truTV: Not Reality. Actuality.

An official of the National Association of Letter Carriers in Buffalo, N.Y., said in February that it would challenge the Postal Service's threatened suspension of a carrier who was using sidewalks to get from house to house this winter instead of walking across ice-packed, deep-snow-drift yards. Cutting across yards is required by Postal Service rules in order to speed up deliveries.

The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal agreed in February to hear the charge brought by Roxanne Stevenson that she was turned down illegally for a clerk's job by the city of Kelowna because she smokes. "Smoking," itself, is not covered by the law, and a city official said Stevenson frequently used sick leave at a previous job and that, during her interview, she "reeked" of smoke and coughed constantly. Lawyers interviewed by the Vancouver Sun said, however, that employers cannot discriminate on account of health status or addiction without offering to accommodate the worker's condition.

Doctoral student Daniel Bennett filed a lawsuit against Britain's Leeds University in February because custodians had mistakenly thrown out research that he had been working with for the last seven years. Bennett is studying the rare Butaan lizard of the Philippines and over the years, to examine its diet, had painstakingly sifted through jungle dirt to gather over 70 pounds of its feces, which Bennett believes is worth far more than the ($720) Leeds has offered him.

In January, a federal judge dismissed the last lawsuit standing in the way of a new Indian casino for California's Amador County, where the federally recognized Me-Wuk tribe of the Buena Vista Rancheria has its 67-acre reservation. The tribe consists of Rhonda Morningstar Pope and her five children, none of whom lives on the tribal land.

Community Property: As part of a highly contentious New York divorce, surgeon Richard Batista, who in good times had donated a kidney to his wife, demanded in January that she either give it back or compensate him with $1.5 million in consideration of the rarity of his kidney match.

Elizabeth Shelton, 21, filed a lawsuit in Houston in December against the truck driver that she accidentally rear-ended in a 2007 crash, while she was intoxicated, and in which her boyfriend was killed. Though she was convicted of manslaughter, she is now suing for $20,000 damage to her Lexus SUV and for "pain and suffering," basing her claim on the fact that the blameless driver she hit was uninsured. In all, her lawsuit names 16 defendants, including insurance companies and banks. Shelton is the daughter of a state court judge.