Iran's parliament is set to pass a bill regulating how men dress in public, banning apparel that "is against public modesty, such as clothing that does not cover a part of the body lower than the chest or higher than the ankle." But the Basij, the nation's morality police, is already enforcing the law. They have been beating and arresting men caught wearing shorts in public, at a time when temperatures reaching 45° Celsius (113° Fahrenheit) and frequent power outages have led many men to wear shorts outside.

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In Buffalo, New York, city officials say they will pause efforts to collect amusement license fees from local music venues. A law allowing the city to collect the fees has been on the books since 1927, but the city only began attempting to collect the money earlier this month. The fees are charged per event, based on the price of tickets. Some venue owners told local media the fees could cost them $10,000 to $25,000 a year, and larger venues said the fees could cost them as much as $100,000. Some city council members said they were caught off guard by the move to collect the fees and plan to address the issue when the council meets again in September.

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Electric school buses that were supposed to cut one Maryland county school system's transit costs in half actually cost the system millions of dollars. A report by the Montgomery County Office of the Inspector General found the buses were often delivered late and frequently had mechanical issues that "rendered them inoperable for extended periods." As a result, the school system had to spend more than $14.7 million to buy 90 diesel buses to cover routes. The delays and repair issues entitled the school system to more than $372,000 in penalties from the contractor, but no administrator ever pursued it.

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The Houston Police Department halted more than 260,000 investigations between 2016 and 2023 because of a lack of personnel. Now, department leaders say they will try to catch up on those investigations, especially the 4,017 rape cases that were put on hold. Police officials said they did not realize just how often the "S.L." tag, for "Suspended–Lack of Personnel," was applied to cases until a home invasion and sexual assault in September 2023. Physical evidence recovered from that scene matched that of a rape kit from a September 2022 assault. Detectives found that the earlier case had been marked S.L. even though the victim gave police her attacker's name, description, and vehicle description.

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For the past year, New York City-based political strategy firm Mercury Public Affairs has lobbied Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson on economic and labor issues. And beginning in 2024, it has also consulted for his political fund. According to the Chicago Tribune, there are no state or city ethics rules that prohibit a political group from helping an elected official raise money at the same time it is lobbying him.

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In the United Kingdom, a National Health Service survey found that 26 percent of people in Cheshire and Merseyside who tried to book a dental appointment in the last two years were unsuccessful, and 20 percent of Cheshire and Merseyside residents who did get to see a dentist rated the experience fairly or very poor, numbers which are typical of England as a whole. The British Dental Association said that millions of people no longer even try to book appointments because they know they can't get one, adding that getting to see an NHS dentist "is just a nice idea rather than a reality they can depend on."

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In California, Cajon Valley Union Superintendent David Miyashiro ran up nearly $400,000 in charges on his school district credit card between May 2022 and March 2024. Miyashiro spent thousands of dollars for professional conferences and memberships in education associations, while also spending $76,000 on hotels, $30,000 on airfare, $10,000 on rideshares, and $50,000 on food plus another $115,700 on catering; his average purchase during that period was $19,000. Miyashiro is one of the highest-paid superintendents in the state, receiving a $408,000 annual salary, an $800 monthly car allowance, and a $300 monthly stipend for business expenses.

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Jamey Noel, former Clark County, Indiana, sheriff and Republican Party chairman, is facing 25 felony counts relating to claims that he used jail employees for personal work and that he used credit cards from a volunteer fire department he headed and money from the jail commissary to make personal purchases, among other allegations. A state audit found more than $900,000 worth of "questionable" or "unsupported" purchases.

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U.S. Reps. Grace Meng and Tim Kennedy, both Democrats from New York, have introduced a bill that bar the sale, transfer, or possession of Level 3 body armor to anyone but the military or police officers. Level 3 armor is designed to stop rifle rounds such as 7.62 mm. The bill is named for Aaron Salter Jr., a retired police officer who died trying to stop a 2022 mass shooting in Buffalo. Kennedy said Salter fired on and hit the gunman but the gunman was wearing body armor and was not stopped.

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A Portland, Maine, police department after-action report on a mass shooting last year describes a scene of "utter chaos" with officers who had not been dispatched showing up in civilian clothing, some of them dressed similarly to how the gunman was described as being dressed. The report said this could have led to an accidental friendly fire incident. It also said a tactical team from another agency almost crashed its armored vehicle into another police vehicle. Officers also reported smelling alcohol from inside that tactical team's vehicle, and members of the team said they had just come from a funeral.

