Two assistant principals at I.S. 24 middle school in Staten Island have been fined $25,000 each for keeping free tickets to the Great Adventure amusement park that had been donated to needy students. Derric Borrero and Richard Gilberto kept $20,000 in tickets for themselves and passed them out to family, friends, and other faculty members instead of to students at the school. They were caught when Borrero's brother sold some of the tickets he was given and a Great Adventure employee matched the serial numbers to ones that had been given away.
Officials at Minnesota's Anoka-Hennepin school district have ordered Jake Balthazor, 15, to stop wearing a rosary. Balthazor says he was wearing it to honor his grandmother, who is battling cancer. But school officials say rosaries are a gang symbol and school rules bar students from wearing “any apparel, jewelry, accessories, or matter of grooming which by virtue of its color arrangement, trademark, or any other attribute (as a primary purpose) denotes membership in an organized gang.” After local media reported the rosary ban, however, they said they would try to work out a compromise with the boy.
Jacob Clark is just 9, but he has already been summoned for jury duty twice. He was recently called for jury duty in Orleans District Court in Massachusetts. He was first called for jury duty when he was two.
Fotis I. Antonopoulos thought that exporting authentic olive products from Greece would make a nifty online business. But it took him 10 months to get all of the permits and paperwork he needed just to open his firm. He says the strangest requirement may have come from the Athens health department, which wanted lung x-rays and stool samples from each of his board members because he'd be selling food products.
When Sabrina Grant read the email from a teacher's aide at Woodrow Wilson Elementary School in Framingham, Massachusetts, she was furious. The aide said Grant's 10-year-old autistic son kept playing with one of his loose baby teeth. The aide added it was very distracting, so they yanked the tooth out. Grant got even even angrier when her son got home. She found the loose tooth was still in his mouth, but a molar next to it was missing.
Parents of a student at Manitoba's Walter Whyte School are demanding that the principal and two teachers be fired after their son and another student were tricked into eating moose droppings during a field trip. Superintendent Scott Kwasnitza says staff members have been disciplined after they watched, and did not stop, two adult chaperones trick the Grade 8 students into eating the moose droppings by telling them they were chocolate-covered almonds. He refused to say exactly what punishment they received, however.
The Annville-Cleona, Pennsylvania, school board removed the award-winning children's book The Dirty Cowboy from elementary school libraries after <aone parent complained. The book tells the story of a cowboy who takes a bath in a river then finds his dog, which no longer recognizes him, won't let him have his clothes back. The parent complained that the cowboy is depicted as being nude, though various objects always cover his genitals.
An Iranian court has sentenced human rights lawyer Abdolofattah Soltani to 18 years in prison and barred him from practicing law for 20 years. The government says Soltani, who has represented numerous human rights activists, is guilty of spreading antigovernment propaganda and endangering national security.
Quebec police officers raided the home of a reporter after he did an expose on how Montreal hospitals leave confidential patient files unattended in their hallways. Reporter Eric-Yvan Lemay videotaped himself going through some of the files and posted it on his newspaper’s website. Police say they were investigating the possible theft of confidential documents.
Former Edinburg, Texas, police officer Gilberto Montezano has pleaded guilty to official repression after taking a beer-filled ice chest from a driver during a traffic stop last year. He was sentenced to 18 months probation and a $500 fine. In 2010, Montezano was involved in a chase against traffic that ended with the suspect crashing into another vehicle, killing three of its occupants. That chase did not end his law enforcement career. Stealing the beer did.
Volusia County, Florida, officials are defending a nurse who withheld a student’s inhaler from him during an asthma attack. They say the school did not have an up-to-date medical release form signed by Michael Rudi’s parents. But they say they can’t explain why no one called 911. Instead, school officials called his mother, who arrived at school to find Michael on the floor gasping for breath with the nurse standing over him.
Orlando, Florida, high school student Stormy Rich says she told a bus driver that other students were bullying a mentally challenged middle school girl. But the bullying continued. So she told an official at her high school. But she says the bullying continued. So she confronted the bullies herself and told them to stop. The school then barred her from riding the bus.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has apologized to motorists who were ticketed during a funeral procession for a local Marine killed in Iraq. Hundreds of people lined the streets for the procession. Some drivers pulled to the side of the street and got out of their cars to show respect, where they were given tickets for parking illegally. Officials say they have voided all tickets issued in the area of the procession.
Giulo Cesare Fava, mayor of Falciano del Massico, Italy, has banned residents from dying until the town builds a new cemetery. Town officials could not reach an agreement with a neighboring town to expand the cemetery they share, so Fava decided to build a new one.
A grand jury in West Palm Beach, Florida, says Eric Perez received “fundamentally inadequate” care at the Palm Beach county juvenile detention center. Perez had been arrested for marijuana possession. He was allegedly tossed on his head during “horseplay” with some of the guards. He was taken back to his cell despite being unsteady on his feet. He spent the next several hours, hallucinating, crying in pain, calling for help, vomiting, and soiling himself before dying. Though an officer checked on his cell every 10 minutes, the only effort to get him help were two calls to the head nurse that went unanswered.
Dozens of students at Michigan's Kenowa Hills High School decided to ride their bicycles to school as a senior prank. They talked to the local police department and managed to get an official escort to the parade, and they even convinced the mayor to ride with them. When they got to school the principal immediately suspended the students, forbid them from taking part in the traditional last walk through the school, and threatened to keep them from taking part in the graduation ceremony. Principal Katie Pennington said the students backed up traffic and put people in danger. But Superintendent Gerard Hopkins said the suspension was as much about showing the students who was in charge as it was about any problems they caused.
Officials at Woodlake Hills Middle School in San Antonio suspended Patrick Gonzalez for one day after he had part of his head shaved to resemble the face of NBA player Matt Bonner. Gonzalez says Bonner is his favorite player because the both have red hair. After local media reported the suspension, Bonner gave the boy tickets to a playoff game.
The East Chicago Board of Public Safety suspended police officer Arcides Santiago for six months without pay after he was caught on video fondling his genitals while making lewd comments to a woman. The woman had called police to report a burglary.
For their senior prank, three students at Lawrence High School in Kansas decided to partially shave the heads of some younger friends and siblings. The haircuts took place off campus, and the younger students volunteered for the haircuts. Still, school officials charged the seniors with hazing and bullying and suspended them. Even after parents explained they had given the OK for the head shaving, officials would not lift the suspensions.
Officials at Center High School in Texas have barred Avery Tindol from attending the prom after they caught him with a prop gun from the drama department. Tindol and some other students were cleaning out the prop room when one of them handed him the fake firearm. A teacher spotted him with the weapon, and the school also suspended him for three days.
The Brevard County, Florida, public library system has pulled all of its 19 copies of 50 Shades of Grey from the shelves. Library services director Cathy Schweinsberg says the best-selling novel is pornographic.
Colorado's Meridian Ranch Elementary School held a "wax museum" day recently and asked students to come dressed as some historic figure. Second-grader Sean King decided to come as Martin Luther King Jr., so he put on a suit and a fake mustache. And since, King is white, he decided to use makeup to darken his face. One faculty member complained the "blackface" was offensive. So the principal ordered him to remove the makeup or leave school. King's parents opted to take him home.
Crowley, Texas, resident David Englett found when he tried to renew his driver's license that he had several outstanding warrants. The warrants were all for code violations at his former home in Arlington. Englett hasn't lived in the house since it was foreclosed two years ago, and he said that he thought it was the bank's responsibility to keep the grass mowed and yard clean. He had to pay Arlington $150 to remove the hold on his license, but officials are still demanding hundreds more in fines.
Venezuelan intelligence officers visited the offices of Ultima Noticias newspaper to gather information on Neptali Segovia, who writes the paper's crossword puzzles. One of his recent puzzles contained, among other answers, the first name of President Hugo Chavez's brother Adan, a Spanish word for to kill and a Spanish word that can mean either machine gun fire or a gust of wind. Chavez supporters say the puzzle was a threat to Adan Chavez.
A code enforcement officer in Brynmawr, Wales, fined Valerie George £75 for littering after a strand of cotton fell from one of her gloves to the sidewalk. George says she didn't even see the strand fall and would have picked it up if asked. When contacted by media, local officials said they would drop the fine but George did break the law.
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