Brickbats
* The French Riviera town of Le Lavandou has banned death. Anyone who doesn't have a reserved burial plot is now forbidden from dying within city limits. "I know it's absurd, but it's no less absurd than the court order which banned us from building a new cemetery on the grounds that the seaside terrain where we want to build comes under rules protecting the environment," said Mayor Gil Bernardi.
* The Turkish government is serious about its census. It threatened three months in jail to anyone who left their home the day of last fall's count. To make matters worse, the census determines how many representatives each district has and how much government money cities receive. So some local governments tried to keep people from returning to their home towns for the tally. In Ankara, police tried to keep buses from leaving the city the day before the count.
* In Elkhart, Indiana, David Hobbs and Josh Beam were turned away from their high school graduation ceremonies because they didn't wear neckties, as required by administrators. Hobbs and Beam, proud Marines, wore their dress uniforms instead. School officials told them to remove their jackets and don ties, but since military personnel can neither wear an incomplete uniform nor add anything to it, they refused. Security escorted them from the event.
* Thomas Walsh hasn't paid his city property tax in three years. "I have no defense. I just fall behind," he said about his $3,500 in back taxes. Walsh is the director of the Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, Tax Claim Bureau.
* German motorists have been put on notice: Don't make rude gestures at traffic cameras. A Bavarian court has ruled that a driver who gave a camera the middle finger was, in effect, making that gesture at the police. He was charged with offending the police, a crime in Germany.
* The Tyranny Response Team, a pro-gun rights group, pulls no punches. When the Boulder, Colorado, City Council met to discuss more curbs on guns, the TRT wanted to show what can happen when people can't defend themselves. They showed up wearing yellow stars and passed out photos of Holocaust victims. At anti-gun marches, they've stood on the sidelines raising their arms and yelling "Sieg Heil!" Some people apparently don't get the point: The Anti-Defamation League now monitors the group.
* Police in Lagos, Nigeria, released two dogs after failing to find any evidence to support charges that they were actually children who had been transformed into canines by a witch. They also released the man accused of making the change, as well as 13 members of a mob that beat the man and tried to lynch him.
