Suffer the little children...

With all the discussion of child abuse at the polygamist ranch in West Texas recently, you might be thinking, "Surely they're not the only folks to mistreat their kids." And you'd be right.

In fact, people never get tired of finding novel ways to put their kids in jeopardy for what seems to be a good idea at the time.

Take the devotees of a Muslim shrine in Solapur in western India's Maharastra state. For more than 500 years they've been observing a bizarre ritual--throwing their young children off a tall building for luck and to improve their health. They believe it will make their children strong, and they say no accidents have ever happened.

(In fact, Maharastra is just teeming with good luck. The poverty rate is only 24 per cent, down from 38 per cent back in the '90s. Presumably, the impoverished didn't get dropped).

Closer to home, a Corpus Christi, Texas, judge reduced felony charges against the director of a Christian boot camp and an employee to simple assault in connection with the alleged dragging of a 15-year-old girl behind a van after she fell behind during a morning run. The 32-day boot camp for girls ages 13 to 19 includes 28 days at a facility near San Antonio, then four days at a camp in Banquete, about 10 miles west of Corpus Christi. The boot camp is run by the embarrassingly named Love Demonstrated Ministries of San Antonio.

But then, sometimes kids just need an old fashioned spanking.

It's too late for 18-year-old Ryan Schallenberger, a straight-A student who planned to blow up his South Carolina high school. He intended "to die and go to heaven and once he got there, he wanted to kill Jesus," according to police who arrested him. (Kids say the darnedest things). They discovered his journal, which lauded the Columbine killers, contained notes on more than 10 types of explosives that Schallenberger experimented with and evaluated a year ago.

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