April Fools' Day is great in concept. The problem is that a very large portion of the population has no idea what a prank actually is, or how they work. And while it's merely annoying that most of your co-workers think a "prank" is nothing more than a random, pointless lie, there are always those few who go too far in the other direction.

5 Those Wacky Husseins!

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We need to make something clear right now: This article itself is not an April Fools' prank -- everything below actually happened, as far as we know (always feel free to check our sources). We have to tell you that now, because everything in this entry sounds like bad, gruesome parody. It's not -- Saddam Hussein's regime really was a bunch of wacky pranksters.

For instance, on April 1, 1998, the Babil newspaper (owned by Saddam's brutal son Uday) quoted President Bill Clinton in a front page story, saying the U.S. had decided to lift sanctions against Iraq. This was potentially lifesaving news for impoverished Iraqis living under the strict sanctions, so you can only imagine their tears of joy ... which quickly dried when they turned to page two and saw, "April Fools'! It is the beginning of spring. Many happy returns!" Ha! You starving kids just got Uday'd!

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"Dude, next year, you should pretend to be Freddie Mercury, announcing that you faked your AIDS."

Uday had a whole year to think about how to top himself, and on April 1, 1999, the paper's fake headline stated that monthly food rations would now include bananas, Pepsi, and chocolate. You can guess how that thigh slapper went over.

But then, like all great comedians, the Husseins eventually started recycling material, reusing the crowd-pleasing sanction gag in 2000 and the oh my aching sides! ration one in 2001. Unfortunately, Captain Bringdown, er, Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdula Aziz bin Abdullah Al al-Sheikh ground the clown car to a halt by banning April Fools' Day altogether in 2001 for some strange reason.

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"YOU SHALL LAUGH IMMEDIATELY!"

But there would be one last hurrah for the wacky Iraqi pranksters. In March of 2003, Iraq was invaded by a coalition of forces led by the U.S. and UK. As thousands of American-led coalition troops stormed across Iraq, the Iraqi Ambassador to Russia, Abbas Khalaf Kunfuth, held a press conference. It was expected he would announce that Iraq conceded defeat. Instead he held up a piece of paper that he identified as a news flash from Reuters and read, "The Americans have accidentally fired a nuclear missile into British forces, killing seven ..."