Brickbats
The Bowery Mission in New York City had to toss away a batch of fried chicken donated by a local church to help feed the homeless. City law bans all licensed food vendors, including emergency food providers, from serving food with trans fat.
The English shopkeeper Mark Howard says he recycles all the cardboard boxes his bicycles come in, sometimes as packaging for secondhand bikes and sometimes at home as bedding for his chickens. The Southend Council has fined him £180 for not producing any garbage.
The Transportation Security Administration will not allow airline passengers to take snow globes through security. The globes contain liquids, and the agency's rules bar passengers from bringing liquids, gels, or aerosols in containers of more than three ounces in their carry-on bags.
Students at Stevenson High School in Illinois say administrators not only forced them to remove articles from the school newspaper dealing with smoking, drinking, and teen pregnancy but required them to write replacement articles in just two hours or receive a failing grade.
Chicago police have charged Samantha Tumpach with felony copying of a movie. While taping part of a surprise birthday party for her sister at the city's Muvico Theater, Tumpach captured less than four minutes of the film Twilight: New Moon. She faces up to three years in prison if convicted.
The Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation has fined the Roosters salon chain for allowing its cosmetologists to shave their customers. Texas law allows only barbers to shave.
Randolph Forde, who teaches at Mundy's Mill High School in Georgia, has been charged with making terroristic threats against a student. Forde allegedly threatened to hit the 16-year-old boy and later reportedly offered to pay another student to kill him.
The House of Representatives has passed a bill mandating that the National Park Service take over Billy Carter's old gas station and make it part of the Jimmy Carter National Historic Site in Plains, Georgia. The legislation also calls on the park service to take over a house Jimmy Carter lived in from 1956 to 1961 and a state welcome center that may be closed because of budget cuts. According to the Congressional Budget Office, it will cost $17 million to upgrade and run the sites for five years.
John Mason, a resident of Connah's Quay, Wales, filled his garden waste bin with grass clippings and dozens of apples that had fallen from his trees into his yard. When he went to collect the bin, he found that sanitation workers not only had not emptied it but had slapped a "contaminated" sticker on it. Council officials told Mason the apples were kitchen waste, not garden waste, and they weren't going to collect them.
A young girl was killed in Afghanistan after she was struck by a box of propaganda leaflets dropped by the British Royal Air Force.
Charles Oliver
