Lead Stories
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Toronto’s Globe and Mail reported in May that the Chinese government is having trouble controlling the spending and leisure habits of the nation’s youth and young adults. Party leaders still appear on “most admired” lists, but so do Bill Gates and the Taiwanese boy band F4. The government recently banned a TV show starring the band but backed down after state-owned TV stations said they needed the advertising revenue.
In March middle school teacher Timothy Thomure of Sedalia, Missouri, admitted that he had rubbed a knife blade along one student’s finger, among other acts of intimidation, in hopes of getting his students to “loosen up” and interact . . . . In April parents of an eight-year-old boy asked Houston school officials to provide counseling for their child, who was still troubled by an incident three years earlier in which a teacher disciplined him by dumping a cup of cockroaches on his chest . . . . The next month a middle school teacher in Pflugerville, Texas, was fired for allegedly throwing a chair at a student during a “behavior management” class . . . . And last month in Andover, Minnesota, a Sunday-school teacher was convicted of a misdemeanor after advising a teenage boy prone to masturbation to write “What would Jesus do?” on his penis.
Unclear on the Concept
Last month Brazilian drug king Fernandinho Beira-Mar managed to have a shoulder-launched antiaircraft missile delivered to his cell at Bangu One prison; it was confiscated by authorities . . . . And that same month in Bulls Gap, Tennessee, a federal environmental official warned that every pound of methamphetamine created in home labs produces five pounds of toxic waste.
