Brickbats.

• Author: Oliver, Charles
• Position: Brief article

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When officers Thomas Elliassen and Michael Danese caught a 14-year-old boy tossing eggs at cars on Staten Island last Halloween, they did what any cops would do. They took him to a swampy area, made him strip to his shorts and socks, and left him there.

Most people just chuckle when David Pratt wears a T-shirt that reads, "Don't piss me off! I am running out of places to hide the bodies." But the cops in Peterborough, England, decided the shirt could incite violence and threatened him with an 80 [pounds sterling] fine if they saw him wearing it again.

In Portage County, Ohio, assistant public defender Brian Jones told Judge John Plough he wasn't ready to take a case to trial. So the judge ordered deputies to take the lawyer into custody. According to the public defender's office, Jones had been assigned the case only a day or so before.

Bob Du Broy, vice president of a Christian music station in Ottawa, wants to start another station devoted to spoken-word Christian programming. There's just one problem: Canadian broadcast regulations require him to devote 71 minutes of airtime each day to other faiths, for "balance." Still, he's lucky: Canada banned religious programming completely until the early 1990s.

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When Ibrahim Mohammad Lawal's neighbor became ill, he took the 63-year-old woman to the local hospital. In most countries, that sort of thing is considered a good deed. Unfortunately, Lawal was in Saudi Arabia. He was seized on charges of being alone with a woman not related to him and held in jail for 50 days.

Code enforcement officials in Maidenhead England, have ordered the staff of...