10,000 copies of a Russian school notebook feature a greeting from the local mayor (who was just arrested for bribery)

This May, school children in Orenburg received little notebooks with a message from their mayor, Evgeny Arapov. “Dear friend!” the text begins. “The most important thing now is to study well! [...] I hope you make your parents, your school, and our town proud!” The only problem with the notebooks is that Mayor Arapov was arrested in mid-August for extorting 600,000 rubles ($8,915) in bribes from a local businessman for favoritism in the city’s construction industry. Investigators also found four million rubles (almost $60,000) in Arapov’s office.

“The only thing we can do is either tear out the page or paste something over it,” says Vladimir Ukhov, the local businessman who produced 10,000 copies of the notebooks, apparently without the participation of Orenburg’s City Hall.