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When two masked men broke into a woman's Chicago home, she called 911. And then she called again. And again. In total, she spoke to 911 operators six times over the course of an hour. At one point, a supervisor explained they had no police units to send, blaming cuts to the police department; he even recommended she call her alderman and ask him to give the police more funding. Fortunately for her, the intruders left after spotting her. Officers did not arrive until more than three hours after her first call to 911.

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Jeremy Haney, a former police officer in Appleton, Wisconsin, has pleaded no contest to felony misconduct in public office for falsifying information in a report. Haney forged the signatures of a prosecutor and a judge on paperwork to authorize placing a tracking device on a suspect's vehicle as part of a drug investigation. An assistant district attorney spotted the discrepancy when he was reviewing the documents and realized they were not the ones he signed. Haney claimed that he lost the original paperwork, so he reprinted it and forged the signatures. He will receive no jail time but will have to pay fines and fees totaling more than $1,000.

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Justin Champlin, the former chief deputy tax assessor in Ascension Parish, Louisiana, has been arrested on two counts each of injuring public records and computer tampering, as well as malfeasance in office. Police said that on two different occasions, Champlin illegally reduced the assessment on his property to lower his tax obligation. Champlin was fired from his job in early April following an internal audit.

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A German court has ruled that the robots at the Tegut supermarket chain must be given Sundays off, just like human workers. Under German law, retail stores must close on Sundays and Christian holidays in order to give employees a day of rest. Tegut has gotten around that law by fully automating its stores, and it gets 25–30 percent of its sales on Sunday. A union that represents shop workers filed suit to force the stores to close on Sundays, saying it fears the company's success could undermine support for the nation's blue laws.

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Hawaii News Now (HNN), a news service operated by a consortium of TV stations, reports that in 2022 and 2023, Oahu police arrested almost 300 people for driving under the influence who had breathalyzer scores below the legal limit of 0.08, 69 of them with scores of 0.00. "When I was a policeman, I never had anybody blow triple zeros," said Jonathan Burge, a defense attorney specializing in traffic cases and former Honolulu Police Department (HPD) officer. Burge claims there are unofficial quotas for officers, particularly for those working DUI task forces funded by federal dollars. Deputy HPD Chief Keith Horikawa, in a statement to HNN, said "supervisors may have goals and standards that are pertinent to their unit to help guide the personnel under their command." HNN reports that even when charges are dropped, the arrest remains on the records of adult drivers unless they pay to have it expunged. Last year, the Honolulu Prosecutor's Office rejected more than 80 percent of the DUI cases referred by HPD.

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The Los Angeles County Probation Department has placed 12 officers on administrative leave pending an investigation of violence at the Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall. Video taken in December 2023 showed officers standing around watching, and perhaps encouraging, fights among the youth housed at the facility. "We will not tolerate misconduct like that depicted in the video, nor will we tolerate a lack of urgent response, if and when these incidents happen," said Probation Chief Guillermo Viera Rosa in a statement.

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An Iranian court has sentenced rapper Toomaj Salehi to death after finding him guilty of "corruption on Earth." Salehi has been arrested multiple times for his songs about the government's corruption and stifling of dissent.

The post Brickbat: Songs of Protest appeared first on Reason.com.

In England, a judge has ruled that London's Metropolitan Police cannot bar Niyak Ghorbani from attending pro-Palestinian protests. Ghorbani, an Iranian dissident, has become famous for attending such protests while carrying a sign that reads "Hamas is terrorist." He has been arrested by Met police three times at those protests. At his last arrest, he did not have the sign, but he was arrested for refusing to stand where a police officer told him. After that arrest, the police gave him a piece of paper saying that one of his bail conditions was "not to attend any protest relating to Israel or Palestine in the City of Westminster." The judge said that condition was not "necessary or proportionate."

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Tressa Beltran, former police chief of Hartford, Michigan, has been charged with multiple felonies, including delivery of narcotics, larceny, extortion, using a computer to commit a crime, embezzlement over $50 by a public official, and three counts of drug possession. Beltran reportedly admitted stealing from the drug disposal box at the police department. Now a new lawsuit against Beltran and the city claims she coerced Hai Quoc Le Jr. into providing her with pain medication he was prescribed for a torn ACL. Le is on parole, and according to his lawsuit, Beltran threatened to make his life "a living hell" if he didn't provide her with drugs, by reporting him to his parole officer and charging him criminally. Le says Beltran was often in her uniform and on duty when she met with him.

