Some 1.2 million copies of a spoof of The New York Times, dated July 4, 2009, were handed out by 1,000 volunteers on behalf of a collective of liberal activists.
At first glance, the parody, which uses the Times' Gothic-style font on the nameplate, could easily be mistaken for the real thing.
The 14-page paper - which also announced the abolition of corporate lobbying, a maximum wage for CEOs and a recall for all gasoline-fueled cars - showed up in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington.
The activists behind the prank say they wanted to make sure the administration of Democratic President-elect Barack Obama keeps its promises.
It was paid for by small, online contributions "to maintain the pressure on the people we've elected so they do what we've elected them to do," said Wilfred Sassoon, a freelance journalist who helped create the paper with about 30 other writers, many from New York daily newspapers. The team even included three New York Times staffers whose names will remain a secret, Sassoon said.
On the Times' Web site, spokeswoman Catherine Mathis said: "This is obviously a fake issue of The Times. We are in the process of finding out more about it."
Sassoon said the project started about six months ago, when "a little group of journalists were sitting around having a beer."
They posted a small notice on Craigslist soliciting volunteer writers and others to help with the fake paper, which was printed at presses around the country. Software and Internet support were provided by the Yes Men, a New York-based prankster group.
The lead story in the paper appears beneath the headlines "Iraq War Ends" and "Troops to Return Immediately." Another story declares, "Nation Sets Its Sights on Building Sane Economy."
The writers' political perspective is clear, from their twist on the Times' own motto "All the news that's fit to print" - "All the news we hope to print" - to a story that has former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice admitting the Bush administration knew well before the 2003 Iraq invasion that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction.
Even the ads are fake, including one for a South African diamond company promising that a purchase of a diamond "will help fund the creation, fitting and maintenance of a prosthetic for an African whose hand was lost in one of the continent's brutal conflicts over diamonds."
It's not the first time the venerable newspaper has been parodied. One was published during the 1978 newspaper strike. Another came out on April Fool's Day 1999, printed by British business tycoon Sir Richard Branson and titled "I Can't Believe It's Not The New York Times."
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