‘April Fools is no joke’

BEIING: April Fools is no laughing matter, China’s official news service said Friday, bashing the Western tradition of opening spring with a gag as un-Chinese.

The official news agency Xinhua’s stiffly worded post on micro-blog Weibo declared: “Today is the West’s so-called ‘April Fools’.”
The occasion “does not conform with our nation’s cultural traditions,” it added.
“Don’t believe rumors, don’t create rumors and don’t spread rumors,” it said, capping off the note with a smiley emoticon.
The latter two activities are illegal under Chinese law.
But the country’s Internet users met the reminder with a collective guffaw, suggesting that in China, every day is April Fools.
“The most amusing ‘April Fools’ news is that Xinhua is seriously saying ‘don’t believe rumors’,” an online comment said.
There were 36 replies to its original Weibo post, none of which were visible after comments were blocked.
Separately, Google acknowledged that it pranked itself after an April Fool’s Day Gmail tweak angered some people who use Google’s e-mail for work.
The company added a button to its e-mail service that allowed users to fire out a minion GIF, a character from the animated film “Despicable Me,” which would drop a microphone and then mute responses to whatever e-mail the user had sent.
The Gmail Help Forum was soon populated by angry users who say they unintentionally attached a minion dropping a mic during important business communications.
Google Inc. apologized and turned off the feature, saying that due to a bug, the mic drop “inadvertently caused more headaches than laughs.”