April Fools Aplenty (No Kidding!)
The dodo came back from the dead, news broke that Harrods would open a floating store on the Thames and a German castle was to be wrapped in an orange cover.
The usual swag of April Fools' Day pranks and jokes featured widely in the world's media Monday, from the Romanian newspaper item calling for bribes to be legalized to the Internet report that Canadian Finance Minister Paul Martin would quit his job to breed cows and ducks.
The British tabloids, renowned for reveling in spoof stories on April 1, were this year in a somber mood following the death of the Queen Mother Saturday and largely refrained from publishing hoax stories.
The Daily Star could not help itself though. It heralded the return of the extinct dodo saying geneticists had worked their magic using DNA from skeletal remains to bring the bird back to life.
It showed a picture of keeper "Alf Oropil" with Doris the dodo.
One of the most elaborate pranks was worked by the luxury London-based retailer Harrods, which issued a statement saying that it was poised to float on the stock market.
Red-faced journalists duped by Sunday's news of the imminent listing were in for another shock Monday when they received a second statement from owner Mohamed Al Fayed saying the store would indeed "float."
"And what more appropriate place to float the world's most famous store than on the world's best-known river, the River Thames?" it said.
But the sting in the tail could be found in the "Terms and Conditions" at Fayed's personal Web site, www.alfayed.com. "The 'Harrods to Float' piece is intended for amusement only. There are no plans to construct a floating version of Harrods to be sited along the river Thames in London."
The report that Canada's Martin was poised to quit his job as finance minister to become a farmer had more serious ramifications as the dollar fell to a one-month low on the news.
The report, on Canada's bourque.org Web site of political gossip, included hyperlinks to sites with pictures of white Charolais cows and large brown-and-white ducks.
The spoof front-page article in Romania's leading financial daily Ziarul Financiar proposed a sliding scale of taxes on "commissions and supplementary insurance payments for health and a better life," starting with a five percent levy on bribes of up to one million euros.
The April Fools' Day exclusive said the government was even considering incentives for bribe-payers, allowing them to offset 50 percent of their outlay on kick-backs against tax.
Eastern German radio station Landeswelle Thuringia reported that the artistic duo Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who in 1995 covered Berlin's Reichstag in one million square feet of polypropylene, wanted to smother Wartburg Castle near Eisenach in orange.
"Christo had been planning to wrap the Wartburg back in the 1970s, but ran into resistance from the East German government," the radio station reported, saying the castle would be covered on Easter Monday -- April 1.