truTV: Not Reality. Actuality.

Britain's Local Governments Are Afraid of Everything: The Bedfordshire and Luton Fire and Rescue Service issued rules recently requiring the use of long poles to test high-up fire alarms because letting the firefighters use stepladders might lead to injuries.

"You use the toilet every day. Imagine if you could start pouring a little gasoline into the toilet bowl and get 50 cents a gallon (as a tax credit from IRS) every time you flushed." According to a hedge fund analyst (quoted by The Nation magazine for an April story), that's the way Congress' 2005 legislation to encourage "alternative" fuels has been exploited by the paper industry. Company representatives have until now been proud that the paper industry supplied most of its own fuel, as a by-product of making paper, but when it discovered the tax credit, it reworked its factories to accept a mixture of the incumbent by-product and ordinary diesel fuel, thus creating an "alternative" fuel and earning the credit, which, for example, was worth $71.6 million to International Paper Co. in March and is not scheduled to expire until December.

In March, because of budget cuts, the Municipal Court in Mount Gilead, Ohio, ordered its clerk to accept no new filings of any kind (including criminal cases) unless the filer brings his own paper for printing the legally required copies to be distributed.

Inadvertently, Raed Jarrar, 30, made his August 2006 airline flight from New York to Oakland, Calif., pay off handsomely for him, despite some inconvenience and harassment. Jarrar, an Iraqi-born U.S. resident married to an American citizen, was wearing a T-shirt with Arabic lettering at the JetBlue gate at JFK airport when the airline denied him boarding. After negotiating, he was allowed to board provided he cover the shirt and sit in the back row. In January 2009, JetBlue and two officials of the Transportation Security Administration agreed to pay Jarrar $240,000 to settle his racial profiling lawsuit. (The T-shirt read "We Will Not Be Silent" and was in both English and Arabic.)

Australia's Queensland Rail agency disclosed in January that it would quickly offer refunds to passengers on a Cairns-to-Brisbane train that crashed just outside Cairns, but reiterated at the same time that it would not pay refunds to survivors of a November 2008 Brisbane-to-Cairns train crash that killed two and injured nine. The difference, according to a Queensland Rail general manager, was that the 2009 trip was just getting underway from Cairns when it crashed, but that the 2008 trip, also near Cairns, was "95 percent over" by the time the deadly crash occurred (and thus, the survivors had basically reached their destination).

The U.S. Transportation Security Administration ruled in January that a post-9-11 federal maritime law, which requires comprehensive background credentials for mariners holding U.S. Coast Guard authorization on U.S. waters, applies even to the two "mule skinners" who work, in tourist season, dressed in colonial costumes at the Hugh Moore Historical Park in Easton, Pa. The park's lone mule-pulled boat is operated in a 2-mile-long canal that is near nothing of strategic significance, said the park director.