Wasted Daily News

A dozen Chinese teenagers have been caught in a failed plot to sneak into Canada by masquerading as kung fu masters from the famous Shaolin Temple, state media reported Friday.

The 12 had no martial arts experience but joined a team of genuine kung fu performers from a school in Henan province, also home to the 1,500-year-old temple, that was leaving for a tour of Canada, the official Xinhua News Agency said.

They had paid up to $90,000 each to a human smuggler, or “snakehead,” and two coaches from the martial arts school who often accompany students on trips abroad, Xinhua said. Read the rest of this entry →

PATNA, India (Reuters) – Scores of Indian children attending a school located in a graveyard were having recurring nightmares about ghosts and have appealed to authorities to shift them from the site, officials and residents said.

“I have stopped going to school after many dead people walked out of their graves and came into my dreams, ordering me to reach school on time,” said six-year-old Raqib Ansari.

This week, hundreds of children at the school in the eastern state of Bihar, accompanied by their parents, marched to the office of a senior district official, asking for the school to be shifted away from the Muslim graveyard.

About 200 children study in the makeshift school set up several years ago after authorities refused to donate land for a school in Kohari village, 125 miles southwest of the state capital, Patna.

Some parents say their children’s sleep and health is being affected by dreams of ghosts.

“They used to play and study together and finish their lunch boxes while sitting on top of concrete graves but now the ghosts have come to haunt them at night and they are falling ill,” said one father, Riyazuddin Ansari.

“We have no choice as the nearest other school is at least four hours away,” he said by phone from Kohari.

There are more than 100 tombs in the graveyard but dozens of fresh graves — most of them shallow — have been dug in recent months, further crowding the burial ground.

Authorities in densely populated Bihar said they were trying to provide new land for the school.

“Maybe the dead are not enjoying the noise inside the graveyard any more, but we are looking into the matter,” said Ram Yash Singh, a village council official.

Best-selling Canadian author Yann Martel, worried about Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s apparent lack of interest in the arts, sent him a book on Monday and said he would continue doing so once a fortnight.

Martel, who wrote the novel “Life of Pi,” was upset that Harper had paid no attention during a recent parliamentary ceremony to honor Canadian artists.

Harper, whose Conservatives won the January 2006 election, is a rather wooden figure who has expressed little enthusiasm for the arts. Read the rest of this entry →

A law protecting library records’ confidentiality has hamstrung officials pursuing a man who reportedly masturbated among the books at the Neenah Public Library earlier this month. City Attorney James Godlewski said the library can’t turn a surveillance video of the man over to police without a court order.

“That is state law,” Godlewski said Monday. “The library is merely following what state law says.” Read the rest of this entry →

Canadian researchers said on Wednesday they have produced the world’s smallest published book, a story of a turnip contest that will require readers to use an electron microscope.

The book, entitled “Teeny Ted from Turnip Town”, measures 0.07 mm by 0.10 mm and was made using a focused gallium-ion beam to carve out spaces around each letter on pieces of crystalline silicon, according to Simon Fraser University. Read the rest of this entry →

School district officials are trying to identify who watched $250 worth of pay-per-view pornographic movies using a school cable television box, officials said.

Someone after business hours used one of the five cable boxes in the Board of Education building to order the films, priced between $4.95 and $9.95. Read the rest of this entry →

A substitute teacher’s tool for silencing chatty kindergartners — clothespins — doesn’t wash with school officials.

Four boys said spring-type clothespins were placed over their upper or lower lips for talking too much in class, Amanda-Clearcreek Primary School principal Mike Johnsen wrote in a letter to parents this week.

Ruth Ann Stoneburner, a retired school nurse who had worked as a substitute for several years, confirmed to Johnsen that she had used the clothespin discipline March 26, he said. Read the rest of this entry →