US/World

BEIJING – While fraudulent footprint fireworks and little lip-syncing Lin appeared to be the extent of China’s Olympic deception, in reality these scandals are just the icing on an enormous Olympic fakery cake. According to well-placed sources in the Chinese government, the entirety of the Beijing Olympic Games is in fact completely staged.

Every single aspect of the 2008 Summer Games as viewed by the world on television and the Internet has been part of an elaborate farce, carried out through a combination of green-screen digital trickery and fully computer-generated graphics.

Even Beijing’s famous “crow’s nest” stadium exists only as an arrangement of bits inside a massive graphic-manipulation supercomputer.

In a sudden fit of rage Friday, moviegoers across the country threw down their ten dollar popcorn, spat out their eight dollar sodas, and announced the commencement of a full-scale war against theaters.

“We have had enough,” read the statement. “From now on, we only buy tickets, nothing else. Also, we’re not going to watch the pre-movie ads anymore.”

The spontaneous army of six-million film watchers issued the statement just as box offices around the country were preparing for another blockbuster weekend thanks to such mega-hits as The Dark Knight, Step Brothers, and Kung Fu Panda.

Instead of greeting patrons anxious to buy junk food with three thousand percent markups, theater employees were barely able to escape with their lives as legions of angry fans stormed past the concession stands and into auditoriums without buying a single thing.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) announced today that effective immediately they will cease all banking operations nationwide.

“The simple truth of the matter is that we just couldn’t deal with this many banks failing all at once,” said FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair. The government agency provided so-called deposit “insurance” for bank deposits up to $100,000.

Created in 1933 during the Great Depression, the FDIC was intended to be a government-issued security blanket that would restore confidence in the banking system among the American people. Unfortunately, the agency was never granted enough power or funding to handle more than one or two minor bank failures per year.

“We never really expected this degree of crisis,” explained Bair. “I mean, who could have possibly predicted…

In a press conference from Jerusalem on Monday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced the stunning findings of a team of Iran’s best genealogists: Ahmadinejad is a sixteenth Jewish.

A stunned silence fell upon the roughly 200 members of the press, most of whom expected the revelation to be followed by an explosive tirade against Israel. Instead, Ahmadinejad calmly explained that he now realizes that his previous “annihilate Israel” platform may have been unnecessarily harsh, and that he intends to fully embrace his newly-discovered Jewish heritage.

“In the past, when I said that ‘anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation’s fury,’ I was speaking from an outsider’s misunderstanding of what it means to be Jewish,” said Ahmadinejad as he donned a traditional kippah. “It turns out that the Zionist regime really isn’t that bad after all.”

After months of silence, a video released from al-Qaeda on Monday announced that the struggling organization will close 150 terror cells worldwide, including in Seattle.

The unnamed spokesman in the grainy video cited skyrocketing insurance costs as the primary reason for closing the Seattle cell. “Health, dental, vision, life, automobile, home… it adds up fast,” said the figure.

Most of the local terror cell jobs will be outsourced to Iraq and Pakistan. The move has upset local dedicated al-Qaeda operatives.

“I left my job at Microsoft because I believed in this organization’s three values: Death to America, establish caliphate, and taking care of the martyrs with full vision and dental,” said Shoreline al-Qaeda member Ahmed Moqed…