What A Gift!

Did you ever get presents from students, maybe at holiday time? I have gotten a few over the years and most are something typical and appropriate for a teacher like a coffee mug, item to wear, personal gift made by the student, etc. I got cookies and sweets and always enjoyed eating them.
I think most kids like to give their teachers expressions of thanks for all they do to help students. But some kids are not so charitable. And in one case in Maine, a parent joined in on pilling on the teacher with a..uh...not so nice present. It happened last year at Christmas in Skowhegan, when a parent, Julie Hunt, decided her daughter's teacher "had to go"....so to speak. You see, Julie was convicted last Xmas with helping her daughter and two other teenagers bake Christmas cookies laced with laxative that sent one teacher "leaping" with something other than joy. (No cookies in my mail, relax).
The cookies were baked with Ex-Lax an left on the teacher's desk at Carrabec Community School with a note saying, "we made these cookies just for you, hope you enjoy them", after Mom Julie showed her daughter and her two friends, all 13 and 14 years old, how to crush the Ex-Lax and mix them with cookie batter. The kids used an entire bottle of the laxative in the batter!
Fortunately, the girls not only have bad baking habits, but also can't keep a secret. When one of them giggled about what they were doing to that teacher, some of the other students reported the plot to the school principal, who alerted the teacher and called police. After intercepting the plot, the school suspended the three kids and police arrested the mom on a misdemeanor assault charge. The judge should have included in the punishment for mom, an extra jolt to Hunt when sentencing, by ordering her to eat a few of those cookies and locking the bathroom for a few hours. Now that would really be an instructive lesson for mom.
The abomination of the year award has to go to the inept and seemingly always unreliable United Nations. In the latest implausible U.N. move it elected several very inhumane nations to the Human Right Council. The Council is set up within the U.N. as a forum for discussion and cooperation on bringing forth human rights in nations. It attempts to push members to respect human rights and assist other countries in establishing basic freedoms for their citizens. But one would think to be a member a nation should at least exhibit some philosophy of respecting the rights of their citizens.
Given that, why did the U.N. Human Rights Council just select Cuba, China, Russia, Pakistan, Azerbaijan and Saudi Arabia as new members? Isn't the record and policy of those nation's governments to deny basic human rights to their people? Wouldn't it be better for them to at least show otherwise before being admitted?
Well, now they take a seat with 41 other nations to set the agenda on human rights world-wide. I don't know about you, but I hardly want Cuba or Saudi Arabia helping setting that standard. What do you think? Should nations who make human rights a cause also be guarantee it in their own countries?