From The Daily Mail:

Prison officer Walter Schmidt wanted to give his colleagues' children a taste of what their mums and dads get up to at work while showing them around a Florida jail.

So to make the youngsters' experience all the more realistic as they toured Franklin Correctional Institution during the lock-up's 'Take our Daughters and Sons to Work Day', he decided to zap them with his 50,000-volt stun gun.

The jolt sent at least two of them sprawling to the floor, crying out in pain and clutching at agonising burns on their arms. One child ended up in hospital.

But 37-year-old Schmidt told officials who later fired him that he had only been trying to show the children - whose parents all work at the jail near Tallahassee - what a typical day involves while handling unruly inmates.

'It wasn't intended to be malicious, but educational,' he explained to the St Petersburg Times.

'The big shock came when I got fired.'

One of my favorite satirical sites is The Peoples News, which describes itself as "a satirical look at the lives of Black folks....While the stories are intended to be humorous and entertaining, they are also designed to spark discussions and make people think."

Here are some recent stories:

• Undercover Democrat Michael Steele Sabotages GOP
• African Americans Thankful Multiple-Birth Mom Isn’t Black
• March 16: This Day in African-American History (1621): Samoset, a Mohegan Indian, arrives at the Plymouth Colony with a message to the Pilgrims that he thinks says "Welcome, my name is Samoset." But tragically, his prankster friend, Leroy, had actually taught him to say "Please tell your countrymen back home to come steal our land and wipe us out."

The site also contains occasional true stories that are beyond satire, such as this one about child abuse and welfare fraud that is too tasteless for me to post here.

My sister Andrea spotted this photo of disgraced Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich in the Chicago Sun-Times.

I read the above-pictured article on the Independent website about the Austrian family in which the father imprisoned his daughter in a secret cellar and fathered seven children by her, three of whom were also imprisoned and had never been outside.

I clicked on the link "Interesting? Click here to explore further" and got links to three articles, including:

• "Room at the bottom: Creating or converting a cellar"

From that article:

Sam Dunn goes underground to look at the costs, benefits and pitfalls of building a new living area below stairs...

"I'm sure it will add value but we'd always thought about how we needed an extra room for our children to use."

See also earlier story on bad computer-generated recommendations.

From the New York Times (January 9, 2008):

Two men were arrested on Tuesday after pushing a corpse, seated in an office chair, along the sidewalk to a check-cashing store to cash the dead man's Social Security check.

Some comments by my co-workers:

In Chicago they would have been taking him to vote. -- Bart Locanthi

In LA, it would have been a movie screening's focus group -- Bryan Baker

Readers?