BEAUMONT, Texas – A teacher at a Texas high school has been arrested and charged with assault after her alleged assault on a student was caught on video.
Mary Hastings is a 63-year-old geometry teacher at Ozen High School in Beaumont, Texas, a city of about 120,000 about 90 miles east of Houston. On Friday during her fourth period math class, she was filmed allegedly attacking a student who reportedly asked about a grade. What preceded the alleged attack was not clear.
“Because you’re stopping him from graduating, you idiot ass!” Hastings said in a video, pushing papers off the student’s desk and slapping him five times with an open palm. When the student asked why she had hit him – “Why you did that?” – Hastings repeated his words, mocking him.
After the widely shared video was posted to Twitter on April 8, Hastings was arrested that day and charged with one count of assault, 12 News reported. She was released on $2,500 bond.
FUKUSHIMA, Japan – Nuclear catastrophe is always an unmitigated disaster. The only beneficiaries are animals, which tend to flourish in areas humans evacuate. This has certainly been the case for wild boars around Fukushima, which have multiplied so rapidly, they’ve become a problem for neighboring towns.
Since 2011, no humans have been able to live on the poisoned land. Wild boars, meanwhile, have thrived heartily. No evidence suggests that the radioactive contamination harms the beasts, and the lack of people there to hunt them has allowed them to breed with abandon.
Normally, boar meat is highly desired in Japan--in fact, The Japan Times called pork “the nation’s most popular meat,” but these animals have been eating contaminated plants and small animals in the power plant’s “exclusion zone.”
These animals are unfit for human consumption, which presents another problem: hunters can attempt to reduce the population, but they have to do something with the carcasses. According to Texas A&M wildlife and fisheries professor Billy Higginbotham, the average size of a male hog is around 200 pounds. Considering this average, if 13,000 are killed, hunters have around 2,600,000 pounds of potentially dangerous flesh requiring disposal.
WASHINGTON – Although terrorists have attacked trains and subway systems in Europe, there is relatively little risk that they will assault similar targets in the United States, according to the nation’s transportation security chief.
“Right now we consider the general risk to be low in the United States domestically against surface transportation,” said Peter Neffenger, administrator of the Transportation Security Administration. “That’s freight rail, light rail, metro subway systems, over the road buses and the like.”
Neffenger, in a conversation with reporters on Friday, said that is unlikely to happen in the United States. Some of his assessment comes from “a vast national intelligence network” and is classified information, he said.
“It doesn’t mean there’s no threat, there’s no risk, but it’s relatively low,” he said.
Associated Press & Washington Post
