According to news reports the town of Hamelin in northern Germany is overrun with rats. Officials say the infestation is the result of a local garbage dump serving as a "refuge" for the booming rodent population.

According to legend, Hamelin experienced a similar problem in the year 1284, prompting city fathers to hire a "pied piper" to lure the rats out of town with his magical flute. When the time came to pay the piper, however, the townspeople reneged, for which he took revenge by herding a hundred or so of their children into a faraway mountain cave. They were never seen or heard from again.

Memo to the current Mayor of Hamelin: hire an exterminator. And pay him when he's done.

Read more:
• Rats Return to Pied Piper Town
• Legend of the Pied Piper
• The Children of Hamelin (Brothers Grimm)

I see by a spate of denials that appeared over the weekend that the Miley Cyrus death hoax was resurrected via a YouTube video (now deleted) attributed to the teen star's best friend, Mandy Jiroux. The fake announcement claimed Cyrus was killed in an auto accident by a drunk driver. It didn't happen.

Jiroux disavowed the YouTube hoax in this note posted on her MySpace page: "some1 hacked the miley and mandy youtube account and we cant get back into it just yet!! MILEY IS OK!!"

Read more: Miley Cyrus Victim of Hacker Hoax

In case you weren't properly terrified at the prospect of President-elect Obama and his "terrorist pals" remaking this country into a communist police state, the right-wing blogosphere would like you to get a load of this prescient quote from a past leader of the Soviet Union:

AND SO IT BEGINS!

"We cannot expect Americans to jump from capitalism to Communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving Americans small doses of socialism until they suddenly awake to find they have Communism."

-Soviet Leader Nikita Khrushchev, 1959

Except, um, Comrade Khrushchev never said any such thing.  Read more...

Self-styled "culture jammers" the Yes Men put out a 14-page alternative-reality edition of the New York Times and distributed at least a million copies in New York and Los Angeles yesterday. Unsuspecting readers did a double-take.

"IRAQ WAR ENDS, TROOPS TO RETURN IMMEDIATELY," blared the front page headlines. In place of the usual Times motto, "All the News That's Fit to Print," the box in the upper-left-hand corner read, "All the News We Hope to Print."

Said a Times spokeswoman with a straight face, "This is obviously a fake issue of The Times."

• Web version of the fake NY Times
• Reuters coverage of the prank
• A Times editorial blogger reacts
• Yes Men press release