn’t want to show the guy with the rifle from the neck up during this particular segment. For all the well-deserved heat that MSNBC’s primetime line-up has taken for its demagoguery...

The New York Times has removed photos from its website that appear to have been digitally altered. From Fishbowl NY Editor & Publisher noticed that the New York Times had taken down a slideshow of photos by Portuguese photographer Edgar Martins that had appeared in this Sunday's magazine depicting abandoned house construction projects in the wake of the financial crisis. Now, instead of the gallery online, there is a short statement from the paper: "The pictures in this feature were removed after questions were raised about whether they had been digitally altered." It's unclear who made the original allegations of...

The smiling, ethnically diverse family featured on the cover of Toronto's latest edition of its summer Fun Guide was digitally altered to make the photo more "inclusive," which city officials say is in keeping with a policy to reflect diversity. A spokesman for the department that publishes the guide listing recreation activities confirmed the publication was doctored to insert the face of a different father. "He superimposed the African-Canadian person onto the family cluster in the original photo. It was two photographs and one head was superimposed over the original family photo," said John Gosgnach, communications director for the...

The crowd in this pro-Ahmadinijad rally appears to have been clone-tool enhanced.

At least one picture shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee. Further photographs are said to depict sexual assaults on prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube.

Highlights - The site, thedirty.com, now claims they have a sex tape of Carrie Prejean. - However, the site’s owner has a history of making false claims and profiting from the publicity and reaction his allegations generate. - The most popular case was Kobe Bryant and Laker Girl Vanessa Curry. - No photographic evidence of a Bryant and Curry affair emerged; despite weeks of claims he would soon publish pictures. Read full report: http://www.butasforme.com/2009/05/13/fraud-thedirtycom-says-video-of-prejean-coming-but-the-site-has-a-history-of-hyping-slanderous-material-that-never-materialized/

Watch Video: http://www.butasforme.com/2009/05/08/trump-from-what-im-seeing-the-photos-are-not-extremely-bad/TRUMP ON PREJEAN: "Not Extremely Bad ... Shows Only One Thing... She is Beautiful." PREJAN DEFENDS: Some Photos Photoshopped ... Her Head ... Not Her Body.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/05/un-report-israel-gaza-negligence

Recently a 'Community activist' (AKA Pain in the A**) in the city of Boston named Sadiki Cambone, brought a set of pictures purporting to be of our service men raping Iraqi women to the Boston City Council. Much like John Kerry this Sadiki Cambone throws aroundhis service in the militaryto prove his alleged patriotism, all the while undermining our troops at every opportunity. The Boston Glob(e) published these pictures as being genuine without bothering to verify them.As it turns out the pictures actually come from a fetish porn site of men in camouflage having sex with porn actress. On todays...

The Boston Globe today tried to distance itself from its admitted error in publishing pornographic photos fraudulently depicting the rape of Iraqi women by American GIs by blaming the city councilor who distributed the pictures at a press conference. In an editorial, the paper admitted for the first time the photos were "bogus" and "appeared" to be taken from a porn site, but in a separate article, the Globe's ombudsman claims she still has failed to discover the source of the photos and still has not confirmed or denied their veracity to readers. The photographs – uncovered by WorldNetDaily as...

Memo to the White House: Not only was flying a Presidential jet for a photo-op Monday over downtown Manhattan in bad taste – it was unnecessary. Anyone in the White House ever hear of Photoshop? You'd think the administration would've been tech-savvy enough to realize the merits of the computer software program – what with its constant Internet spin doctoring and the President's notorious BlackBerry infatuation. The cost of flying one of Obama's official planes – a pimped-out Boeing 747 – along with a F-16 jet over the city cost upwards of $300,000 in taxpayer dollars. In comparison, the latest...

To all you silly-billies at the Globe - enough already with the groveling. Self-pity is not good box office. Stop weeping into your brandy Alexanders and start looking for a job - a real job. And no, I won’t be at your “Solidarity” rally today at Faneuil Hall. But I can imagine the signs - “In Barney Frank We Trust,” “Viva Fidel, Hugo y Teddy!” and of course, “Hands Off My Trust Fund.” Outside, bowtied bumkissers will be chanting in unison, “Hey hey ho ho, Globe-a-phobia’s got to go.” The Globe union is running buses up from Morrissey Boulevard, a...

