KIDS TODAY

Better than soap

Two Connecticut high schools have responded to a rise in the use of foul language not by washing their students’ mouths out with soap, but with police-issued fines. Officers detailed to the schools will write US$103 tickets to particularly egregious trash-talkers. About 20 have been written so far.

Madonna? Strange?

She built a music career with outrageous behaviour and clothes, but Madonna’s biggest critic is her nine-year-old daughter, Lourdes. Mortified by the pop singer’s current preference for dumpy tracksuits, Lourdes has told her mother not to wear them when picking her up from school. As Madonna recently told a British newspaper: “She doesn’t want me to look too strange.”