truTV: Not Reality. Actuality.

According to a report commissioned by Britain's Department of Education and Skills, some history teachers have dropped references to the Holocaust (and the 11th-century Crusades) out of fear that the regular history curriculum might confuse or anger Muslim students who have been taught differently in local mosques (according to an April story in London's Daily Mail). And London's Daily Telegraph reported in March that the head teacher at a school in Huddersfield had changed the June student festival production of Roald Dahl's "The Three Little Pigs" to "The Three Little Puppies," out of fear that Muslim children would be uncomfortable singing "pig" references. (A local Muslim spokesman immediately condemned the change as unnecessary, and the school overruled the teacher.)

The Scandia Family Fun Center, which operates a super thrill ride (168 feet high, spinning at 60 miles an hour, pulling 3.5 g's) called the Screamer, in Sacramento, Calif., decided in March that because of neighborhood residents' noise complAin'ts, riders would be prohibited from screaming (and subject to ejection from the park).

The Department of Homeland Security's inspector general revealed in March that, although 52 teams are at work tracking down foreigners who remain in the country even after being ordered out, the agency still has a backlog of 620,000 of these fugitive aliens. (However, the inspector general also admitted that there are not enough cells to detain that many fugitives, anyway.)

The local government's Tourist Information Centre in Swindon, England, told author Mark Sutton that his World War I-themed book, Tell Them Of Us, could not be sold in its bookstore unless Sutton demonstrated that he had liability insurance, not for potentially libelous passages but in case readers, for example, suffered paper cuts turning the pages. Said Swindon Borough Council spokesman Richard Freeman, "We have to cover every eventuality."

A condominium on New York City's Upper East Side filed a $500,000 lawsuit in February against a Subway sandwich shop on the building's first floor, complaining about "nauseating" food odors, but according to a New York Sun reporter, the dominant "smell" involved is a scent highly valued by many clear-nosed, non-New Yorkers: fresh-baked bread.

Tennessee's death-row-execution procedures came under attack in February when critics realized they were a hodgepodge of lethal-injection rules intermingled with old electric-chair protocol. (Lethal injection thus now requires shaving an inmate's head and having a fire extinguisher ready.) Also in February, at a hearing investigating Florida's botched December execution of Angel Diaz, a special commission concluded that the executioner should have re-checked whether the IV line was in the vein, instead of (as he did) merely continuing to push the resisting chemicals into the arm. (The only formal qualification to be appointed a Florida executioner is to be at least 18 years old.)