If you had visited the Ghana Home Page website (popularly called Ghanaweb) this morning, you wouldn't have missed the headline news titled "First Ghanaian Space Tourist To Blast Off … 20 million dollars to spend 9 days in space". According to the news item allegedly sourced from the Russian space agency Roskosmos on Monday March 30, 2009, Ghana's first space tourist, Chuck Kofi Wayo, will blast off on board a Russian spaceship headed for the International Space Station (ISS) on April 14, 2009.
ISS spokesman Igor Panarine said "the Ghanaian tourist is due to go into space in April. He is continuing his training at Star City (near Moscow). Last month, Wayo took a sea and land survival course in Sebastopol (Ukraine). Now he is training on a simulator of the ISS. And he is working at it with considerable determination".
The catch in the story that gave the cat out of the bag sits at the end of the item in paragraphs 8 and 9. In paragraph 8, the statement is cast in a way to suggest that the story has more to do with the significance of the day's date than the substance of the story. It is captured as follows; 'when this writer (presumably the Ghana Home Page writer ) phoned Wayo for confirmation, his answering machine had this message “What is today’s date?”
Then to confirm one's curosity, the subsequent paragraph ran like "for videos, pictures and more information on the trip click here".
By now I believe you've pictured the essence of this article. Imagine what you see when you click on the link....Wikipedia's April Fools' Day. All Fools' Day, is a notable day celebrated in many countries on April 1. The day is marked by the commission of hoaxes and other practical jokes of varying sophistication on friends, family members, enemies, and neighbours, or sending them on fool's errand, the aim of which is to embarrass the gullible.
Be careful your gullibility is not exploited on this day. Wish you a day free of April Fools' prank.
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