Oddly Enough

Thai'd below the knee: Students at Thailand's oldest university learned that they face lower grades if they wear miniskirts. Officials at Chulalongkorn University had put up posters of women in short skirts captioned: "Wearing skirts like this can damage the prestige of the university", but when those failed to persuade, they imposed a ban with penalties of lower grades for anyone infringing it. The latest posters feature a drawing of a crocodile salivating at a woman in a miniskirt.

Sharp pencils: A Californian appeared in court in New York charged with conspiracy and obstruction of justice after he admitted running a scheme to sell answers to examinations to graduate-school entrants. For a fee of between $2,000 and $9,000, Po Chieng Ma would provide examinees with pencils which had the test answers inscribed on them in code. He had employed a "team of crack test-takers" to obtain the answers.

Knock-out punch: A book was withdrawn from a children's library after parents complained of pictures of baby-battering and the murder of a policeman. Marlborough library in Wiltshire removed the Punch and Judy book from their shelves after the parents of six-year-old Evie Kerton alerted teachers at St Mary's infants school. "You spend all your time as a parent telling kids not to play with ropes or plastic bags, and then they see someone in a book tricking a policeman into a noose and hanging him," said the child's father, Paul Kerton.