We’ve got autistic kids banned from church, booted from flights, and now one mom claims she and her autistic 4-year-old were kicked out of their local restaurant.

Gail Martin and her daughters just wanted to grab at bite to eat at the Buckhead Cafe in Jackson one day last week. The family was just about to order when 4-year-old Alyssa began crying; she suffers from autism and that made one customer very upset.

“He said, you need to pick her up and you need to get her out of here now,” Gail said.

Gail didn’t know who was yelling at her at first, but turns out it was Jackson Police Chief Dennis Rushton, who was eating in another part of the restaurant.

“I wasn’t embarrassed from Alyssa’s behavior. I was embarrassed at the way it was handled,” she said.

A boy in Louisville, Kentucky is apparently tired of speeders in his subdivision, so he’s decided to become a junior Barney Fife to get them to slow down.

Dressed in a reflective vest, wearing a bicycle helmet and armed with a Hot Wheels brand radar gun, [11-year-old Landon Wilburn] points and records the speed of passing traffic.

The boy also carries a flashlight with a built-in siren.

Subdivision resident George Ayers said he has seen drivers lock up their brakes when they saw Landon clocking them.

On a side note, Hot Wheels makes a radar gun that actually works? How cool is that?

Casey Anthony is being held without bond after it was discovered that her 2-year-old daughter Caylee has been missing for almost a month. Anthony’s mother finally got involved an notified authorities.

Casey Anthony told detectives she dropped Caylee off at a baby sitter’s house June 9 but that the child was not there when she went to pick her up.

She never notified deputies.

She didn’t tell her parents.

She did her own investigation, she told detectives. She went to clubs that the baby sitter, a woman she identified as Zenaida Gonzalez, is known to frequent. She said she was afraid her daughter would get hurt if authorities got involved because she had seen that happen in movies.

Investigators discovered that the apartment Casey Anthony said belonged to the baby sitter had been vacant for nearly five months.

“It’s difficult to sort through what we’ve been told, given that what we’ve been given was false,” said Sgt. John Allen of the sheriff’s child-abuse unit.

Police in Indiana have found 5,000 marijuana plants growing on land that is partly used for a Girl Scout camp. Where they tipped off by the large number of empty Thin Mints boxes laying around?

Police found the hidden marijuana farm with plants in various stages of cultivation in a wooded swampy area of Kosciusko County, according to documents filed Monday in U.S. District Court in South Bend. Some of the plants were growing on land belonging to a local resident, while the bulk — about 5,000 plants — were growing on camp land. State troopers in an airplane spotted the plots.

Mario Comacho, 44, Mariano Gonzales, 38, and a juvenile were arrested last week after police found the farm. Comacho and Gonzales, both of Goshen, appeared for an initial hearing Monday in federal court on charges of possession of more than 1,000 marijuana plants with the intent to distribute. Neither man had an attorney, according to court documents.

An Alabama baby has contracted Eastern equine encephalitis, otherwise known as sleeping sickness or “Triple E”. (What, no “horse flu”?) Like West Nile Virus, EEE is a mosquito-borne illness. It’s the first known case of the disease in the United States this year.

Baldwin County health officials declined to identify the baby, but said the infant was less than a year-old. The child’s condition was unavailable.

Last September, a six-month-old boy from Gulf Shores died from the ailment.

Residents are urged to take steps to protect themselves against mosquitoes.

A new report shows that 2007 marked a significant growth in babies being born, setting a new record. Are we entering a new “baby boom”?

The 4,315,000 births in 2007, reported as “provisional” data by the National Center for Health Statistics, gives just a glimpse of what’s ahead in the nursery.

“I can’t tell you anything about who’s having these babies, but it is an early look and there is an increase,” says federal demographer Stephanie Ventura. “It’s a milestone.”

She says details about the mothers won’t be available until the fall, because all the agency has now is birth certificate data from state health departments.

A woman who pleaded guilty to adopting 11 disabled children and collecting big, fat government checks while prosecutors say she severely abused the kids has been sentenced to 11 years in prison. Really? They only got her on the fraud charges? What about the abuse? This woman needs about 11 years for *each* child, served consecutively. Yeah, that ought to do it.

