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Ask not for whom the bell tolls too early
According to Reuters, Chinese state media has reported that a man in the Chinese province of Hunan received a jail sentence of one year for ringing a bell to end a national college entrance exam five minutes early, forcing the students to hand in their papers before the exam should have ended.
The man, 54-year-old Xiao Yulong, admitted dinging the dong four minutes and 48 seconds early, but insists that it was a mistake. Not to be appeased, thousands of students and parents demanded that the government investigate; the result was the one-year court-imposed sentence for negligence on the hapless bell ringer. “Xiao was careless in his work and mistakenly rang the bell too early, resulting in adverse social impact,” was the court’s official statement. (The good news is that he was also given a one-year reprieve, which means he may serve either little or no time inside.)
The national college entrance exam is an extremely competitive test in which high school students vie for a limited number of spaces at universities.
Is that a gun in your book or are you just happy to see me?
An employee at a library in Valparaiso, Indiana, got quite a shock when he opened a donated copy of Robert Stone’s Outerbridge Reach and found not printed pages with a story written on them but an old handgun inside what turned out to be a hollowed-out book. The police described the weapon as a gold, wooden-handled, ASM brand, .31-calibre, single-shot, black-powder gun. Because the library receives so many donations, officials said there’s no way to know who made the donation.
Goodbye, Mr. Nips
In an attempt to look like a cool guy in front of his students, Martin Rouse, a chubby 57-year-old substitute teacher in Britain, stripped to his waist in front of a class of 14-year-olds. Predictably, a student filmed his antics and uploaded the footage to YouTube. It shows Rouse unbuttoning and whipping off his shirt, flexing his muscles and parading up and down the aisles of a classroom. Rouse, who was not present at his disciplinary hearing, at which he was sacked, is said to now be working in a supermarket.
