Newspaper hoax fools New Yorkers

Readers of the New York Times were treated to some startling news on Wednesday morning. A banner headline announced: "Iraq War Ends". This was accompanied by an admission from Condoleezza Rice (pictured) that the Bush administration had known all along that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction.

It was, of course, a hoax. But the 14-page "special edition", which was circulated free in Manhattan, was such a brilliant facsimile that many NYT readers were intially fooled, especially as it was backed it up by an equally convincing website.

Dated July 4 2009, and boasting the motto "All the news we hope to print" in a twist on the newspaper's famous phrase "All the news that's fit to print", the fake paper looked forward to the day the war ends, and envisaged a happy and unlikely chain of events.In one story ExxonMobil is taken into public ownership, while in another evangelicals open the doors of their mega-churches to Iraqi refugees.

The perpetrators of the hoax are thought to be the Yes Men, a leftwing group that seeks to expose what it claims to be the "nastiness of powerful evildoers".