Weekly Daily Brickbats Archive 2008 January 8-31

The call them sugar gliders, and they are small possums from Australia. Owners say they are cute and fun. But members of the St. Paul, Minnesota, City Council voted 6-1 to ban to ban them. Are the sugar gliders dangerous? No, but council members say they are high maintenance and smelly. They aren't sure that everyone who gets one if up to properly caring for it. That's why they banned them.

South Yorkshire, England, police sent Ayesha Khan a ticket for driving 65 mph in a 40 mph zone. They warned her to pay up or face a court date. Ayesha is just two years old, and her mother says the girl's feet can't even reach the pedals of a car. A police spokesman blamed "an ambiguity in the information supplied to us" for Ayesha getting a ticket.

Officials at Illinois' Mascoutah Elementary School say they warned Megan Coulter about her behavior, but she refused to shape up. So they gave her detention, twice, for hugging a classmate. The Mascoutah Public School District banned displays of affection last year.

Police knocked at Lakshmana Kailash K's door in Bangalore one morning, waking him up. They said he'd uploaded an insulting picture of Chhatrapati Shivaji, founder of the Maratha empire, on an Internet networking site. They arrested him for insulting Shivaji and put him in jail. Fifty days later, police released him. They say they'd found the real criminals, three weeks earlier.