OFFBEAT NEWS:

In the United States, people pay big bucks for plastic surgery treatments, but not in Brazil. There, such procedures are much cheaper – if not free – for residents. Why? Because they believe that everyone has “the right to beauty.” In fact, as many as half a million surgeries are subsidized every year.

According to “Vice,” beauty is considered essential in landing a job, finding a partner and “getting ahead” in that country – so the government got involved. That said, it’s not like you can pop down to the doc and make an appointment. Wait time can range anywhere from a few months to years. When you consider that on average, 1.2-million surgeries are performed every year – it can take a minute.

Still…there’s a darker side. In some public hospitals they even offer surgeries for free or at an extremely low cost. But just because they’re cheap doesn’t mean there isn’t a price to pay – as a  number of these hospitals are being used to test new procedures. This leaves patients at high risk regarding their results. But they do it anyway, in hopes of reaching their version of beauty.

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An administrator at Greenville High School in South Carolina has apparently told students and their parents not to cheer at graduation or they could be fined $1,030. During a recent school assembly, a slide show noted that seniors should ask their guests to be on their best behavior during the ceremony.

What’s that mean? No cheering, whistling, or applauding “during the reading of names and presentation of diplomas. You know – or get fined. They say it’s “so every name can be heard.” As for where the amount came from? Who knows. But the weirdest part is that the school district is saying no citations will be issued.

Still, the school administrators are standing firm. Either way,  Sgt. Jonathan Bragg has noted that congratulating a grad or yelling their name is “not a police matter.” He clarifies that police “would only get involved when it’s actually a criminal matter. As far as charging someone for yelling, we have not done that.” The only time they’d actually get involved in the ceremony is for “disorderly conduct” like “yelling obscenities.”

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STUPID CRIMINALS:

A woman in New Jersey has been arrested after leaving a cable TV employee stranded on her lift. Officials say the two women had a dispute, causing the resident to turn off the worker’s truck while she was working on the lift. This left her suspended in midair. The woman then “stole utility property” before leaving the scene. The cable company says their employees’ safety is their top priority and are happy that their worker was not harmed. However, the other woman was charged with harassment, false imprisonment, disorderly conduct, and criminal trespassing.

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The Discovery Wildlife Park in Canada has been fined after taking one of its bears out for ice cream. Wildlife authorities have charged the zoo for not notifying them about the recent outing, which involved taking the zoo’s one-year-old bear to Dairy Queen. The zoo posted a video of the trip on their Facebook, showing the bear heading through the drive-thru window. In a video, the Dairy Queen employee can be seen feeding the bear a vanilla cone. Alberta Fish and Wildlife notes they aren’t mad about the bear going out for a treat, just that they weren’t notified about it. Zoo owners Doug Bos and Debbie Rowland have been cited for violating the terms of license.