Brickbats
Albany High School in Oregon suspended Jaime Salazar and Marco Castro for wearing crucifixes. School officials say crucifixes are gang symbols.
When officials at New Jersey's Readington Middle School cut the lunch period to 30 minutes, students got upset. Some of them showed their displeasure by paying the $2 cost of their lunches in pennies. Twenty-nine kids received detention for their payments.
For 62 years, Betty Davies has swept the sidewalk outside her house in Wales. But a council worker recently told the 88-year-old woman to stop. The man informed her she could be taken to court and fined for breaking littering laws because she swept leaves into the street.
In West Virginia, the Monongalia County Commission upheld a 1,531 percent property tax increase levied on Jim Jones. Jones says the taxes skyrocketed after he rejected an offer from Chief Deputy Assessor Bill Perry to buy the property. Perry denies the claim, and Assessor Rodney Pyles says taxes went up because of a routine audit. But the owners of a neighboring piece of property also claim their taxes soared after they turned down an offer from Perry.
Steve Brook and Mandy Smith started to take a photo of their 11-month-old daughter on a swing in Oldham, England. A park warden rushed over and ordered them to stop, declaring that it was illegal to take pictures of children in the park. Town officials say the warden misinterpreted the policy.
City officials in Dibble, Oklahoma, cited Carol Mendenhall after a neighbor complained her goats were "doing it" in Mendenhall's yard. Turns out there was a city law against animals' mating in public, even on private property. After Mendenhall complained, the government dropped the citations and the city council repealed the law.
Denise George's Amish neighbors' religion doesn't allow them to own automobiles, so she drives them to town every now and then. They give her gas money, and sometimes homemade goods and crafts. Many people would say she is just being neighborly. But not the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission. It sent her a letter warning her that she is violating state laws against carrying passengers for compensation.
Mick Forsythe accidentally scratched Lorna Steele's car while parking outside a tattoo parlor she runs in Newtown, Wales. A subsequent discussion got heated, and Forsythe called Steele an "English bitch." Apparently, British law takes a dim view of calling someone English: A court found Forsythe guilty of racially aggravated disorderly behavior for his remarks.
Rogers, Arkansas, Police Chief Steve Helms has suspended Lt. David Mitchell for videotaping himself using a Taser on a cow, then attempting to Tase another cow but accidentally shocking himself and another man instead. Helms admits he and other high-ranking members of the department saw the video after it was completed two years ago but says that until an animal rights group found out about the tape he didn't realize Mitchell's actions may have violated police policy.