FROM fake whiskies to fake news, the art of counterfeit hit the headlines this week.

MORE than a third of vintage Scotch whiskies tested at a specialist laboratory centre have been found to be “modern fakes”, according to a new investigation.

Tests undertaken at the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre (SUERC) in East Kilbride confirmed that 21 out of 55 bottles of rare Scotch whisky were either be fake or not distilled in the year declared.

The fake bottles could have been worth around £635,000 if proven real, claim specialists.

All malt whisky samples which had been stated as dating from around 1900 or earlier were also found to be fake.

The SUERC used advanced radiocarbon dating techniques to reach its conclusions.

Researchers measured residual concentrations of a radioactive isotope of carbon present in the alcohol contained in each bottle in order to establish the ages of the whiskies.

The samples had been sent for analysis by whisky broker Rare Whisky 101 (RW101), which said it was responding to "growing concern surrounding the proliferation of fake whisky" in the secondary market.

The bottles had been selected at random from auctions, private collections and retailers.

And the national tipple was not the only fake product to be unmasked this week after a top European news magazine fired one of its star journalists after discovering that he had fabricated facts and sources in more than a dozen articles over a seven-year period.

Taking the concept of fake news to a whole new level, Claas Relotius, a reporter and editor, "falsified his articles on a grand scale and even invented characters, deceiving both readers and his colleagues," Germany's Der Spiegel said.

The startling revelation is a heavy blow to Der Spiegel, a 71-year-old publication that's renowned for its quality journalism and read by hundreds of thousands of people in print and by millions online.

"I'm so angry, horrified, shocked, stunned," the magazine's deputy foreign editor Mathieu von Rohr tweeted. "Claas Relotius faked, he cheated all of us."

After a colleague working with Relotius on a story in the US flagged suspicions about his reporting, Der Spiegel says it carried out an internal investigation. Relotius confessed that he invented entire passages for that article, and also falsified information in other stories.

Relotius, who resigned, said he was sick and needed help, a Der Spiegel spokesman told CNN.

His work had received awards from CNN, but a CNN spokesperson said, "Relotius was not associated with CNN, he never worked for the company and never had anything published on CNN platforms."

Relotius first joined Der Spiegel in 2011 as a freelancer, and was hired as an editor a year and half ago.

Der Spiegel said the 33-year-old admitted to partial fabrications in at least 14 of nearly 60 articles he wrote for its magazine and website. That included making up dialogue and quotes and creating composite characters. The magazine warned that the number could be higher, and that other news organizations could be affected.

Forbes identified Relotius as a top reporter last year, including him on a "30 Under 30" list for European media.

Several major features Relotius wrote for Der Spiegel that were also nominated for or won journalism awards are now under scrutiny, according to the magazine.

Among them, "The Last Witness," about an American who allegedly travels to an execution as a witness, "Lion Children," about two Iraqi children who have been kidnapped and reeducated by the Islamic State, and "Number 440," a feature about alleged prisoners at the US detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Der Spiegel is the latest prominent news organization to be rocked by revelations of a high-flying reporter falsifying information.

In 2003, The New York Times discovered that one of its rising stars, Jayson Blair, had invented parts of his stories and stolen material from other news outlets. The scandal resulted in the resignations of Blair and the newspaper's top two editors.

At The New Republic, Stephen Glass was considered a brilliant 25-year-old magazine writer, until he was unmasked as a serial fabricator and fired in 1998.

THE discovery of the "world's biggest diamond" in 2007 sent ripples of excitement around the world. It was said to be twice the size of the previous record holder, the Cullinan, or Great Star of Africa, discovered near Pretoria in 1905.

The 'diamond' was discovered in a mine in South Africa’s North West.

Brett Jolly, a spokesman for the mining firm Two Point Five Construction, had announced the stone was being transported to a bank vault in Johannesburg "until we calm down and decide what we are going to do".

But its status was shortlived.

Days later, the president of the World Federation of Diamond Bourses, Ernest Blom, announced he was withdrawing from the verification process to test the stone, saying: "I suspect something is afoot."

