Weekly Daily Brickbats Archive 2007 March 1-31

Yvette Bavier says she made it through the first 60 years of her life without getting into trouble with the law. That ended on her lunch break recently. She was tossing birdseed to sparrows when two New York City police officers stopped her. She says it took them 20 minutes to figure out what to charge her with, but she was eventually given a ticket for littering. She says she was even more stunned when, as they departed, one of the officers told her if she went to court she could probably get the ticket dismissed. A police spokesman says the officers were responding to a complaint that someone was endangering pigeons by feeding them raw rice.

The editors of Cambridge University's Clareification magazine renamed it Crucification for a special issue of religious satire, an issue that reproduced some of the infamous Danish cartoons of Mohammad, the founder of Islam. Of course, the issue quickly brought protests, and the university says it has disciplined the guest editor of that issue. More ominously, police have reportedly "questioned under caution" that guest editor as well as the editor of the magazine. Police say they have sent a file to the Crown Prosecution Service for possible legal action.

Bakersfield, California, resident Jessie Bower saw two men in her backyard. Though the 68-year-old woman is not in good health, she grabbed a handgun and held them until sheriff's deputies arrived. The deputies arrested the two men on suspicion of burglary. And they seized Bower's gun, which was not properly registered.

British police have almost 3 million DNA profiles, about 6 percent of its population, on file. But that's not enough Dave Johnston, the head of the Metropolitan Police's Homicide and Serious Crimes unit. He wants DNA samples taken from all babies. "We have 300,000 unsolved cases where we have taken a profile at a crime scene but have not yet matched it," he said. Johnston did not say how many babies he suspects may have committed those crimes.

Zimbabwe has banned political rallies for three months. The move came as President Robert Mugabe planned to celebrate his 83^rd birthday. In fact, he planned a lavish party that was paid for, according to The Times of London by "deducting money from civil servants' wages and bullying near-bankrupt businesses for donations."