The pupils will mark their fingerprints every time they go to church over three years and if they attend 200 masses they will be freed from the obligation of having to pass an exam prior to their confirmation, the paper said.

The pupils in the southern town of Gryfow Slaski told the daily they liked the idea and also the priest, Grzegorz Sowa, who invented it.

“This is comfortable. We don’t have to stand in a line to get the priest’s signature (confirming our presence at the mass) in our confirmation notebooks,” said one pupil, who gave her name as Karolina.

Poland is perhaps the most devoutly Roman Catholic country in Europe today and churches are regularly packed on Sundays.

(Reporting by Kuba Jaworowski, editing by Paul Casciato)

The local “Miss Venezuela” organization — which has landed the South American nation more international pageant titles than any other country — announced on Wednesday it had slashed the number of national competitors to 20 from 30.

“We have had to tighten our belt a bit too,” said Joaquin Riviera, organizer of the annual Miss Venezuela competition, which is wildly popular and draws huge TV audiences.

The next national winner will be chosen on September 24.

“I’ve asked Osmel to be a bit stricter choosing 20 girls, so we only have the best,” Riviera added, referring to local beauty “czar” Osmel Sousa, who prepares the competitors.

Sousa denied the cuts, however, would mean fewer dresses or less plastic surgery for girls competing. Venezuela has one of the highest rates of cosmetic surgery in the world.

Venezuela’s Stefania Fernandez, an 18-year-old brunette, won the Miss Universe 2009 title last month in the Bahamas, giving her country its second win in a row and its sixth in that pageant’s history.

(Reporting by Fabian Andres Cambero; Writing by Andrew Cawthorne; Editing by Eric Beech)

Bishop Artemije, in charge of the Rasko-Prizrenska diocese, said he ordered an inquiry into the activities of priest Branislav Peranovic at the Crna Reka center, about 300 kilometers (187 miles) southwest of the capital Belgrade.

“We will shut down the facility if the reports about beatings and violence persist,” Artemije said in a statement.

The bishop said he decided against closing it “after numerous pleadings by the patients and their parents.”

“We are also asking state authorities to investigate the matter and punish those responsible,” the statement said.

Last week, the Holy Synod, the church’s top body, asked Artemije to shut down the center that houses about 200 patients near the southwestern city of Novi Pazar.

Two separate videos made public by Belgrade’s Vreme weekly and B92 TV showed one of the centre’s employees and Peranovic repeatedly beating patients with a shovel, and kicking and hitting them inside a room decorated with icons.

The government’s human rights watchdog Sasa Jankovic has filed criminal charges against the center and Peranovic.

This week Serbian health authorities said the Crna Reka center was not registered to undertake drug rehabilitation.

Peranovic told B92 TV the beatings were a “hard and unwanted, but necessary part of treatment.”

He said that on admission, patients and their parents had to sign a written consent approving the use of violence “for therapeutic purposes.”

(Reporting by Aleksandar Vasovic; Editing by Robert Woodward)

The New Year’s Eve “Bye Bye” comedy program — shown by the French-language Radio Canada network — generated more than 200 complaints. In one segment, two hosts discussed Obama’s election in November 2008. Obama, who took office in January, is the first black U.S. president.

“We’re not racists. It will be good to have a Negro in the White House. It will be practical. Black on white, it will be easier to shoot him,” one of the show’s hosts remarked.

The Canadian Broadcasting Standards Council said it found “nothing redeeming in the allegedly comedic notion that an American president should be shot, still less that this would be easier to achieve because of the color of the president’s skin. It was a disturbing, wounding, abusive racial comment.”

The show also featured an interview with an actor pretending to be Obama. The host said, “The blacks, you all look alike,” and then warned viewers to hide their purses.

The council said the comments and sketches breached regulations, adding they went “too far in terms of Canadian broadcast standards.”

The producers of the show denied the skits had been racist, saying they had meant to mock the characters making the offensive remarks.

Complaints about Radio Canada are usually handled by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). In this case the CRTC asked the council — which deals with commercial channels and has more experience in handling such complaints — for advice.