Mr Jolly, originally a British property developer, claimed he had been the victim of a fraud to entice him to buy the land. He told the website Mining Weekly Online that he wished he "never was involved with [the diamond] in the first place," adding that he didn't "care any more whether it's a diamond or not".

Meanwhile, De Beers, which owns the Cullinan, expressed relief that it still holds the title of the biggest diamond ever discovered. "The search for diamonds is so romantic," said a spokesman, Tom Tweedy. "This does illustrate that diamonds hold a mystique with people."

THE jury is still out on the validity of the world's most expensive painting sold at auction - Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi.

The painting, bought at auction in New York last November for an eye-watering £342.1m, fuelled speculation this year when it failed to go on display as planned at the Louvre in Abu Dhabi this September.

The identity of the buyer was initially unknown but later revealed to be Badr bin Abdullah bin Mohammed bin Farhan al Saud, a member of the Saudi royal family who was said to be acting on behalf of the museum.

However, the German art historian Frank Zöllner wrote in the preface to the 2017 edition of his book, Leonardo – the Complete Paintings and Drawings, that the painting “exhibits a strongly developed sfumato technique that corresponds more closely to the manner of a Leonardo pupil active in the 1520s than to the style of the master himself”.

Separate findings from University of Oxford art historian Matthew Landrus claim only 20% to 30% of the painting was actually completed by Leonardo himself.

Speaking to CNN, Landrus outlined his theory that the great painter's assistant, Bernardino Luini, was largely responsible for the artwork.

A DRAM of vintage Scotch bought by a Chinese millionaire in a Swiss hotel bar for £7,600 was a fake, laboratory tests have concluded.

Analysts from Scotland were called in by the Waldhaus Am See hotel in St Moritz after experts questioned the authenticity of the 2cl shot.

It had been poured from an unopened bottle labelled as an 1878 Macallan single malt.

It is believed to be the largest sum ever paid for a poured dram of Scotch.

But analysis found that it was almost certainly not distilled before 1970.

The hotel said it had accepted the findings and reimbursed the customer in full.

Zhang Wei, 36, from Beijing - one of China's highest-earning online writers - had paid just under 10,000 Swiss francs (£7,600, $10,050) for the single shot while visiting the hotel's Devil's Place whisky bar in July.

But suspicions about the spirit's provenance surfaced soon after the purchase, when whisky industry experts spotted discrepancies in the bottle's cork and label from newspaper articles.

A 32-YEAR-old man posed as a 17-year-old pupil at one of Scotland's leading schools then went on to university to study medicine, continuing to claim that he was a teenager.

Brandon Lee, as he called himself, gained five A-grade Highers at Bearsden Academy, near Glasgow, while claiming to be 17, then went on to Dundee University in October in 1994 with the aim of becoming a doctor.

He had presented documents which convinced teaching staff he had been at another school but had moved into the area.

Places on medicine courses are in high demand and Dundee does not normally offer them to anyone aged over 30.

Lee joined the school in 1993 as a fifth year pupil.

Why do we fall for fake news?

Humans like to think of themselves as rational creatures, but most of the time we are guided by emotional and irrational thinking.

Psychologists have shown this through the study of cognitive shortcuts known as heuristics. It’s hard to imagine getting through so much as a trip to the supermarket without these time-savers. “You don’t and can’t take the time and energy to examine and compare every brand of yoghurt,” says Wray Herbert, author of On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind’s Hard-Wired Habits. So we might instead rely on what is known as the familiarity heuristic, our tendency to assume that if something is familiar, it must be good and safe.

US cognitive scientist David Rand illustrated our tendency to believe things we’ve been exposed to in the past.

His study presented subjects with headlines–some false, some true– in a format identical to what users see on Facebook. Rand found that simply being exposed to fake news made people more likely to rate those stories as accurate later on in the experiment.

If you’ve seen something before, “your brain subconsciously uses that as an indication that it’s true,” he said.