Lunch Break: Cats in Court, Sex Offenders 101

By Connect Mason News Director Elizabeth Stern

Daily items of interest from all over the news and blog feeds.

Businesses in California were ordered to close their doors and windows earlier today and drivers were urged to stay in their cars because, when a truck flipped over, approximately 12-16 million honey bees were released and swarmed the highway. Ouch.

A second student at Cornell has been hospitalized for meningococcal meningitis, a potentially fatal disease. The contagious illness, which infects one’s spinal cord and the fluid surrounding the brain, affects between 100-125 college students per year. Student Health Services offers a vaccine that costs $100.

Maybe the goldfish you keep in your dorm shouldn’t be your best friend — at least if you’re a murderer. Police bugged the house of a 73-year-old man accused of murdering his wife. They believed he had confessed the crime to his two cats and presented this information as evidence. After a 41-day trial, the man was acquitted of the charges.

Wal-Mart is reported to be the largest private user of electricity in the world. After opening pilot stores in the Midwest which had reduced energy usage by 25 percent, the company will begin opening more energy-efficient stores, starting in Las Vegas. Rooftop cooling towers, recycled refrigerator heat and low-power LED lights are some of the ways Wal-Mart is trying to become more eco-friendly.

Your lab partner might be more dangerous than you think. While prison inmates and students who have committed certain drug offenses are ineligible for Pell grants to receive higher education, sex offenders are entitled to thousands of taxpayer dollars through these grants to attend college. It was reported in 2003 that 54 offenders at a Florida institute were receiving a total of $200,000 in a single year. It is also impossible to tell whether or not these offenders are using the money towards college or iPods, Nikes, or other miscellaneous items.

FYI: I know we’re all busy with midterms and everything, but just in case you bought a lottery ticket on September 27, 2007 because you were drunk/celebrating turning 18/whatever, you might want to double-check if you had the winning numbers to an unclaimed prize worth $100,000. The ticket was purchased at a Food Lion in Gloucester, Virginia and will expire on March 25.