Postcards

And then she was put in ‘time-out.’ In November, Albuquerque Metro Judge Barbara Brown was temporarily suspended after police charged her with throwing rocks at a check-cashing store. The behavior was sparked when the store refused to grant the judge a loan because she had not yet paid off a previous loan.

We don’t want it. You can’t have it. City officials in Edmonds, Wash., are suing a local man for taking a totem pole out of a landfill. The city had voted to trash the pole, which it had received as a donation. According to the Seattle Times, officials just want to make sure the pole stays in the landfill.

Yo. Take my cab. New York and Charleston, S.C., were named the most polite cities in the country in December. The list of the 10 best-mannered cities has been compiled by Marjabelle Young Stewart for the last 25 years. Charleston has appeared every year and has topped the list eight times. Counting the most recent list, New York has appeared only twice.

A quarter century of pressing business. Philadelphia City Councilman Angel Ortiz was recently found to have been driving for the last 25 years without a license. “I kept trying to make time to get a new license, and it seemed that something pressing always took precedence,” Ortiz told the Philadelphia Daily News. According to the newspaper, Ortiz also had 53 unpaid parking tickets worth about $3,000.

Bomb? What bomb? New Bedford, Mass., high school students who had threatened to blow up their school got a break in November when police tossed out the partial bomb that served as evidence. According to the Boston Globe, the police made the decision based on an erroneous belief that only active bombs could be used as evidence.