And here is the news
'The Manchester Fire Brigade is suing a man who called them out on bonfire night to help him set off a Roman candle that failed to ignite'
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Your support makes all the difference.We all like to think we follow the news, but do we really know what's going on? Well, of course we don't know what's really going on. Even our politicians don't know that. But do we even know what is being reported in the papers?
Well, there's a very good way to find out, and that's to take this little test. Today I bring you five news stories from the past week or so. One is completely made up and fictitious. Can you spot which one? If you're up for the challenge, here are the five news stories. Get your thinking-caps on!
1) Greater Manchester Fire Brigade is suing a householder in the Wilmslow area for asking them to get involved in arson.
Mr Hugo Barrison sent for the firemen on 5 November to come to his bonfire-night party. When they arrived, they found that Mr Barrison had been setting off fireworks, and had kept to the end a vast £175 multiple Roman candle display. However, he had been unable to light it and, unwilling to waste so much money on the night, had sent for the Fire Brigade to enlist its aid.
"It is a clear breach of public duty to ask the fire service to set fire to things," said a spokesman. "We shall be asking for our money back."
2) Kim Howells, the Culture minister who famously dismissed conceptual art as "cold, mechanical bullshit", has been unexpectedly defended by a group of avant-garde artists called The Bowel Movement.
"We think that Kim Howells's outburst, far from being a philistine display, was actually a good piece of performance art in its own right," they say. " It was visceral and fiery and got people thinking. It certainly got us thinking. We are now promoting a new prize called the Grand Prix de Merde to be awarded to just what he was talking about: the best piece of cold, mechanical bullshit..."
3) A burglar on Merseyside was caught by having too good a telephone manner. Gary Thrupp, a Birkenhead man, was busy ransacking the home of Mr and Mrs Arthur Shedley, when Arthur Shedley himself rang home to see if his wife was in. To his surprise, the phone was answered by a man's voice saying: "I'm afraid there is nobody in at the moment, but if you would like to leave your name and number after the tone, we will get back to you as soon as possible."
"Not only did I not recognise the voice," said Mr Shedley, "but I smelt a rat because we have no telephone answering machine. So I rang the police immediately, and sped home myself; I work 10 minutes away."
Mr Shedley apprehended the burglar and handed him over to the police when they arrived four hours later. But why did the burglar answer the phone at all?
"I'd promised to do some shopping for the wife that morning, but I left before she had got the shopping-list ready," Thrupp told the police. "So I gave her this number to give me a ring on. When I answered the phone, and it wasn't her, I pretended to be an answering machine. I see now that it was a mistake."
"The ironic thing," said Mr Shedley later, "is that we used to have an answering machine, but it was taken the last time we were burgled."
4) Although it was quickly hushed up at the time, it is now known that the Queen, unusually, inserted a paragraph of her own into the Queen's Speech, to the effect that hunting with dogs should not be banned. It has been stricken from all the records and recordings, and the Prime Minister has made known his displeasure to the Palace. Nevertheless, she did actually say it, and therefore exultant fox-hunting defenders claim it must now be government policy.
5) BBC executives were freaked out last week when, counting the current positions in the poll to find the greatest Briton, they found that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was in at No 4 and rising fast.
"What was weird about that was that he wasn't even a candidate, and nobody had voted for him. All we can assume was that Sir Arthur, who was notoriously keen on spiritualism, has been taking a keen interest from the far side and has been trying directly to control the competition. Accordingly, we have directed that his name should be erased from all the results."
Well? How did you get on?
Did you spot that the item about the Queen and her speech was totally made up? Well done!
Of course, all the other items were stuff and nonsense as well. Honestly, you can't trust anything you read these days, can you?
I despair sometimes.
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