[...]

"What is new is that the security situation in our neighbourhood has worsened, and that we must therefore make preparations regarding the threat of war and conflict."

The letter said that the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions (SKL) had agreed to oversee the preparations, and would work over the coming year with MSB and the Swedish Armed Forces to work out more details of municipalities' duties.

These include developing a plan to maintain and upgrade emergency bunkers across the country, many of which have been sold or allowed to fall into disrepair.

"Operations centres in bunkers need to continue to be held in ready reserve. In special cases, decommissioning or sale can take place, but first there must be a dialogue between MSB and the local region," the letter warned.

Sweden's government decided to bring back civil defence last year as part of its defence policy for 2016 to 2020.

"There is nothing to suggest that war is likely, but we have been given an order from the government to plan for it," Svante Werger, the press officer for MSB, told the Sydsvenskan newspaper.

The letter has provoked complaints from some municipalities that they have insufficient information on what is required and have not been provided with the necessary funding.

Jonas Hult, head of Safety and Security for the city of Malmö, told Sydsvenskan that the city still had no plans on how to distribute protective masks, vaccines, or petrol, or on how to direct people to bunkers and shelters in the event of an attack.

"Increasing war-readiness costs money, and it's money municipalities do not have," he said. "It's unfortunate that the municipalities have been left in the lurch."

In 2013, the Russian air force conducted a mock nuclear strike against Sweden during war games which saw a contingent of Russian aircraft approach Swedish airspace after crossing the Gulf of Finland.

This was one of several examples of dummy nuclear attacks against Nato and its allies in recent years, according to a Nato report.

War games run by the Rand Corporation, a US defence think tank, have predicted the Russian army could be in the Baltic capitals of Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius in less than three days.

Stories deemed to be false will now be "flagged" by Facebook, with an accompanying red label claiming the story is "disputed by 3rd Party Fact-Checkers."

Users will then have the option to "learn why this is disputed" to receive an explanation as to why Facebook believes the story is false.

"We'll use the reports from our community, along with other signals, to send stories to these organizations," Facebook VP Adam Mosseri wrote in the Facebook news blog. "If the fact checking organizations identify a story as fake, it will get flagged as disputed and there will be a link to the corresponding article explaining why."

Furthermore, Facebook will prohibit paid promotion of stories that have been marked as disputed.

In the announcement, Facebook confirmed that it will be working alongside organizations that are signatories of "Poynter's International Fact Checking Code of Principles."

Business Insider reports that these organisations will include the likes of Snopes, ABC, Politifact, and FactCheck.org, all of which have records of left-wing partisanship — particularly throughout the 2016 election.

For example, PolitiFact infamously said it was "mostly false" when Donald Trump claimed in a presidential debate that Hillary Clinton wanted "open borders." PolitiFact made this ruling despite Clinton being on the record at a paid speech saying "My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders."

Trump also said that Russia has 1,800 nuclear warheads and has expanded its arsenal while the U.S. has not. PolitiFact admitted that Trump's claim was factual, but it rated the statement as "half true"for supposedly "missing the big picture."

In both of these cases, PolitiFact went beyond mere fact-checking and moved the goal posts in ways that benefited Clinton's candidacy. This type of ideological "fact checking" went beyond parody during October's presidential debates, with NBC taking Trump's statement that Clinton "acid washed" her emails (a reference to the data deletion tool "BleachBit") 100% literally and declaring the statement "false."

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