Wow, did you hear about this?

There are some amazing stories circulating on the internet and by email right now - and apparently they are all true! Here are some of them:

UPS Uniforms reported missing - believed to have been acquired by terrorists, who are planning to use them to gain unauthorized access to certain sensitive and vulnerable areas.

Ashley Flores, a 13-year old girl from Philadelphia, is missing - she has been missing for two weeks and we need your help to find her!

The "Life is Beautiful" virus - it is being distributed as a PowerPoint presentation that is attached to an email. The standard antivirus programs cannot destroy it!

Applebees is giving out free $50 gift certificates - all you have to do is forward this email to 9 of your friends!

Lipstick danger - some major brands of lipstick contain lead, which causes cancer! To test it, put some of your lipstick in the palm of your hand and rub it with a 24k gold ring. If the lipstick color changes to black, it has lead in it.

ATM panic button - did you know, that if someone forces you to go to an ATM machine to withdraw money, you can just enter your PIN number backwards, and the police will be immediately dispatched to that ATM machine.

As you can probably figure out, these "news" items all have one thing in common - they are all false. These are just some of the stupid hoaxes that continue to get forwarded by email, causing unnecessary alarm and clogging up the internet and millions of email inboxes.

If you get an email that says "Forward this to everyone in your address book", you should not forward it. You should delete it. It is almost certainly a hoax.

The same goes for email petitions. While some email petitions aren't necessarily a total fraud, they are essentially useless in effecting change.

If you get one that you just think has to be true, just do a search at www.snopes.com - this is one of the largest databases of internet hoaxes and urban legends. Or, you can send it to me and I will check it out (BEFORE you send it to all of your friends).

This week's video: an interesting trick