Brickbats
-A security guard at Seagoville High School in Dallas, Texas, ordered a student to take off her rosary. Local police say rosary beads are a gang symbol.
-In California's Dos Palos High School, an assistant principal forced Jake Shelly to take off his shirt and wear a T-shirt proclaiming him a dress code violator. Shelly's shirt, said the official, violated a provision of the dress code banning clothing that promotes "specific races, cultures, or ethnicities." It depicted the American flag.
-Dave Alsop parked his car in a lot near Torquy Harbor in England at 2:49 p.m. He paid for 75 minutes, allowing him to park until 4:04 p.m. But when he got back to his car at 3:41 p.m., he found a traffic warden had just given him a ticket. When he protested, the man tapped 14.49 intohis calculator and then added .75, which gave him 15.24. He insisted this meant that Alsop's time expired at 3:24 p.m. After Alsop appealed the ticket and won, council officials said they'd give the warden extra training on how to tell time.
-State law may prohibit some Texans who own beachfront property from rebuilding on it in the wake of Hurricane Ike. The state considers anything between the average high-tide line and the average low-tide line public property. In some places, the storm may have eroded the beach so much that previously private territory is now in that zone. The owners won't be compensated for their lost property.
-Jack Anderson may be just 6, but he's been on the federal government's no-fly list for years. Well, actually it's someone with a name similar to his. But it's close enough. His mother says the first time he had trouble with airline security was in 2004, when Jack was just 2. She says it took her family an hour to convince officials that the tyke in the stroller wasn't the man on the list. It happened again two years later. Since that encounter, the Andersons have driven, not flown, on vacations.
-When police in South Charleston, West Virginia, pulled over Jose Cruz for driving under the influence and driving with no headlights, he passed gas and waved his hand, directing the smell toward the officer. So the cops added battery to the charges. After reviewing the case, prosecutors dropped that charge.
-The poet Friedrich Schiller has been dead for more than 200 years. But that didn't stop the German government from billing him for his mandatory TV and radio license fee. Bills continue to arrive at the Friedrich Schiller Primary School, even after the headmaster wrote to the collection agency reminding them that Schiller has long been dead.
-When Brazil's Environment Ministry set out to document the 100 biggest illegal loggers, it found the biggest offender was the government itself. The six largest deforested areas of the Amazon belong to the National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform.