Oddly Enough

Food fight: An Illinois teenager who was arrested for flicking a paperclip at a dinner-lady has avoided having to spend time in jail. Clint E Jackson, an 18-year-old student at Richmond-Burton High School in suburban Chicago, was initially charged with misdemeanor battery, but pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of disorderly conduct last month. The student was sentenced to 12 hours of community service and fined $150 (pounds 96). According to prosecutor Daniel Regna, last May Mr Jackson loaded a rubber-band slingshot with the paperclip, pointy side out, and hit the dinner lady in the chest, causing her to bleed.

Going nuclear: Computer hackers who thought they had discovered India's nuclear secrets were actually reading a student's coded e-mails. Hackers calling themselves the Milworm Group said, soon after the Indian nuclear tests in May, that they had broken into computers of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, the nerve-centre of the country's nuclear programs. On Monday, Bikash Sinha, a top official at the centre, said hackers had only read coded e-mails to a friend from a graduate student doing research at the centre. The student used code names for the department's scientists, whom he sometimes ridiculed, and for scientific subjects, which fooled the hackers into believing they had stumbled upon classified information.

English language: John Bonnell says it's hard not to teach some literature - say, a James Joyce short story or Lady Chatterley's Lover - without using a few saucy words. The English professor has used what he calls "blunt language" in his classes at Macomb Community College for 32 years. But this year, school officials have accused Bonnell's speech of running foul of sexual harassment policies and have suspended him indefinitely. A student filed a complaint in November, saying she found his words "dehumanising, degrading and sexually explicit." Bonnell said the school suspended him for three days for the complaint, then suspended him indefinitely while it investigated whether he told students to stay away during his suspension. Bonnell said he begins the semester by warning students that graphic language may be used. And he said his use of four-letter words does not go beyond speech used by his students. "You get in novels and short fiction, at times, some blunt handling of human sexuality, which I think is the problem here," Bonnell said.