Quirky World ... Class duplicity as teen pretends to be senator
Mohawk Local School District officials said Izaha Akins, of Marion, Ohio, visited the high school in December and claimed to be a lawmaker replacing another senator. They realised they’d been duped when Republican Senator David Burke, of Marysville, showed up to speak weeks later, as scheduled.
Burke said in an email that when he learned about the hoax, he and the school immediately began working with law enforcement. He said, “This was an extremely elaborate scheme and not as simple as walking through the door.”
The Blade newspaper of Toledo reported that Akins said he was making a point about school security in small communities. He was charged recently with felony counts of telecommunications fraud and impersonating a peace officer.
“These country schools think it can’t happen to them,” Akins told The Blade in a brief interview. He said he wanted to “prove a point — that these kinds of things can happen. They could easily have Googled me, and they didn’t.”
School officials say Akins knew that Burke was scheduled to speak to a class on January 14, and called to bill himself as Burke’s replacement as senator and available to speak earlier. He arranged to visit on December. 15, provided his real name, presented his driver’s licence at the school that afternoon, got a tour of the school from the principal, then gave his presentation and left, Mohawk Schools Superintendent Ken Ratliff said.
“The presentation was about being active in politics, political processes,” Ratliff said. “Everyone thought it was legit; bought into it, including the teacher.”
Authorities said Reineke Ford provided a car and driver for the day to the supposed legislator. The Blade said Reineke Motors general manager Tony Flood said it’s not unusual for the dealership to help the nearby school district.
Parents at a primary school in Devon have been told not to swear when picking up their children, the Sun reported.
A note to mothers and fathers at Heathcoat Primary said: “We have sadly noticed that some adults have been swearing on the school grounds.
“We know that children get upset when they hear these kinds of words and can copy them.”
The Royal Air Force has reportedly been accused of interfering with the weather by the government of Cyprus — so Tornado and Typhoon aircraft can fly missions to Syria and Iraq in clear conditions.
It has been reported that the strange claim emerged after local weathermen forecast heavy rain for early February only for the period to stay dry. A newspaper on the Mediterranean island reported that the Cypriot government was accusing British forces of cloud-seeding — a technique which involves using a chemical to divert rain clouds.
Parents are applying for places at top private schools before their children are even born, it was reported.
Some mothers are even timing Caesarean deliveries in order to have the best chance of getting the choices they want.
William Petty, from admissions experts Bonas MacFarlane, said: “We have the most in-demand private schools in the world.”
An Oregon food distribution company has halted some shipments of canned green beans after a Utah woman said she found a severed snake head in a can.
The unsettling discovery was made at a Mormon church in Farmington, Utah, while women and youth were preparing a meal for older members of the congregation.
Troy Walker said she was taking beans out of a slow cooker when she spotted something odd, KSL-TV in Salt Lake City reported.
“It looked pretty much like a burnt bean, and then as I got closer to lift it off the spoon, I saw eyes,” Walker said. “That’s when I just dropped it and screamed.”
Christi Smith was also cooking that evening and said it was a very small snake that had clearly been cut up. After the kids all came to see it, they threw out several other large pots of string beans that were also cooking, before looking inside.
“Who knows where the other parts of that snake were?” Smith said.
Walker said she took the snake head and empty can back to the grocery store where she bought the food. She took a picture of the snake head to send to Western Family, an Oregon-based food distribution company whose label was on the can.
Sharon McFadden, vice president of quality control for Western Family, said that the company takes the matter seriously and is working with the supplier that produced the green beans to find out what happened and how many cans came from the batch.
