5 B.S. News Stories That Fooled Your Friends (Part 23)

5 The Kid-Scribbled Chinese Passport Is Clearly Not Real

This month, the Internet officially collapsed under the weight of its own "LOLZ CHINA" thanks to this totally legitimate photograph of a man whose passport was defaced by his 4-year-old, causing him to be detained in South Korea:

Good thing he didn't get stuck in North Korea, or the media would be saying he was fed to 120 dogs. Also, good thing MS Paint has an undo button -- because, yes, as Kotaku immediately pointed out, that photo is obviously a fake, for a number of reasons ... starting with the fact that the digitally created lines stray off the passport on the right side:

Or the fact that this barely cognizant problem child had the presence of mind to perfectly cover all the identifying information on his father's passport. Clearly, no idiot in the world would-

EVERYONE REPORTED ON THIS. That includes the Daily Mail, Gizmodo, Fox, Jezebel, the NY Daily News, the Telegraph, and Gawker, all of which included the photo right under their headlines and somehow still missed the part where the lines magically continue into the air. Apparently none of them researched the story long enough to realize that it originally broke on some random YouTube news page or, you know, just used their eyes to see that it was fake before making it international news.

In the end, the story spread so far that a Chinese Embassy official had to publicly state what most 10-year-old junior detectives could have deduced with a magnifying glass. You know you messed up bad when communist China has to give you a reality check.

4 Boston Isn't Being Plagued by a "Serial Tickler"

If Quentin Tarantino has taught the world anything, it's that all foot fetishists are dangerous, bug-eyed squish-faces that should be avoided at all costs. Boston knows this better than most, though:

On the one hand, it's not the worst serial activity that has been associated with Boston in the past, but it's still kind of disturbing that the infamous "Boston Tickler" has broken into 10 homes in the Boston College area and tickled people's feet in their sleep, according to the NY Post, Huffington Post, Fox News, Gawker, Washington Post, and Cosmopolitan. All the victims are college-age dudes, by the way -- otherwise known as the most-trustworthy, least-likely-to-pull-off-a-hoax-just-for-the-heck-of-it people on the planet.

And what do you know, the original article that all the above news sites took at face value was also written by students. According to the Boston.com piece, a police spokesman said, "This is no myth."

Or, you know, totally a myth. After the story went viral, the Boston PD put out an announcement saying that they have no idea where the student reporters got the "serial tickler" information: They've only had one reported foot-touching incident in the past two years. As for the "no myth" quote, they said the officer was replying to an unrelated question and the article took it out of context. So, pretty much the opposite of journalism.

Looks like we're going to have to settle for an America with only one actual police-dodging serial foot tickler, who terrorized Florida (where else?) from 2001 to 2006.

3 The U.S. Isn't Getting "Kicked Out" of the International Space Station by Russia

From Bond to Bullwinkle, there's simply no higher caliber of villain than the Russians. When tensions rose concerning Ukraine, the media naturally scrambled for the most nefarious angles they could sink their teeth into -- the most popcorn-worthy being Red Dawn in space:

So are we talking Call of Duty: Ghosts style 'splosion-fighting, or are they just going to push really hard and let momentum do the rest? There's so many questions to be had, none of which appear to be answered by the many sites covering this, like the Verge, the Telegraph, and NBC News -- which has a headline flat-out saying that the Russians plan to "Kill Space Station," as if it were HAL or something.

But wait, since when does Russia own the International Space Station? Since never: No one single country does, on account of it being, you know, international. What the deputy prime minister actually said was that the Russians are voluntarily pulling out of the ISS in 2020 (which was the original end date for the project anyway), meaning that the U.S. won't be able to use a Russian spacecraft to get there anymore. However, as most of the articles briefly mention under the alarmist headlines, the U.S. will have its own transport by 2017. Which is before 2020, in case you're not a NASA engineer and can't do the math.

In the meantime, the Russian and American astronauts will not only continue to cooperate, but intensify their work, since they know they have precious little time together. Sorry, news sites: You'll have to find some other example of Russia being terrible, somehow.

2 Shockingly, Denmark's Nude CrossFit Classes Were a Joke

CrossFit has always been seen as a somehow less "manly" alternative to traditional workout routines, as evidenced by the predictable autocomplete result when you type "CrossFit is ..." on Google. Rather than avoiding the stereotype, a gym in Denmark decided to go all-out and embrace it by hosting all-nude, all-dude CrossFit classes:

Holy smoked ham, that room must have a funk in the air! According to Cosmopolitan, Metro, and Huff Post, the special workout was inspired by the olden days, when Spartans did jumping squats to the sounds of rhythmic flapping, and bench presses involved seeing an anus up close.

The pictures of men spotting each other's asses were so overtly daffy that it's a wonder this isn't just some late April Fools' joke being played on the world. What's that? That's exactly what this is? Huh.

It all started on April 1 when a gym called Spartan Mentality posted a joke about nude classes on their site. The story remained a hilarious prank for almost two months, until a blog called the Gaily Grind picked up and ran with those balls, consequently re-April Foolsing everyone into thinking a bare-assed gym photograph from a random blog was a suitable starting point for a news article.

The hoax was so successful that the gym actually did host naked classes for a while, but then stopped because it was getting "a little too comical." Yeah, we're guessing the nudists/CrossFit fanatics Venn diagram doesn't exactly include the most impressive human specimens ever.

1 An Iranian Actress Isn't Going to Get Publicly Flogged for a Kiss

Straight from the desk of "things that sound like something Iran would do, but we're not sure because we don't know anything about Iran," the Telegraph, Daily Mail, and Daily Beast, among others, have reported that the Iranian actress from A Separation has been condemned to a flogging for kissing the Cannes festival president on the cheek, something that's apparently a big no-no over there. And it's not just a regular flogging: It's gonna be a public one, too.

Note that the headlines say she "faces flogging" and is "to be flogged," as opposed to "definitely won't be flogged just because someone said she should be" ... which is what's actually happening here. The call for flogging came from a small group of conservative students protesting the kiss -- to put it in perspective, this is like running an article titled "CANADA TO EXECUTE MEMBERS OF NICKELBACK" because someone saw the comments they get on YouTube.

It's true that Iranian political figures condemned the kiss, but that's mostly for show: They know women kiss men on the cheek every day, and they don't give a shit. When the kiss is on TV, though, they have to say something or risk losing the crazy-pants sector of their constituents.

Hell, we doubt the students themselves have any real hope of this happening. In other words, this was an empty threat by a gaggle of nut jobs that no one would possibly take seriously.

Um, except for all of the media, of course.