Perez Hilton explains Miley Cyrus prank

Perez Hilton has publicly come clean this week, and admitted that Miley Cyrus is in fact just a hoax.

The blogger and television personality, perhaps best known for his celebrity gossip website, stirred controversy earlier in the week by posting a picture to his Twitter feed, which allegedly depicted teen sensation Miley Cyrus not wearing underwear. This provoked widespread condemnation, with numerous online commentators outraged that Hilton would spread explicit material of an underage girl, and also that the photo was really grainy and you couldn't even see anything.

However, in a new explanatory video, Hilton has owned up to the prank, and admitted that Miley Cyrus has been a fabrication all along.

"I, like, totally got all you suckers!" he exclaimed in the clip uploaded to YouTube this afternoon. "C'mon, what were you guys thinking? Miley Cyrus? Sure, that totally sounds like a real name! Man, I had you all going for years!"

Reaction among the millions of Miley Cyrus fans worldwide has been mixed, with some expressing annoyance at their time being wasted for "a meaningless joke", while others seemed more willing to join into the spirit of the humour.

Perhaps most appreciative of the prank have been those who have worked with "Miley" in recent years, such as Hannah Montana co-star Emily Osment.

"Oh God, I laughed for like an hour when I found out," said Osment when asked for her reaction to the news. "It was amazing, I was so totally taken in. I have no idea how Perez did it.

"Seriously," she added, "the logistics just seem to make no sense. But it was so funny!"

No statement from Miley's "father", country music legend Billy Ray Cyrus, has yet been forthcoming. Sources close to the singer suggest that he was not in on the joke, and may not be taking the news as well as might have been hoped.

(inspired by this)

Al & Tipper Gore separate

Former US Vice President Al Gore has split from his wife of 40 years, according to a surprise announcement made yesterday.

The decision was originally said to be "amicable" and "a shared decision" - but today the former Democratic Presidential candidate complained bitterly that his wife was "impossible to deal with".

"That woman is never happy with anything I do," Gore told The Daily Half-Truth this morning. "You would not believe the lengths I went to, trying to earn her approval. All that environmental stuff, that was all her idea. She said she couldn't be with a man who wasn't passionately committed to the future of our planet, and kept saying how much it'd impress her if I proved how much I cared."

"Well, I won a goddamn Nobel Prize!" he continued angrily. "They don't hand those out in cereal boxes, you know! I got a big gold medallion saying that I was the best at peace that year, out of everyone. And she just sniffed and said something about how Norman Borlaug didn't need any showy jewellery to save a billion lives."

"And that's why this interview, along with all my public appearances in the future, is taking place on this petrol-driven hovercraft, on my way to my massive house where I leave the lights on all the time and keep several thousand rubber tyres constantly burning in the back yard. Because fuck it, y'know?"

Mr Gore went on to describe the many other carbon-heavy luxuries which he intends to allow himself as of today, interspersed with bursts of manic laughter and occasional muttered curses that sounded like "Norman fucking Borlaug".

In addition, just before today's Half-Truth went to press, it was reported that Gore had been seen boarding a private jet and instructing somebody to "crank up that smog". Also said to be on the plane were Gavin Henson, who recently separated from singer Charlotte Church, and Microsoft Windows, which suffered a very public humiliation this week when search engine Google terminated the pair's relationship.

(inspired by this, this, and this.)