From the front of this weekend's Globe and Mail in Canada. Hilarious!

I noticed this hilarious story on the front page of the Globe and Mail newspaper this morning over here. It'd be interesting to see if this prank could work anywhere else in the world besides America.

"Last February, a frantic call came through to a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Manchester, N.H., at the height of the lunchtime rush. It was from corporate headquarters and it was urgent: A toxic chemical had been released through the restaurant's sprinkler system.
Employees were told to strip down and urinate on each other to neutralize the chemical.
If they did not, everyone would die.

“I need you to be strong, I need you to be brave,” a man named Jeff Anderson told his panicked staff in Manchester.
“You need to do exactly what I say,” he urged, in a faint Southern drawl.
And so they did.

Police pulled in half an hour later to a bizarre scene: Naked women, doused in each other's urine, milling about the parking lot. There was no trace of the chemical. As it turned out, there was no Jeff Anderson. The entire call had been a hoax, orchestrated by “Dex,” a twentysomething Canadian prankster, who now finds himself at the centre of a controversy that highlights how our definitions of humour are evolving in a digital age, where the Internet provides anonymity and encourages an inflated sense of importance and extra distance from the consequences of action.

Increasingly, this is becoming less of a philosophical debate. This week, a Quebec father thought it was amusing to post a video of his seven-year-old son driving on YouTube until police and child services stepped in. Only then did he acknowledge his mistake.

Dex is the founder of Pranknet, an online chat group where members devise hoaxes and broadcast them live. Members can listen in, and rate the prank as it's being pulled, with the most popular attaining the status of “epic.”

In Pennsylvania, Pranknet called a hotel guest and told him there was a gas leak. The man was told to smash the window and television screen with a toilet tank lid to prevent an explosion. Another man in Nebraska was persuaded to drive his truck through the door of a hotel lobby to deactivate a fire alarm. A front-desk clerk at another hotel drank a guest's urine, after a Pranknet caller convinced her it was cider, and that the man who brought it – who thought he was providing a urine sample for the hotel doctor – was the representative of an apple juice company.