truTV: Not Reality. Actuality.

Change We Can Believe In: In December, the city council in Brighton, Mich., passed an ordinance making it illegal for anyone to be "annoying" in public, "by word of mouth, sign or motions." Violators can be ticketed and fined.

In November, a jury acquitted Ms. Johnnie Miles, 42, of $7,500 worth of fraudulent credit-card transactions against a store in Vero Beach, Fla., and Miles assumed she had thus earned her freedom. However, Judge Dan Vaughn apparently considered Miles a disreputable rip-off artist (even though technically not guilty of "fraud") and used her schemings to convict her of violating probation on an earlier case. Florida law permits such collateral use of a defendant's behavior, and Vaughn sentenced Miles to five years on each of 11 probation violations, to be served consecutively.

In December, Britain's Oxford University Press announced the latest changes in its highly selective Junior Dictionary, finding room to add dozens of words, including trapezium, alliteration and incisor but eliminating, for example, bishop, chapel, christen, minister, monk, nun, parish, psalm and saint. The publisher said the changes reflect Britain's "multicultural, multifaith" society.

Germany's highest court ruled in December in favor of a male inmate who had challenged a prison rule barring men from purchasing skin-conditioning products.

In November, a judge at Killorglin District Court in Kerry, Ireland, dismissed two DUI cases because the blood-alcohol readings were not administered properly. The suspects should have been isolated for 20 minutes before the test but had been permitted to use urinals, and the judge accepted lawyers' arguments that "steam" from the urine might have wafted into the men's noses and raised their readings.

In November, the student association at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, voted to eliminate a cystic fibrosis organization from the list of charities it supports, explaining that since the condition almost exclusively afflicts white people, it was not "inclusive" enough to merit student funding.