"Stingray" skate skates at ray-sting arraignment

FORT LAUDERDALE, Florida, GNN (GOANNA NEWS NETWORK) -- BROWARD County Sheriffs were left with egg in their moustaches yesterday when they were forced to drop all charges against the "only suspect" in the high-profile stingray attack on that 81-year-old bloke in his boat a little while back.

The suspect, Skately "Skeeter" Skaterman, a self-employed forager from the continental shelf off of Newfoundland, Canadia, was released shortly before his arraignment on one charge of Inflicting Grevious Bodily Harm on One of Your Elders and Betters, Boy, after a rather uncomfortable examination by county veterinary examiner Filet Gumbo revealed that he was not a stingray at all, but rather a barn-door skate (dipturis laevis).

Outside the court, Mr Skaterman said he had been brutally treated during his arrest and interrogation.

"I was just doon here on vacation wandering aboot and sampling some of the local seafood -- I'd heard good things aboot Florida crustaceans -- when these great big knuckle-dragging gorillas harpooned me and just aboot dragged me doon to the precinct," Mr Skaterman said in a prepared statement.

"Once at the station I was repeatedly beaten aboot the head with a Recording King RK-80. My lawyer told me that the Dade County firearms instructor once told him, quote, 'Them Broward County hicks couldn't hit a barn door with a banjo.' I'm sorry to say that these bruises prove him wrong. No doubt aboot it."

When Mr Skaterman was asked whether he intended to take legal action against the Broward County Sheriff's Department, his overworked court-appointed attorney, Mr Cuba Libre, intervened.

"These pinche puto policias are gon' need a damn oil tanker to carry all the shrimp my client is going to buy with his payout," Mr Libre said. "It just shows that in Florida there is one law for cartilaginous flatfish and another law for everyone else.

"Pendejos," he added.

"Thees press conference ees over," he added.

Veterinary Examiner Gumbo said he failed to see how the arresting officers had failed to see that Mr Skaterman was a skate rather than a ray.

"Although the two have similar anatomical structures and evolutionary histories, stingrays have a long, thin tail, typically tipped by a sting, whereas skates, such as Mr Skaterman typically have broad, flat tails."

Mr Gumbo refused to comment on whether his protracted cavity search for species-differentiating egg sacs was entirely necessary, given that Mr Skaterman was quite prodigiously male.

Broward County Sheriff's spokesman Phineas Flatfoot would not comment on the pending civil suit, but hinted heavily that Mr Skaterman was not in Florida for a holiday.

"That perp is a real bottom-feeder," he said. "And skate wings taste something like scallops."

Goanna wins top journalism award

JUST 15 years or so after taking out a much-coveted journalism award (it was the Australia Day Committee award for best promotional story, I think), your humble correspondent is back in a headline -- albeit his own.

This time he has snaffled the Foolitzer Prize (pictured) for excellence in journalism or something, as voted by his peerless peers at Uncyclopedia. (The handsome bust on the Foolitzer is of Oscar Wilde, for some reason).

He trousered it for the sort of "satirical" garbage he writes here. So he guesses he should pull the finger out and write some more, eh?

White House releases approved dictators list

WASHINGTON, Day Effay, GNN (GOANNA NEWS NETWORK)

EGYPTIAN military strongman Hosni Mubarak (pictured) and Pakistan's late-night US talk-show mainstay Pervez Musharraf topped the list of acceptable non-democratic autocrats in this week's official White House rankings.

Mubarak leapt to number one (with a bullet for each apprehended member of the Muslim Brotherhood) after fellow military man Musharraf relinquished his top spot on account of his appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart having drawn too much attention to Afghanistan for the US administration's liking.

Holding steady at No. 3 on the list was KGB heavyweight turned Russian president Vladimir Putin, with Uzbekistani kingpin Islam Karimov at No. 4 because he doesn't rock the boat and nobody even remembers that massacre in Andijan last year. No. 5 was Turkmenistan's President for Life Saparmurat Niyazov, because nobody even knows where that nightmarish little shithole is.

White House spokesman Tony Snow, who remains an administration mouthpiece despite having left Fox News, said that in the wake of the apparent low-rent nuclear test by dumpy androgynous North Korean nutbag Kim Jong-il, US President George Bush felt that it was important to make abundantly clear who's hot and who's not.

"Pervez -- or the Pervmeister, as we like to call him -- has been a favourite of ours for a long time, but this week Hosni has hit No. 1 for the simple reason that he knows how to keep his mouth shut," Snow said.

Snow left the door ajar for Syrian President Bashar Assad to rejoin the hit parade, provided he "stop being such a pussy about Lebanon and open the bloodgates, I mean floodgates, for extraordinary rendition flights again."
US De Facto Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said today's chart-toppers were a pale shadow of the seminal acts that topped the charts in his heyday.

"Ngo Dinh Diem -- now there was a Viet you could take to the bank," he said. "(Anastasio) Somoza (Garcia)? Like FDR said: 'He may be a son of a bitch but he's our son of a bitch.' Never been a Nicaraguan like him since.

"And (General Augusto) Pinochet? When that guy said he was going to get his secret police to wedge the trade unionists' heads under the fire-escape steps at the soccer stadium and jump on their backs to break their necks, you could sleep like a baby knowing that he'd do it."