N.J. Bans Sex Offenders From Social Networking Sites

New Jersey’s parole board yesterday voted unanimously to bar those convicted of sex crimes from using the Internet to network. That this will do very little to help public safety means nothing; N.J. could pass a law requiring registered sex offenders to chop off their own hands and the majority of the public would probably cheer.

There are some questions, of course; where does the law stop? It’s targetd at Facebook and Myspace, of course, but what about YouTube, which has commenting and community? Are registered sex offenders allowed to comment here? Are the New Jersey police going to ask me for the server logs so they can comb through for sex offenders? (Okay: No, but you see where I’m going with this.)

Apparently, the rule is you can’t post a profile. And sex offenders can still use email. Hey, a feel-good solution that does nothing to actually prevent underage sex solicitation online!

But I think my hypothetical pales in comparison to that of a poster on the always incredible Courier-Post forums.

This is like saying you accosted a Orange once; now you’re forbidden from buying oranges. So are you going to have a cop at every venue that may sell oranges?

Please, won’t someone think of the oranges?

N.J. bans sex offenders from networking sites [Courier-Post]
N.J. to sex parolees: Keep off MySpace [The Star-Ledger]

Orange You Glad This Woman Was Suspended?

Know what’s great about being a student in the Philadelphia public school system? No, it’s not the classes, or the teachers, or the schools named after such luminaries as Thomas Edison and George Washington.

The real reason it’s great to be in the Philadelphia public school system is if a food service worker throws out a crate of oranges because they’re brown, white and covered with green spots, the principal of the school will pull them out of the dumpster and feed them to children. Then the food service worker will be suspended and transferred to another school. Allegedly, at least.

Yes, 18-year district veteran Loretta Allen said she threw out the crate of oranges — and three more crates just like it — after seeing what terrible shape they were in. But the school district said she just didn’t want to cut up the 500 oranges for the students, because, well, after 18 years sometimes you just get mad as hell and don’t want to take it anymore.

Of course, the school district admitted that some of them might have been white and green and brown, but that not all of them were, and so throwing them all away was just simply unacceptable, as it’s a school district policy to make the children eat green oranges or something.

The worker’s only real mistake, her union says, was not calling her supervisor before she threw out the oranges. But the district didn’t agree, and she’s been suspended for three days and transferred from her West Kensington elementary school to Shallcross, a disciplinary school.

There, she’ll feed the children bottlecaps and bolts:

Allen said she also had become increasingly concerned about the quality of the food and had reported to superiors on a few occasions in the past about items - including bottle caps, screws and bolts - found in large containers of food.

Discarding oranges gets school worker in trouble [Inquirer]