Eideard

The residents of a Romanian village knowingly voted in a dead man as their mayor in Sunday’s municipal election, preferring him to his living opponent.

Neculai Ivascu, 57, who ran the village for almost two decades, died from liver disease just after voting began — but still won the election by a margin of 23 votes.

A local official said the authorities decided to keep the poll open in case Ivascu’s opponent, Gheorghe Dobrescu, won, avoiding the need for a re-run…

In the end, election authorities gave the post to the runner-up, but some villagers and Ivascu’s party, the powerful opposition Social Democrat Party (PSD), have called for a new vote.

Yup. Nice to know the graveyard vote still counts for something.

T-Mobile will sell Apple’s new iPhone for as little as 1 euro ($1.54) for the 8-gigabyte version together with a $106 monthly contract.

Apple is set to reach far more consumers with the launch of the 3G iPhone in 70 countries than it did with the original version a year ago, partly due to having abandoned its insistence that carriers give it a share of call revenue.

Operators such as T-Mobile now have more scope to subsidize the cost of the phone to buyers in return for more lucrative contracts.

There ain’t going to be an iPhone in our immediate family until we can walk into the local T-Mobile store and buy one that matches our current plan.

Oh, yeah. O2 in the UK says the iPhone will be free.

When Shaun Yandell proposed to his long-time girlfriend Gina Marasco on the doorstep of their new home in the sunny suburb of Elk Grove, California, four years ago, he never imagined things would get this bad. But they did, and it happened almost overnight.

Yandell’s marriage isn’t falling apart: his neighborhood is.

Devastated by the subprime mortgage crisis, hundreds of homes have been foreclosed and thousands of residents have been forced to move, leaving in their wake a not-so-pleasant path of empty houses, unkempt lawns, vacant strip malls, graffiti-sprayed desolate sidewalks and even increased crime.

In Elk Grove, some homeowners not only cut their own grass but also trim the yards of vacant homes on their streets, hoping to deter gangs and criminals from moving in…

While the foreclosure epidemic has left communities across the United States overrun with unoccupied houses and overgrown grass, underneath the chaos another trend is quietly emerging that, over the next several decades, could change the face of suburban American life as we know it.

This change can be witnessed in places like Atlanta, Georgia, Detroit, Michigan, and Dallas, Texas, said Leinberger, where once rundown downtowns are being revitalized by well-educated, young professionals who have no desire to live in a detached single family home typical of a suburbia where life is often centered around long commutes and cars.

Instead, they are looking for what Leinberger calls “walkable urbanism” — both small communities and big cities characterized by efficient mass transit systems and high density developments enabling residents to walk virtually everywhere for everything — from home to work to restaurants to movie theaters.

The so-called New Urbanism movement emerged in the mid-90s and has been steadily gaining momentum, especially with rising energy costs, environmental concerns and health problems associated with what Leinberger calls “drivable sub-urbanism” — a low-density built environment plan that emerged around the end of the Second World War and has been the dominant design in the U.S. ever since.

Changing demographics are also fueling new demands as the number of households with children continues to decline. By the end of the next decade, the number of single-person households in the United States will amost equal those with kids.

Most Western nations never got round to aping exurbanite Levittown. They never destroyed rail systems. Trashing inner city communities in the name of Urban Renewal never achieved a political mandate.

More than ever before, the cost of energy and transport may begin to govern living trends in the United States – again.

The Greenville school board appears to be moving toward a more flexible discipline policy. Parents have criticized current disciplinary policy as unfair and too rigid. The board didn’t substantively change its policy that calls for automatic expulsion for such offenses as possession of alcohol on school grounds. But the revision is intended to make it clearer that an automatic recommendation doesn’t mean an automatic expulsion, according to a recent story by Greenville News writer Ron Barnett.

The district is moving away from a zero-tolerance policy that leaves little room for adult judgment and extenuating circumstances. School board chairman Keith Ray signaled the district’s greater flexibility, saying “If the board adopts this policy, the board is making a very strong statement that we do not tolerate that behavior, but at the same time it’s not a zero-tolerance policy where we throw reason out the window.”

A “zero-tolerance” approach to student discipline may sound good in theory, but principals and other school officials should not be held hostage to policy. There has to be some room for discretion.

Too often, Zero Tolerance policies are pushed through by parents, politicians and administrators whose outlook on life is exclusively rule-based and stuck somewhere in 19th Century rulebooks. Or older.

A little common sense in a corner of the Palmetto State.

A Singapore man with a penchant for sniffing women’s armpits was sentenced to 14 years in jail and 18 strokes of the cane for molesting his victims…

He molested 23 women over the course of 15 months, smelling their armpits and touching them in lifts, staircase landings and their homes, the paper said. He was caught after a housewife reported him to the police.

The court meted out the jail term, normally reserved for hardcore criminals, saying the man was likely to commit crimes again.

Does the punishment fit the crime?

The U.S. Army, experiencing a stagnant recruiting situation, is going experiential.

The Army plans to unveil a pilot concept recruitment center in late August that was inspired by the interactivity of Apple Stores. The center, opening in a city that’s yet to be determined, will be built around virtual simulations and other experiential marketing techniques to engage visitors…

The first new recruitment center is designed to be less intimidating and more “like walking into a NASA center,” said Walters. It will consist of three large simulators with full-scale mock-ups of Army equipment and wrap-around 270-degree video screens. “The modeling command and control systems are like those used in Iraq…”

The Apache simulator allows a pilot and co-pilot to experience the aircraft and its weapons systems. The Black Hawk helicopter simulator provides four door gunner positions. And, the armored HMMWV vehicle simulator has positions for a driver and several gunners. The centers also will include an area where visitors can compete in America’s Army, a videogame released in 2002…

They may be aggressive; but, I doubt that Apple store designers are literally out to kill the competition.

The British government is facing fresh criticism over another embarrassing lapse in security after a second batch of secret official files were found left on a train.

The papers, which cover the UK’s policies on fighting global terrorist funding, drugs trafficking and money laundering were handed to The Independent on Sunday.

This latest blunder has prompted calls for civil servants to be banned from taking confidential documents out of their offices…

The papers were found on the same day that a top secret assessments by the Joint Intelligence Committee covering Iraq and al Qaida were handed to the BBC having also been left on a train…

The pol heading the committee investigating security lapses said, “Our enemies don’t even need to hack into our computers, they apparently just need to travel on public transport…”