ARTFUL DODGERS
The head of the Perse School in Cambridge, England, recently instituted a “10-Second Rule” for minor disciplinary infractions: Students could avoid punishment if they quickly produced a clever explanation for their misbehavior. “Getting children to talk their way out of a tight corner in a very short period of time” said Ed Elliott, encourages creativity and could produce a generation of British entrepreneurs. Said a supporter, “Often the ones who get further are the artful dodgers” who “bend the truth.” (Elliott warned, though, that “out-and-out falseness” would not be tolerated.)
FAMILY VALUES
A Tampa, Fla., mother and daughter (ages 56 and 22, with their familial ties verified by a Huffington Post reporter), shoot scenes together for their pornography website (“The Sexxxtons”), including threesomes with a man, but the women insist that they never incestuously touch each other. And Tiffany Hartford, 23, and George Sayers Jr., 48, were charged in Bethel, Conn., in December with selling unauthorized videos of Hartford having sex with another woman. That other woman charged, and a DNA test confirmed, that Sayers is Hartford’s father and that the two have a baby (although both deny knowing they were father-daughter at the time they had sex).
TRUE GAMBLING JUNKIES
Sheriff’s officials in Deerfield Beach, Fla., arrested nine people in October and charged them in connection with a betting ring that set point spreads and took bets not only on pro and college games but on kids’ games of the South Florida Youth Football League. Six thousand children play in the 22-team association.
TOO SILLY TO BE TRUE
Police in Geraldton, Australia, reported in November that they had captured a thief they were chasing in the dark through a neighborhood’s backyards. As the thief came to a fence and leaped over it, he happened to land on a family’s trampoline and was propelled backward, practically into cops’ laps.
INCREDIBLE!
Deputy NYPD Commissioner Paul Browne told reporters in November that, in the 24 hours of Monday, Nov. 26, not a single criminal shooting, stabbing, or slashing was reported in New York’s five boroughs. Browne said no police official could remember such a day, ever. In fact, the city is on track to finish 2012 with fewer than 400 homicides–compared to the record year of 1990, when 2,245 people were murdered.
THEY DO THINGS DIFFERENT IN DETROIT
Detroit police chief Ralph Godbee was suspended in October after an affair with a subordinate became public. Godbee’s predecessor had been fired for the same reason (among other reasons), and in fact, Godbee had previously had an affair with the same subordinate who had been implicated with his predecessor.
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