Bentonville, Arkansas, January 22, 2006 -- Wal-Mart's new employee fitness program has been a "dazzling success" in the first three months of its operation, a Wal-Mart spokesman, Chip Kraippe, said yesterday. The new policy, which was announced by the unusual means of a closely-held internal memo that was leaked in October of last year, dictates that all Wal-Mart employees are required to perform at least one hour of high-impact physical activity each day, regardless of their duty assignment.

Wakaya Island, Fiji, April 22, 2006 -- President Bush unveiled sweeping plans for a new "War on Poverty" at a gala $50,000 per couple Republican fundraiser held this weekend at Fiji's stylish Wakaya Club, one of the world's most exclusive beach resorts.

The goal of the poverty initiative, according to Bush, is "to wipe poverty off the face of America within 10 years", an objective embraced by liberals and conservatives alike.

Upton, New York, March 29, 2009 -- A team of physicists at Brookhaven Lab in Upton, New York are currently developing a revolutionary system that will protect coastal areas of the world against future tsunamis using the unique quantum mechanical characteristics of physicist Erwin Schrödinger's cat. The system should be operational within three years or as soon as a sufficient number of Schrödinger's cats can be cloned, whichever comes first.

STRAI tsunami cat (interior view)

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.