UN Summit Collapses After World Leaders Discover They Have All Been Doing 'Rock Paper Scissors' Wrong This Entire Time

GENEVA — An emergency session of the United Nations General Assembly was suspended indefinitely Tuesday after a routine team-building exercise exposed what experts are calling 'the most catastrophic misunderstanding in the history of human civilization,' when it was discovered that approximately 94% of sitting world leaders have been playing Rock Paper Scissors incorrectly for their entire lives.

The revelation came shortly after 11 a.m. local time, when Norwegian Prime Minister Ingrid Solberg-Haugen attempted to use the game to settle a minor dispute over conference room thermostat settings with the German Chancellor. A sharp-eyed intern from the Maldives immediately noticed that both leaders were throwing 'scissors' while verbally declaring 'rock,' a phenomenon that quickly spread through the assembly hall like a diplomatic wildfire.

'Within minutes, we had forty-seven heads of state arguing about what the correct hand gesture for paper even is,' said UN Secretary-General António Guterres, visibly shaken and holding an ice pack to his temple. 'The Brazilian president was doing something that can only be described as a jazz hand. Nobody knew what to do with that.'

Leading game theorist and part-time sandwich artist Dr. Philippa Wrenshaw of the Oxford Institute for Conflict and Children's Games confirmed the scale of the disaster during a hastily arranged press conference.

'Our models indicate that somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of minor international border disputes since 1945 were settled using fundamentally incorrect Rock Paper Scissors technique,' Dr. Wrenshaw said, gesturing at a PowerPoint slide that simply read 'OH NO' in large red letters. 'We believe several bilateral trade agreements may be legally void. We are not okay.'

Perhaps most alarming was the testimony of U.S. President's Chief of Staff, who confirmed under oath that at least three major NATO decisions in the past decade were finalized via 'best two out of three' games in which nobody present actually agreed on the rules beforehand.

'We thought lizard and Spock were optional add-ons,' the Chief of Staff said quietly, staring into the middle distance. 'They are not optional add-ons.'

The crisis deepened Thursday when footage emerged of the Chinese and French delegations engaged in a 47-round match that had been ongoing since Tuesday afternoon, neither side willing to concede that they fundamentally disagreed on whether paper 'covers' or merely 'politely rests on top of' rock, and what philosophical difference, if any, that distinction makes.

In response, the Swiss government has offered to host a neutral Rock Paper Scissors tribunal, a proposal that was immediately complicated when Swiss representatives admitted they had also been doing it wrong, but 'confidently and with excellent punctuality.'

At press time, a emergency resolution calling for a two-year moratorium on all childhood playground games in international diplomacy had been vetoed by Russia, whose delegate threw what witnesses described as 'something between a rock and a thumbs up' and declared victory.