London, August 29, 2009 -- Ice cream trucks, the ubiquitous roaming purveyors of frozen dessert products that infest suburban neighbourhoods around the world, announcing their arrival using strident, uniformly irritating off-pitch melodies, have been found in a recent study to be a leading international cause of insanity.

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.

Dearborn, Michigan, August 29, 2009 -- A spokesman for Ford Motor Company announced today the preemptive recall of all 6.1 million model year 2011 cars expected to be produced under the company's flagship Ford brand next year.

The recall, which will affect all new Ford automobiles immediately upon leaving the assembly line, is intended to address "serious production, concept, engineering and safety flaws that we expect to come to light in the recent future", according to the spokesman.

Berkeley, California, February 19, 2009 -- The widely accepted theory regarding the creation of the universe via a single, momentous explosion, the "Big Bang", has been effectively turned on its head. Scientists report new evidence has come to light of a second, more dramatic explosion, that is theorized to have occurred a few nanoseconds after the first one.