Osama bin Laden is NOT on his way to Rome:
Italy’s leading news agency has denied reporting that al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden would attend Pope John Paul’s funeral Friday after a story attributed to it circulated widely on the Internet.“Some people just won’t stop even at a time of mourning for the Pope: among the deluge of false emails, viruses and spam, a false item attributed to Ansa is circulating about Osama bin Laden attending the funeral of John Paul II,” the Ansa agency said.
In a dispatch issued late Tuesday, Ansa noted that the prankster, who specified bin Laden would be flying to Rome from Pakistan, had accurately imitated the agency’s sign-off style — a series of letters and numbers at the end of every item.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.