This Week's British Exaggeration

11 December 2004: So who ate all the pies in space?, Times Online

“An emergency Christmas Day delivery is planned by rocket to restock the dwindling larder of Salizhan Sharipov and Leroy Chiao. If the mission is called off the astronauts will have to flee in the escape pod.”

Editor’s note:Here we go again. The Progress mission to the ISS is not an “emergency mission”, rather, it is one of many previously scheduled, routine resupply missions. Moreover, I cannot imagine why they’d “flee” if the food ran out. You have to think that they’d have enough notice to plan ahead and simply “depart”. But words such as “routine” and “depart” don’t sell newspapers. Words such as “emergency” and “flee” do.