SEVENTH IMPOSSIBLE THING, Vatican City, Friday (NNN) — A Vatican researcher claims to have proven the Shroud of Turin genuine, shortly after the Large Hadron Collider achieved a half-circuit proton beam on Friday.

The shroud was previously carbon-dated to the 1300s. However, Dr Barbara Frale asserts in her new book The Shroud is Real so Christ is Real so Give the Catholic Church Your Bloody Money that the shroud is real, therefore Christ is real, therefore you should give the Catholic Church your bloody money.

“No mediaeval forger would have called him ‘Jesus the Nazarene,'” said Dr Frale. “They just wouldn’t. It’s much more plausible that the fabric magically carbon-dated itself 1300 years into the future, thus demonstrating the essential divinity of carbon-14. Getting my name in all the papers was, of course, the most unexpected and uninteresting of side-effects.”

Inexplicable phenomena have abounded since the Large Hadron Collider was switched back on — with people finding Gordon Brown to be prime minister despite no-one remembering voting for him, an Asian joining the British National Party (and having to shove dog droppings through his own letterbox) and Europe suddenly being a federal state with a president. The bird with a particularly well-aimed baguette was attributed to a rogue French military assault.

“Nothing can go wrong,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer, stretching his newly-elastic arm across the room to grab an unrelated conical flask to pipette coloured water into for the press photographers. “The collider cannot possibly cause a black hole to consume the earth, this assertion is just silly. The Pope’s head spontaneously exploding is pure coincidence. We assure the ladies, gentlemen, goosnarghs and quzklms of the press that they can continue to live in the manner humans have for fourteen trillion square years, guarding their precious clutches of eggs from marauding strangelets and malevolent intelligent equations, safe in the knowledge that life continues as it always has and, Gods one, two, seven and thirty-eight willing, always will. Probably.”