Brickbats

A school district in Okemah, Oklahoma, says it is investigating why a teacher told a 4-year-old student not to write with his left hand and then sent his mother, Alisha Sands, an article saying that in many cultures, left-handedness is considered "unlucky, inauspicious and frankly evil."

Officials at Winslow Township School 4 in New Jersey suspended an 8-year-old girl for violating the dress code. The girl wore a kelly green shirt to school, and the rules allow only white, navy blue, or dark green shirts.

New Mexico's La Cueva High School has prohibited cheerleaders from wearing their uniforms on campus, saying the outfits are too revealing. The girls are still allowed to wear them at games.

The Secret Service disrupted a planned vigil by forcing hundreds of children with cancer and their parents out of Lafayette Square Park in Washington, D.C. The park was barricaded for hours, and families were not allowed to get back in to retrieve their belongings. Parents say agents told them they closed the square because President Obama had left the White House from a nearby exit.

When Emma Gonzalez, 9, reached for her inhaler during a coughing fit at Utah's Columbia Elementary School, her teacher sent her to the principal's office. Though Emma was coughing so hard she vomited, staff confiscated the inhaler because the school had not received official notification she had a prescription for it. They say that policy is for student safety.

A German court has ordered Berlin cat breeder Jacqueline Linke to have her male Sphynx cat neutered, ruling that passing on Willie's hairless genes and lack of whiskers would amount to animal cruelty.

An Egyptian court has sentenced belly dancers Suha Mohammed Ali and Dalia Kamal Youssef to six months in jail each for inciting debauchery through music videos.

New Zealand has banned its first book in 22 years, following a complaint from a conservative group that Ted Dawe's award-winning novel Into the River contains sex and drug use.

Garbage men in Hull, England, are refusing to pick up trash unless the cans are pointed in the right direction. They say they could get injured turning the cans around.

Founders Brewing has been forced to change the label on its Breakfast Stout beer, which features a bibbed baby eating something from a bowl. Michigan law bans images of minors on alcoholic beverage labels. Bottles sold in the state will now feature the bowl and a note from the baby.

The student union at the University of East Anglia, a public university in England, ordered a Mexican restaurant to stop handing out sombreros during a student fair, saying this was racist "cultural appropriation." Members of the student union also took sombreros from those who had received them, to keep anyone from being offended.