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Police Scotland received thousands of complaints under the nation's new hate crimes law just in the first few days after it took effect. Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf told The Telegraph that "a tiny percentage" of the numerous complaints are "turning into actual investigations," but control room staff is running up overtime weeding through them. Yousaf, who backed the law, said that even if complaints start to dwindle in the future, it will take "weeks or months" and cost "hundreds of thousands of pounds" to work through the backlog.

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In England, Swansea Crown Court Judge Geraint Walters wanted to know why prosecutors dropped charges against photographer Dimitris Legakis on the eve of the trial. Legakis had been arrested for taking photos near a crime scene and charged with assaulting an emergency worker, obstructing or resisting a police officer, and using threatening or abusive words or behavior. A prosecutor said charges were dropped because the officer's original statement differed from a later one. But Walters said that after reading the record, he believed that Legakis was arrested because a police officer "took offence" to him taking photos. He said he believed prosecutors knew early on that "there was no evidential basis" to charge Legakis.

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The Scottish Ambulance Service fired Christopher Gallacher, a duty manager at West Centre in Glasgow, after finding he had an on-duty emergency dispatcher pick him and his family up at the airport after a vacation. According to a disciplinary tribunal, this happened on an evening when there were a "high number of calls" and patients were waiting for "lengthy periods of time." The dispatcher was away from his post for 45 minutes. Gallacher said he had assumed the man would use his break to pick him up.

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California state Sen. Anthony Portantino, (D–Burbank) has introduced a bill that would require gun owners to annually register their firearms with the state. The registration information would be available to law enforcement agencies. "SB 1160 will give the state better data and help us understand how many firearms are in private hands and who owns them," said Portantino.

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The New York City government is refusing to reimburse Adam and Elizabeth Rizer for the loss of their car, which was totaled during a police chase. An officer was pursuing a suspected stolen vehicle when the officer's vehicle, with its lights flashing, T-boned a Hertz rental car in an intersection. That car then collided with the Rizers' Jeep, which was parked outside their apartment. The entire incident, including the collision, was caught on video. Police reports note that the police vehicle struck the Rizers' vehicle, but the city comptroller's office insists the vehicle that was T-boned actually struck their car and referred the couple to Hertz for possible compensation.

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Italian aviation officials blocked a British Airways flight from leaving Milan for London after a surprise inspection found some of the seat cushions were too thick and too wide. Seat cushions on exit rows over the wings are supposed to be smaller to create more room in case of an evacuation. The air crew called out serial numbers for the correct seats and had passengers see if any of the cushions on their seats matched those numbers. They were able to locate enough cushions to swap out for those over the exit rows, and the flight departed after a delay of an hour.

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United Airlines received its first Airbus A321neo airplanes in December, and it has already had to ground them. But United wants you to know there were no safety issues—rather, it has to do with a 1990 Federal Aviation Administration rule requiring "No Smoking" signs to be operated by the flight crew, even though smoking on airplanes has been banned for decades. The A321neo has software that keeps the "No Smoking" sign turned on continuously during flights. In 2020, United got an exemption to that rule for all of its planes that keep the sign on continuously. But that exemption only applies to the aircraft it listed at the time. United has since applied for an exemption for the Airbus A321neo, and it says the FAA has agreed to let the airline fly those aircraft while it evaluates the application.

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Los Angeles station NBC4 reports that the California Department of Motor Vehicles may have improperly charged tens of thousands of drivers late fees for their vehicle registration. It found that the DMV has often rejected electronic checks even when the account had sufficient funds and there were no other issues, then billed the drivers late fees. The DMV told the station it isn't sure exactly how many drivers were affected or how much revenue it collected from those improper late fees.

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Gov. Janet Mills has appointed former Maine Supreme Judicial Court Justice Donald Alexander to overhear a request by Oxford County commissioners to remove Sheriff Christopher Wainwright. Wainwright sold dozens of firearms from evidence without recording the transactions or notifying commissioners. Wainwright said he used the proceeds from the sales to buy equipment for the sheriff's office. The commissioners said they have seen no proof of that claim. Wainwright apologized for his actions but said they don't warrant his removal.

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New tires for automobiles could become more expensive and less safe under legislation proposed by Washington state lawmakers. The proposed bill would give the state Department of Commerce the power to ban the sale of tires it deems bad for the environment. The bill targets heavier and more durable tires, which sponsors say have greater rolling resistance, making them less energy efficient. But critics say the bill would effectively ban cheaper tires and make those that are sold less safe. "The easiest way to reduce rolling resistance is to reduce tread depth which will, in turn, reduce wet traction performance," said Tracey Norberg of the U.S. Tire Manufacturer's Association. "It'll reduce tire life, and it'll increase scrap tire generation."

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