Dalton Daily Citizen
May 26, 2009 10:51 pm
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When Canada’s governor-general has your back, she really has your back. Michaelle Jean recently traveled to the Arctic to show her support for the Inuit seal hunt, which some people call inhumane. While there, Jean gutted a freshly killed seal, pulled out its heart and ate it raw, then turned to her daughter and told her how good it tasted.
Last year, Rembert Weakland, the former archbishop of Milwaukee, admitted that he transferred priests with a history of sexual misconduct into other churches without informing parishioners of their problems. But in a forthcoming memoir, Weakland offers an explanation for his behavior. According to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Weakland writes that he knew that sexual abuse of minors was evil, but he didn’t realize it was a crime.
The Albany, Ga., City Council has banned people from putting sofas and other indoor furniture on their porches or in their lawns.
Albany isn’t the only city that has no respect for private property. In Washington, D.C., police have begun issuing parking tickets to people who have parked in their own driveways. Under city law, everything between a building’s exterior wall facing the street and the property line is considered “public space under the care and maintenance of the property owner.” That means if any part of a car is parked beyond the front of a building it is illegally parked. It also means if you have a can of beer on your front porch, you can be arrested for drinking in public, as many district residents have found out. It doesn’t mean that the city public works department will mow your front yard, however. Homeowners are responsible for maintaining their front yards, and the city will fine them if they don’t keep them up to code.
In Czarist Russia and the Soviet Union, the government used internal passports to track the movements of all its citizens. Westerners used to brag about how they were free to move about without such surveillance. But Britain’s new Immigration and Citizenship bill would give police and other officials the right to demand that anyone present ID at any time. Those who resist or who do not have ID on them would be arrested and could face prison time. Currently, and for most of British history, police have been able to ask someone for ID only if they have reasonable suspicion they have committed a crime.
Los Angeles County officials spent $13,000 trying to collect $1,004 from Sally Stokes. They said the woman owed the money for time her granddaughter spent in a juvenile detention camp.
In Lakeland, Minn., some 50 teachers have asked the school board to ban the Confederate flag. The teachers made their request after one student drove a pickup truck with a Confederate flag emblem on the back window to school. No word on how many of those teachers teach American government.
It isn’t illegal to take photographs in the New York City subway system. Robert Taylor can even show you the part of the state code that says it’s legal. That’s just what he did when New York City police tried to stop him from taking photos. He even showed the law to the officer’s sergeant. They arrested him anyway for taking photographs without authority, disorderly conduct/unreasonable voice and impeding traffic. They later dropped the charge of taking photos without authority. But Taylor still faces charges of disorderly conduct for trying to point out to the officers what the law actually is.
New York City has banned automobiles from idling more than 60 seconds in school zones. Previously, the city had limited idling to three minutes. Some of the worst offenders were school bus drivers, who reportedly would let their buses idle for up to 20 minutes despite the law.
Charles Oliver is a staff writer for The Daily Citizen.
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