On April 21, the Business and Media Institute's Dan Gainor testified before the House Judiciary Committee's Courts and Competition Policy in a hearing on "A New Age for Newspapers." As MRC's Tim Graham wrote on April 22, the hearing was spurred by the steady drumbeat of newspaper closings around the country, and calls from some Democrat lawmakers to bail out and subsidize the newspaper business. While others testified on newsprint business models and the impact of the Internet, Gainor's statement to the subcommittee highlighted liberal bias as a major factor in the industry's decline. "The concept of a journalist as...

Now, this has occurred before with Bill Clinton, and it quite possibly could have been the same with Bush - the issue is how the MSM spins this and how it will report one way if you are affiliated with one party versus the other way when you have the “scarlet” R next to your name. From Flopping Aces: “Cheered wildly by U.S. troops,” begins Jennifer Democratic Operative Loven’s AP report on Obama’s surprise visit to Iraq on Tuesday. Quite a contrast to the silent treatment Marines gave Obama at his Camp LeJeune speech in late February. Just how did...

In 1912 scientists thought they'd discovered the elusive missing link between human and ape. Found in a gravel pit in Piltdown, England, a set of intriguing skull and jaw fragments were later reconstructed by the British Museum into a human-like head with an ape-like jaw. In 1953 it turned out the find wasn't proof of anything—other than the skill of the still anonymous forger. The skull was a medieval human's. The jaw was an orangutan's. And the teeth were a chimp's.

BBC staff protest failure to air pro-Palestinian video Many have wondered if the BBC had a pro-Palestinian bias in their reporting. This has now been confirmed. Over 400 of their staff have signed a protest petition because they failed to air a video that the corporation deemed to be too biased in favor of Palestinians. That must have been one very biased news video. Hat tip to Axis of Right.

As the Israelis continue their push into Gaza; as they continue an offensive military campaign against Hamas, born of the need to protect Israeli civilians from rockets fired by Hamas jihadis, it is almost impossible to gather accurate information regarding the conflict, at least not from the mainstream media. The accounts advanced by mainstream news sources are so devoid of balance – and, thusly, devoid of a whole and honest truth – that their product reaches a caliber of propaganda not seen since the disinformation campaigns of the Third Reich. Goebbels would be envious. It is next to impossible for...

Just how badly do many liberal bloggers want to depict Israelis as heartless killers and Hamas as poor defenseless victims? On Sunday, a more than three year old video of an accidental munitions truck explosion at a Palestinian rally in September 2005 was spread around the liberal blogosphere as footage of an Israeli attack on Gaza on January 3, 2009. Two prominent leftwing websites -- Raw Story and Democratic Underground -- displayed this video for hours before a poster at Reddit exposed the hoax (h/t NBer Blazer). A gruesome propaganda video uploaded to LiveLeak that purported to show the aftermath...

The Palestinian terrorists in Gaza are expert at manipulating the news media to their point of view. Already, the top media outlets have filled television screens with human interest stories of Palestinian women and children being blown to bits by the overpowering and relentless Israeli Defense Forces. Story after story appears with frantic Palestinian women crying out that their lives are disrupted by these terrible bombing raids, that there is no food to feed their families, that their husbands are missing. And while they are talking, there is chaos in the background of bombed out buildings and B-roll of children...

The MSM is busily showing video clips of the damage in Gaza many of them falsified. Palestinian Media Watch has reported this example: A Palestinian journalist has complained that the media and others are manipulating the images going out to the world "A mother of one of the martyrs stood by the door of the intensive care unit while crying... relatives and those around her were telling her what she should say to the television cameras: 'Say your son [before he died] prayed and went out.' Another tells her: 'Curse the Arab leaders'... The journalists [in the hospitals] are going...

More than a dozen photographs of a bathing suit-clad President-elect Barack Obama surfaced online Monday showing the shirtless Chicagoan accompanied by his wife, Michelle, and their two young daughters on the white-sand beach in front of their vacation home. Reporters, photographers and television camera operators traveling with the Obamas have been banned by the Secret Service from approaching the oceanfront estate in nearby Kailua where the family is vacationing. But an enterprising paparazzi photographer wearing a Hawaiian shirt apparently strolled along the beach, saw the Obamas, took out his long-lens camera and started shooting. The photographer was less than 200...

North Korea presents more "evidence" of recovered Kim Tue Dec 16, 9:37 pm ET SEOUL (Reuters) – North Korea stepped up its campaign to prove leader Kim Jong-il is well and in control by showing him looking at an electronic copy of a newspaper dated Tuesday in a series of photos released through its official media. U.S. and South Korean officials have said Kim, 66, suffered a stroke in August, raising questions about leadership in Asia's only communist dynasty and who was making decisions about the North's nuclear program. Despite re-emerging in early October in official media reports about making...

