Houston, Texas, June 28, 2009 -- Somali pirates hijacked and have taken control of the International Space Station, NASA sources announced yesterday. The pirates, who approached the vessel using small, inflatable spacerafts, are demanding a ransom "in excess of ten million dollars", according to Dr. Julius Vern, vice-administrator of NASA's International Space Station program, or they will destroy the vessel.

Washington, D.C., March 12, 2006 -- Vice President Dick Cheney, a leading advocate of the use of torture in the so-called "war on terror", successfully demonstrated the effectiveness of the technique this month by allowing himself to personally undergo a one-week program of "coerced interrogation", the compassionately conservative term for the practice. During the week, the Vice President proved the value of torture by unwillingly confessing to a wide range of infractions, some of them quite surprising.

Washington, D.C., March 22, 2015 -- Despite stiff opposition from Democrats, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives today approved a measure officially reducing the federal minimum wage rate from $5.15 per hour to one button.

Example of the new federal minimum wage

While individual states will still have the right granted by President Clinton to set their own minimum wages higher, no state will henceforth be required to pay workers more than the newly mandated button.

Seattle, February 27, 2007 -- Microsoft Corporation refused to comment today on the embarrassing revelation that the new Windows Vista "startup music", the musical vignette that is played to calm and distract users while waiting for the operating system to boot up, was created exclusively on Apple computer systems.

Windows Vista logo

The inflammatory tidbit was reportedly let slip during an off-the-record interview of a composer on the 20-member team that worked for 18 months to create the harmonic snippet.