Zhou, a farmer and now famed Chinese Fauxtographer won't be going to jail after all.

Welt Online reported, "Last October, he emerged from the woods in Shaanxi with his claim of a tiger sighting, plus dozens of digital photos. His claim was immediately embraced by officials in Shaanxi, who awarded him 20,000 yuan (about US$2,920) and much praise at a press conference little more than a week later."

Reuters reported, " Zhou, who had been given a 2 year jail term for fraud and illegally possessing bullets in September, had the sentence suspended at his appeal, Xinhua news agency said."

Reuters continued, "The court took note of the defendant's admission of guilt and 'obvious regret' and gave Zhou a three-year reprieve, but a 2,000 yuan fine and an order to give back the cash reward were upheld, the Beijing News said in a separate report."

The Xinhua news service reported that Zhou's lawyers said  that Chinese officials shared in the responsibility for the fraud. Apparently,  Zhou's sighting a rare tiger was "too good to check" for authorities as the news promised a boom in local tourism.  Indeed, many government employees were fired after the truth came out.

Welt Online said the hoax unraveled after "someone came up with an old poster with a photo that looked strikingly like the tiger and posted it online, the public called for an official investigation. But Shaanxi officials stuck to their story. With a rare tiger in their area, the officials knew they could bring in a lot of money by boosting tourism and creating a nature reserve, said Yu Hai, a sociology professor at Fudan University, in a phone interview this week."

It was only after "increasing pressure" that officials finally  "confirmed the photo as a hoax " and Zhou was taken into custody on fraud charges. Turned out Zhou had cut the tiger out of the poster, placed it in a wooded area and photographed it with a borrowed digital camera.  

Another fauxtography scandal rocketed through the Internet earlier this year when a prize-winning photo showing rare antelope was revealed to have been photoshopped.

You may remember our last story on the US military's use of Photoshop. They had given AP Photos altered an identification photo for a deceased soldier and people noticed. AP Photos was embarrassed and had to pull the photo from their archives. Well, BBC reported the Army did it again. Now AP Photos have "suspended" using US Dept. of Defense images. The military claims they have not violated their own policy. Photo retouching is fine.  "We're not misrepresenting her," Col Abbott told BBC. "The image is still clearly Gen Dunwoody." Sure, a little make up and skin smoothing in Photoshop helps a busy General who has no time to find the right blush and lip gloss to match those washed-out camoflage greens ! 

BBC reported,  " AP says that adjusting photos and other imagery, even for aesthetic reasons, damages the credibility of the information distributed by the military to news organizations and the public.

" ' For us, there's a zero-tolerance policy of adding or subtracting actual content from an image,' said Santiago Lyon, AP's director of photography.

BBC asked who released the photo or did the Photoshop makeover for the General . Col Abbott said she did not know.

Who knew that optical illusions can be so diverse in the application of the principle called,  "forced perspective?" Click here or right on the photograph to go to the 12 images in the Stinky Journalism album that were collected from the Internet by Polish bloggers. 

The album includes many clever variations of the theme that exploits the ambiguity of size cues in a two-dimensional image. An ant walking around the edge of the drinking cup is not alone. It is accompanied by what looks like a tiny flying helicopter--that is actually a full-size helicopter in the distance aligned just right. The eye and brain are confronted by conflicting information and continue to make the wrong guesses about the ant, cup and helicopter sizes.

The fundamental demand pressed by almost all 12 photos --Is the object near or far away? Since all the objects are flat in any photo, only certain spacial cues help us to properly interpret what we are "seeing" or what is "real." 

Knowing these cues, hoaxers or tricksters can readily exploit them and fool us. The particular images in our album are more humorous than deceptive. However they both "school the eye" as well us give us a bag- o-tricks that we can try at home without ever opening up the computer or Photoshop software.

So much emphasis has been place on "Photoshop" effects, that no muss no fuss, easy-to-do basic photo tricks are not much discussed. Study these examples, if you come up with new illusions --send them in to info@asrlab.org, and we will add them to the album. Have fun!

Controversy about a Chinese space mission video has gone out of this world.  Epoch Times presents arguments that support that it's fake, whereas,  Astroengine.com. has declared it legit.  Both sites have done an impressive, detailed analysis .

Shu Yu reported, "The Epoch Times contacted Chinese expert Dr. Qu Zheng, who worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, to scientifically analyze the video discrepancies" of the CCP Shenzhou VII Spacecraft  "spacewalk" broadcast.

Dr. Zheng said, "In addition to the air bubble problem pointed out by bloggers, they also includes technical pre-launch concerns, a lack of atmosphere around the Earth, abrupt large scale changes in the clouds, and no background noise heard in the space-talk."

Shi Yu asked Dr. Zheng about the absence of an atmosphere around the earth. He answered, "Let us take a look at the photo (see photo above) in the Xinhua news report or the so-called live broadcast video. The edge of the earth near the top of the Shenzhou VII shuttle was almost smooth, and there was no blue atmosphere around it. Similar to the ISS, Shenzhou VII also maintained a close to circular orbit, with both flying at a distance of about 340 kilometers from the earth’s surface."

In contrast, Ian O'Neill, Astroengine.com, concludes, after doing a careful review of the blogger challenges, that the space video is fine.  He wrote, "So, we are presented with two options. Either, China went into space and performed a flawless 15-minute EVA, or the mother of all space hoaxes has just been carried out. So which one do you think it is? I’m betting that China did indeed get into space. The 'bubbles' are in fact space debris, the reflection of “studio lights” is in fact a reflection of some equipment on the Shenzhou-7 hull, and everything else is simply hard to believe." 

The KRMG Local News AP headline blares--“Woman mauled by large pit bull'-- in Tulsa, Oklahoma, October  30, 2008. A photo of a black and brown dog's head accompanied the story. The problem was the shelter described the dog that attacked as "white and brown"? A further problem was that the dog depicted in the photo, wasn't a pit bull, but a Rottweiler. StinkyJournalism has previously reported on this ongoing media error . The press often sees "mean dogs" as all the same, despite their distinct breed differences . 

Indeed, the media loves pit bull news stories. Whether the report is about pit bulls attacking, or on occasion, rescuing people, the pit bull hysteria creates lots of web traffic .

After I informed KRMG editors of their error, the Rottweiler photo quickly disappeared and a notification was posted without explanation:  “Editor's Note: Story/picture edited from original post.” But what does this mean?

So was it a pit bull that attacked as the story claimed or was it a Rottweiler? StinkyJournalism spoke to Rose Wilson, the Lawton animal control officer quoted in the AP story. Wilson wondered, as I did, how and why a pit bull attacked a family member living in the same home? There was no history of this 65 pound, almost 7 year old intact male, showing aggression before. I called the owner in Lawton to find out more. He sounded like a nice man. He was very upset that his mother-in-law was severely injured and still in the hospital.

Was this another case of an unpredictable pit bull that in a media report, out-of-the-blue, maims without reason? The answer, it turned out, was a simple, "no."

The owner’s mother- in-law had just moved into their home one week before the attack. She was alone in the house one morning.  Jiggling the door handle to the area where the dogs were located, she unwittingly incited them to bark. When she finally entered, the dogs, unfortunately, judged her as an intruder. The white and brown pit bull acted to protect his home and attacked. This was human error and a tragic accident. No sensational story here; but the dog still paid the price and was destroyed.