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More and more US schools have their own police forces. Pupils are being arrested for throwing paper planes and failing to pick up crumbs from the cafeteria floor. The state has taken over discipline from the classroom teacher and is now criminalizing normal childhood behavior–or is it?

In Austin, Texas, 12-year-old Sarah Bustamantes was arrested for spraying perfume on her neck in class after the other kids were taunting her and saying she smelled bad. In the Guardian Weekly, Chris McGreal quotes Sarah as saying, "They were saying a lot of rude things to me. Just picking on me. So I sprayed myself with perfume. Then the teacher called the police."
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Polio was the disease that President Franklin Roosevelt had that the media kept secret from the public, for fear of making him look weak. It was the scourge of children who grew up in the 40s and early 50s, before the polio vaccine was invented in 1955. While polio still affects some African countries, the CDC has declared that polio is a disease of the past in the US, except now four Amish children in Minnesota have contracted it, probably because their religious philosophy precludes vaccinations.

Epidemiologist Harry Hull says these cases aren’t a threat to the general public because most people have been vaccinated against polio, but he expects to find more infections within the Amish community because some of its members continue to refuse vaccinations.
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What is it like to live inside the body of the special kind of genius known as the autistic savant (once know as idiot savants)? These are people whom scientists think are brain damaged in the womb. One part of the brain, the part that controls social interactions, ends up underdeveloped and to compensate, the other part, that controls mathematics, music or art, for instance, over develops in order to compensate. This is why there are people who socially retarded but able to instantly tell you the day on which something happened, when you give them the date. The novel “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time” is written from the point of view of such a savant?now one of them explains how he does it.
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