The mind reels at how news organizations might employ this technology in the future. Will we see holograms of reporters standing outside in hurricanes?

What is political astroturf? When a political movement portrays itself to be grass-roots, and later we find out it was actually planned and coordinated by a political party or candidate. This is usually done in support of the cause or candidate behind the astroturf effort. The Republicans are now being attacked by a new type of fake grass: dirty atstroturf. Democratic activists are infiltrating Republican rallys pretending to be Republican grass-roots supporters. The Democratic activist's goal? Discredit Republican grass-roots supporters. Their tactic has been to yell vile statements about Democratic candidates, hoping it would smear Republican grass-roots supporters. So far,...

Are these decent pictures of Gov. Sarah Palin published by Reuters and Associated Press?

Photo Ops in Politics by: Irene Warren, September 29, 2008 Big-name news celebrities shared center stage at the Brookings Institution recently to host an exclusive presentation with Kiku Adatto, author of Picture Perfect: Life in the Age of the Photo Op, as they explored photo expressions and addressed the problems with photo ops in politics, William A. Galston, with the Brookings Institution, explained. “The event is part of the Governing Ideas series,” Galston noted, “it is intended to broaden the discussion of governance issues through forums on timely and relevant books on history, culture, legal norms and practices, and also...

Weird animals defy science: Strange But True?

Jeffery Goldberg from The Atlantic Magazine is reporting that underhanded, leftist photographer Jill Greenberg has just been let go by her Representing Agency, the Vaughan Hannigan photo agency. This is a perfect example of a lesson of consequences. When Greenberg admitted that she lied and tricked John McCain so that she could manipulate his image to slander him and did so in the employ of The Atlantic Magazine, she lost any future work with that magazine for her unprofessional behavior. And now, more consequences have come her way. No one is, of course, saying that Jill Greenberg isn't allowed to...

The fuss over Jill Greenberg's photography.--- The Atlantic offered an apology to John McCain this week after the photographer for the October cover, Jill Greenberg, posted doctored pictures of the Republican nominee on her personal Web site. It also emerged that Greenberg, a fierce anti-Republican, had photographed McCain for the magazine while he stood over a deliberately unflattering green light. In 2006, Jim Lewis discussed whether "the photographer who makes kids cry" unfairly exploits her subjects. The article is reprinted below.

The following statistics are found when searching Google.com for "Sarah Palin." - 22,300,000 google.com search - 3,090,000 images on google image pages - 125,386 news articles on google news - 24,337 items for sale in google shopping - 12,000 videos on youtube/google - 67,100 hits in google groups - 426,200 blog pages on google - Google Trends shows the massive interest in graphical way: http://www.google.com/trends?q=%22sarah+palin%22

We’ve now reached the point where gossip sites are forced to debunk rumors being circulated uncritically by the mainstream media. Keep updating, Charlie. No rest for the weary. KURTZ: But if it’s a “Lifetime Movie of the Week,” Lola, then it seems to me that it’s a very mixed picture from the point of view of a ticket that is trying to get, you know, John McCain and Sarah Palin elected president and vice president of the United States. In other words, it’s great to be a celebrity, and she’ll get a book deal out of it and maybe her...

You have your fear, which might become reality; and then you have Godzilla, who is reality. — from the movie “Godzilla: King of the Monsters” As almost everyone knows by now, various major daily newspaper published, on July 10, a photograph of four Iranian missiles streaking heavenward; then Little Green Footballs (significantly, a blog and not a daily newspaper) provided evidence that the photograph had been faked. Later, many of those same papers published a Whitman’s sampler of retractions and apologies. For me it raised a series of questions about images.[1] Do they provide illustration of a text or an...

WHY, INDEED? "French media loses big court case proving Palestinian propaganda false, New York Times ignores shocking story... Why?" Because it opens the door to suggestions that this wasn't an aberration, but the norm in Mideast coverage? # # # Also see related videos at YouTube: "Green Helmet Guy" in Qana (Aug 2006) Dead Children Used as Props in Lebanon (Aug 2006) Pallywood (Mar 2006)

Photos. The Iranian government was caught Photoshopping their tough-guy missile launch this week. Conservative blogger Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs caught it. Charles is looking at a new Iranian photo to see if it too has been altered.

