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News of the Weird: Zero Tolerance?; Willing to go to Indonesia to cure for emphysema? By Chuck Shepherd
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Recently, public school students were expelled in Spotsylvania, Va. (possession of homemade tubing for launching plastic "spitballs" in lunchroom horseplay) (December); arrested in Hammonton, N.J. (a 7-year-old, for bringing to class a Nerf-type "gun" that fired soft balls) (January); and arrested in Arvada, Colo. (for drawing violent stick figures, which was recommended by his therapist as a way to tamp down harmful thoughts) (February). Meanwhile, in March, at the other end of "zero tolerance," a judge allowed Ryan Ricco, 18, to play for his school in a big basketball tournament despite being on modified house arrest after being charged with threatening to blow up two other high schools in the Chicago suburbs. [Washington Post, 2-1-2011] [WCAU-TV (Philadelphia), 2-2-2011] [KDVR-TV (Denver), 2-23-2011] [Chicago Tribune, 3-18-2011]
The cure for emphysema is cigarette smoke piped directly into the lungs, according to chemist Gretha Zahar, whose clinic has treated 60,000 people in Jakarta, Indonesia, in the past decade. Zahar (with a Ph.D. from Padjadjaran University in West Java) modifies the tobacco smoke with "nanotechnology" to remove "free radicals" and adjust the mercury levels -- and touts her "divine cigarettes" as cures for "all" diseases, including cancer, with only a wink of the eye from the government (which opposition leaders say is in the pocket of Indonesia's tobacco industry). Though 400,000 Indonesians die yearly from smoking-related causes, nicotine "addiction" was only reluctantly and subtly mentioned in recent regulations. One pharmacology professor said he had never heard of anyone dying of smoking, which he called a "good, cheap alternative" to expensive drugs. [Agence France-Presse, 4-12-2011] Click here to comment on this column.
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© 2011, Chuck Shepherd. Distributed by Universal Uclick |
Mitch Albom |