The CRTC, which is due to conduct its own probe into the show, does not have the power to fine Radio-Canada but can issue a public reprimand.

A spokeswoman for the commission said such reprimands could cause problems for networks when it came time for them to seek renewal of their broadcasting license. Radio-Canada is due to apply for a license renewal in 2011.

Polls regularly show that Canadians like Obama far more than they do their own leaders. Tens of thousands turned up to cheer him when he made a brief visit to Ottawa in February. A spokeswoman for the U.S. embassy said she did not know whether the White House had complained about the show.

(Reporting by David Ljunggren; editing by Peter Galloway and Frances Kerry)

Bar owner Mike Morris says Mary Kay Letourneau (leh-TUR’-noh) has served her sentence and it’s OK for the couple to have some fun.

The 47-year-old Letourneau served seven years in prison after pleading guilty in 1997 to raping Vili Fualaau (VEE’-lee foo-ah-LA’-oo), now 26. They met when Fualaau was in second grade and began their affair when he was 12 and she was a 34-year-old married mother of four. They were married in 2005 and have two daughters together.

Morris says Saturday’s event at Fuel Sports Eats & Beats will be their third “Hot for Teacher” night. She greets people and he DJs.

A boss and his secretary who were having an affair saw their romantic tryst interrupted in a wince-inducing manner – after a car crash led her to accidentally bite his penis off.

According to reports in China Press and Sin Chew Daily, the 30-year-old woman was performing oral sex on her boss in a car in a Singapore park, when the car was struck by a reversing van.

The impact caused her to bite the man’s penis off.

ust in case this wasn’t already bad enough for those involved, the incident was observed by a private detective who had been sent by the woman’s husband to catch them out.

He described how, shortly after parking, the car started to ‘shake violently’ – but then was hit by the van. He said that the woman screamed loudly, with her mouth covered in blood.

Helpfully, the investigator called an ambulance to take the man to hospital. His lover followed him there, with part of his penis.

The investigator said he’s never seen an incident like it before.

Source: metro.co.uk

AFP/Getty Images – A small-town Australian doctor used a household drill to release a blood clot from the brain of a boy

SYDNEY (AFP) – A small-town Australian doctor used a household drill to release a blood clot from the brain of a boy following a bicycle accident in what was hailed as an act of extreme bravery and skill.

Nick Rossi, 13, began bleeding on the brain after hitting his head on concrete in a fall from his bicycle last Friday in the town of Maryborough, northwest of Melbourne, his father, Michael, said.

Though he seemed fine, Rossi said his wife, Karen, decided to take their son to the hospital after she discovered a lump behind his ear.

“From there he just started to deteriorate,” Rossi told state radio.

“He started to pass in and out of consciousness to the point where they actually had to put a breathing apparatus on him to make him breathe, and that’s where the two local GPs turned the emergency room into an operating theatre.”

One of the doctors, David Tynan, said it fast became apparent that if they didn’t act to relieve the pressure on Nick’s brain he was going to die.

But the small hospital surgery was not equipped with a drill powerful enough to pierce the boy’s skull, “so we sent down to the maintenance department,” Tynan said.

“Under (telephone) instructions from … a neurosurgeon in Melbourne we made an incision in his scalp down to the bone and then drilled through it with a drill,” he said.

“It’s pretty scary, you obviously worry you’re … pushing too hard but then when some blood came out after we’d gone through the skull we realised we’d made the right decision,” he added.

Rossi said Rob Carson, the doctor who performed the drilling, had told him they had just “one shot” at saving his son, and Nick’s neurosurgeon had told him the gutsy act had meant the difference between life and death.

“He later told me that what Dr Carson did was extremely brave,” Rossi said.

“To have done that with a household drill … he said it was unbelievable.”

A draining tube was inserted into Nick’s head to allow the blood to escape, and he received a transfusion of fresh blood in his arm.

Rossi said he was then airlifted to Melbourne where he made a full recovery and was released from hospital Tuesday — his 13th birthday.