Satire is dead, #927258933344

Another Onion-like story, with the following lead:

Richard Gere is determined to instill his Buddhist beliefs into his son Homer, even though the five-year-old is struggling to understand the actor's religious lessons.

¡Pobre muchacho!

Meanwhile, in Jordan, a man and a woman, each unhappy in marriage, met online and fell in love. When they finally met face to face, they were shocked to find out they were already married to each other. Happy ending? Nope:

Upon seeing Sanaa-alias-Jamila, Bakr-alias-Adnan turned white and screamed at the top of his lungs: "You are divorced, divorced, divorced" -- the traditional manner of officially ending a marriage in Islam.

"You are a liar," Sanaa retorted before fainting, the (report) said.

That's almost too good to be true, so watch this space to see if this turns out to be a hoax or urban legend. (The Jordanian-slash-Islamic angle does seem like an added dash of realism, though.)

Speaking of hoaxes, there's this whole weird story. A man calling himself Jeff Gannon appeared in the White House press room last year, allegedly reporting for something called Talon News. After several bloggers attacked him for quoting White House talking points verbatim in his "news" stories and found links between him and gay erotica websites, he resigned yesterday. All his Talon material has been taken down, but here's Google's cached copy of his bio page from the Talon site.