Art Team Destroys World, Faces Jail

Today, expect partly sunny skies with a 30 percent chance of nuclear armageddon.... That's more-or-less the weather report Czech viewers received a while back, when art pranksters the Ztohoven collective hacked a local news station's broadcast and spliced in a nuclear explosion. Now six members of the group are facing up to three years in jail each for the stunt. The group's name loosely, and aptly, translates to "out of it" and "a hundred shits." The fake mushroom cloud, which appeared as a camera panned the Krkonose mountains during a weather report, prompted freaked-out Czechs to flood the station's switchboard with panicked calls, a lá "War of the Worlds." In a statement on its MySpace page (natch), the group claimed that it meant no harm but merely (in typical quasi-anarchist, art collective-speak) wanted to "remind the media of their duty to bring out the truth."