[Judith Leekin] was sentenced Tuesday on wire and mail fraud charges before U.S. District Judge Richard M. Berman in Manhattan federal court. Berman said that she had engaged in “a heartless dangerous money-driven scheme”. He noted that she had been abused as a child but said that “adoption is a privilege, not a right”.

Leekin apologized to the court and said “I love my children and I miss them”. The children, who now range in age from 16 to 28, have severe mental and physical disabilities such as autism and Downs syndrome.

Prosecutors said that Leekin treated the children like prisoners. They say that she beat them and made them wear handcuffs, locking them in a room and depriving them of medical and dental care. They were not allowed to attend school, officials said and have been so physically and emotionally abused that they will never recover.

Leekin was sentenced to 10 years and 10 months in federal prison and was ordered to forfeit $1.68 million.

A woman says that it was post-partum depression that caused her to begin poisoning her child with table salt. She then visited the infant at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, where officials are saying she tried to “finish the job”.

Amber Brewington, 21, was arrested Wednesday morning on charges of attempted homicide, aggravated assault and endangering the welfare of children. She’s being held in the Allegheny County Jail, where she was undergoing psychiatric evaluation.

Pittsburgh police said a hospital staff member saw Brewington, of Duck River, Tenn., standing over the baby, Noah King, Tuesday night and noticed that someone had tampered with his feeding tube.

After a neighbor’s dog bit her son in the face and police supposedly refused to take action, a mom took matters into her own hands.

“You’re —– dead,” [Holly Leach] was heard saying as she stormed into the house.

“Holly, stop it. Stop it,” a concerned neighbor yelled. “Come on you guys.”

Neighbors pulled Leach’s daughter away in tears, as the enraged mother lashed out against the woman apparently responsible for the pit bull that bit her boy.

Both women emerged from the home after a minute, “looking roughed up,” Toledo reporter Rob Packer said. The pit bull, however, was still being kept safe inside the home.

A new Barbie doll slated for release in September has some folks howling loudly. Why? Apparently the doll will be wearing fishnet stockings and a leather jacket, which in turn is being dubbed the “S&M Barbie”. Hmmm, that gives us an idea…

Makers Mattel say Black Canary Barbie, out in September, is based on a DC comic superhero of the same name.

But religious group Christian Voice said: “Barbie has always been on the tarty side and this is taking it too far.

A children’s doll in sexually suggestive clothing is irresponsible – it’s filth.”

An Ohio man has been arrested for squeezing his 2-month-old son as hard as he could with his hands, breaking the infant’s ribs. Police say he was “in a fit of irritation.” Uh, no kidding.

Deputies said Cedric Butts, 23, became angry because his 2-month-old son, Jaylen, wouldn’t stop crying.

Investigators said two of the boy’s ribs were broken.

A 2-year-old from South Seattle, Washington has died after he fell four stories out his apartment window.

The child, whose name was not released, fell from a seventh-floor apartment onto a third-story concrete courtyard at the Dakota at Rainier Court apartment building at 3642 33rd Ave. S., Seattle police spokesman Jeff Kappel said.

Firefighters and police responded about 6:30 p.m., and the boy was rushed to Harborview Medical Center with serious injuries. He was pronounced dead shortly after, Kappel said.

MT headquarters is along a river, and we routinely see fox around town, even in our yard. We always thought they were so cute, but now we’re going to stay even farther away from the critters.

Three residents of the Berkshires, including a 10-year-old girl, received medical treatment after an encounter with a rabid fox.

The fox was smothered and killed shortly after Sunday’s incident by the girl’s father and a visiting friend. The fox’s body was transported to the state Department of Public Health laboratory in Boston, where testing confirmed it had rabies.

We’re going to teach our kids the route to our local police station ASAP.

Shortly after midnight, three armed men in masks rang the doorbell at a home in the 17200 block of Park Lane and asked the homeowner where the drugs were kept. The homeowner said he didn’t know and the men forced their way inside the residence and began searching for drugs, Country Club Hills spokeswoman Wanda Comein said.

While the men were in the home, a renter came home with her 10-year-old daughter. The girl saw the men inside the home and ran away, Comein said.

When the girl could not be found, police thought the girl might have been kidnapped. However, the girl showed up at the police station, 4200 183rd St., a short time later and the kidnapping investigation was canceled, Comein said.