Quote: In a handout picture released on the news website of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, four long and medium range missiles rise into the air after being test-fired at an undisclosed location in the Iranian desert on July 9, 2008. Iran today test-fired a missile it said is capable of reaching Israel, angering the United States amid growing fears that the standoff over the contested Iranian nuclear drive could lead to war. G**** Images Hahaha nice Photoshop work If you dont have real pictures fake it

As news spread across the world of Iran’s provocative missile tests, so did an image of four missiles heading skyward in unison. Unfortunately, it appeared to contain one too many missiles, a point that had not emerged before the photo appeared on the front pages of The Los Angeles Times, The Financial Times, The Chicago Tribune and several other newspapers as well as on BBC News, MSNBC, Yahoo! News, NYTimes.com and many other major news Web sites.

At least one of the photographs released today by Iran and published by an unquestioning Western media has been Photoshopped:

Two Muslim women at Barack Obama's rally in Detroit Monday were barred from sitting behind the podium by campaign volunteers seeking to prevent the women's headscarves from appearing in photographs or on television with the candidate. The campaign has apologized to the women, all Obama supporters who said they felt betrayed by their treatment at the rally. "This is of course not the policy of the campaign. It is offensive and counter to Obama's commitment to bring Americans together and simply not the kind of campaign we run," said Obama spokesman Bill Burton, who added that the volunteers were acting...

BERLIN — It's an iconic image of World War II: Berlin has fallen and Soviet soldiers are hoisting the red flag over the Reichstag. What most people don't realize, however, is that the photograph isn't capturing the historic moment. Yevgeni Khaldei staged the scene on May 2, 1945 — three days after the Soviets captured Germany's parliament building. The picture is the centerpiece of an exhibit — "Yevgeni Khaldei — The Decisive Moment" — that bills itself as the first comprehensive retrospective of the photographer's World War II work. The show at Berlin's Gropius-Bau museum reveals the extent to which...

Features - June 2, 2008 Digital Forensics: 5 Ways to Spot a Fake Photo By Hany Farid This story is a supplement to the feature "Digital Forensics: How Experts Uncover Doctored Images" which was printed in the June 2008 issue of Scientific American. Lighting Composite images made of pieces from different photographs can display subtle differences in the lighting conditions under which each person or object was originally photographed. Such discrepancies will often go unnoticed by the naked eye. For an image such as the one at the right, my group can estimate the direction of the light source for...

EVANSVILLE, Ind. -- The poll worker who called a polling place "Obama's house" in front of a television news crew apologized -- then accused the local TV station of altering its footage to incriminate her. Kim Minor also told the Vanderburgh County Election Board that her "tight pants" were partly to blame for the remarks broadcast by WTVW-FOX7 and posted on YouTube. Afterward, Election Board members Tom Massey, David Shaw and County Clerk Susan Kirk voted 3-0 to turn over WTVW-FOX7's unedited tape of the incident to the Vanderburgh County Prosecutor's Office for investigation. Bob Walters, news director of WTVW-FOX7,...

[quote]Obama Draws Record Crowd in Oregon An estimated 75,000 gathered on the banks of the Willamette River in Portland on Sunday to see Barack Obama. “Wow! Wow! Wow!” were his first words, as he surveyed the multitude, which included people in kayaks and small pleasure craft on the river.[/quote] Two pictures were included to show Obama in a sea of people:

Two-year-old Ali Hussein is pulled from the rubble of his family's home in the Shiite stronghold of Sadr City in Baghdad, Iraq on Tuesday, April 29, 2008. The child, who later died in hospital, was in one of four homes allegedly destroyed by U.S. missiles. More than two dozen people were killed when Shiite militants ambushed a U.S. patrol in Baghdad's embattled Sadr City district, bringing the death toll in area on Tuesday to more than 30, a U.S. military spokesman and Iraqi officials said. (AP Photo/Karim Kadim)

The story is about climate change, and when I saw the accompanying photo of a fish lying at the bottom of a dried lake, I immediately screamed fake. Take a look, there's no way the buzzards or other predators wouldn't have picked it clean in the time it took for the lake to evaporate.

Identifying Manipulated Images New tools that analyze the lighting in images help spot tampering. By Erica Naone   True or false? The tool used above spots whether an image has been manipulated by modeling the lighting in the image based on an analysis of visible surfaces. To analyze an image, a user indicates the surfaces to consider using contour lines (shown above in white). The system checks for inconsistencies in the way that those surfaces are lit. Credit: Micah Kimo Johnson, Hany Farid Photo-editing software gets more sophisticated all the time, allowing users to alter pictures in ways both...