Weird and wonderful tales are strange - but true?

It's your chance again to test your knowledge of the world's news with our exclusive Spot The Odd One Out competition!

If you haven't done this before, the procedure is quite simple. All you have to do is read the following four news stories, taken from the last week's news reports. One of them is completely made up and untrue. Can you tell which one it is?

Right – here we go!

1. In emulation of Simon Jenkins's book about the 1,000 best churches in Britain, Arthur Blenkinsop has been working for two years on a magnificent coloured picture book on the presidential palaces of Iraq.

"I had very generous collaboration from the Iraqi authorities," says Blenkinsop, "who gave me access everywhere. Unfortunately, I had less generous collaboration from the Americans, who bombed everything I had been working on just after I had finished. This left me with a problem. Should I just abandon the book? Should I publish the book as a record of what once had been? Or should I go round everything again with my camera and do a series of before-and-after photographs?"

Mr Blenkinsop, who used to be in the catering trade, is at present filling in time by helping to open the first Starbucks coffee outlet in Baghdad. He is being very careful to photograph it from all angles in case it is damaged.

2. A new service is being pioneered for millionaires who are caught in traffic jams. Heli-Lift promises to fly a helicopter to any of its members who is caught in a sufficiently horrendous snarl-up – and airlift them to a nearby empty road!

"Logistically, it's quite simple," says the boss, Jack Rotherham. "Like any other member of the public, millionaires have to drive places, and like everyone else, they get caught in jams. Unlike everyone else, they can afford to get a helicopter along to lift them out. It's windy for the other drivers, of course, but safe enough."

Nor entirely without its hazards, however. At the weekend, Heli-Lift was summoned to remove the tycoon Laszlo Prett from a jam on the M25. They airlifted a red Porsche out of the jam, as requested. They flew it to a nearby B road. They then discovered they had got the wrong car, because out of it stepped a very shaken Porsche executive, Bruno Tyring, who was taking it home for the weekend.

"They were all for flying me back to the M25," said Tyring later, "but I pointed out that the gap would have closed up by now. So they left me to get home on strange roads. Still, at least I was out of the jam."

Unlike Laszlo Prett, who is believed still to be on the M25 somewhere.

3. A Lebanese restaurant in London called Nozwari has got into unusual trouble through over-zealous advertising. Noticing the number of graffiti saying "NO WAR" in the area, the manager went round with an aerosol filling in the missing letters to turn "NO WAR" into "NOZWARI". An anti-war protester went to the restaurant to complain that they they were desecrating the graffiti. The manager pointed out that you couldn't desecrate something that was a form of vandalism in the first place. Angry words led to blows, and the anti-war protester ended up in court accused of unprovoked acts of aggression. As the magistrate said in court, "In this context it is hard to avoid the use of the word 'irony'."

4. A cyclist has been prosecuted under a law against witchcraft that has not been invoked for over 200 years. The man, named only as Matt, was cycling home after dark when the attachment fastening his front light broke. The light itself was undamaged, so, failing to find any other place to put it, Matt put the torch in his mouth in such a way that it shone forward and went on his way. Three minutes later he passed an old man who saw what he thought was a ghostly apparition with one great shining eye, and had a mild heart attack. The police were unable to find any other grounds for prosecution, so Matt has now been charged under the Witchcraft Act of 1728 of "impersonating a ghoul, with intent to terrify".

Well, did you work out that the first one was quite untrue?

Well done!

Mark you, all the others were made up as well.

Honestly, you can't believe anything you read these days, can you?