12-Year-Old Dies From Ant Bites During Football Game

A 12-year-old Texas boy has died after
apparently suffering a severe allergic reaction
to ant bites while warming up for the second
half of a middle school football game. Officials confirmed Tuesday that Cameron
Espinosa died days after being bitten multiple
times by fire ants. Corpus Christi school district
spokeswoman Lorette Williams says the boy
used a water bottle to try and remove the ants,
but he eventually fell unconscious last Wednesday. He was taken to a hospital and
was hospitalized in critical condition. The
eighth-grader died Monday. The game resumed after Cameron was
transported to the hospital, but it was later
halted when the severity of his condition
became apparent. Williams says the boy didn’t know he was
allergic to ants. The district had no record of
allergies.

Law School Student Sues School After Failing Class

There’s no better way to learn than hands-on
experience, and hopefully that’s especially true
for one law student who wasn’t doing so hot
in the classroom. Jackson Milkman, who is currently in his third
year at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, is
reportedly suing the school after school
officials told him he must retake a course in
order to complete his law degree program.
Ironically, area of study he failed is Civil Procedure, the course that teaches people
how to file lawsuits. As Above the Law reports, “After a generally
successful second year, Millikan was told he
had to retake Civil Procedure II. Millikan then
went to his summer job. Having heard nothing
more on the subject of ‘you have to pass Civil
Procedure,’ he returned to school.” He took this to mean something entirely
different than what we might take it to mean… He decided school officials had decided he
didn’t need to take the course after all.
Passing off his responsibility to follow up on
something important, then deciding to sue
when he’s wrong? This guy is as American is a
bacon double cheeseburger. The man thought the best course of action
would be to write a 60-page complaint
against the school seeking relief. For those
who don’t know much about filing paperwork
in court, that’s to say that this guy may as well
rewritten the legal equivalent of James Joyce’sUlysses. Then again, this guy doesn’t appear to be a
master of making great decisions. Thomas
Jefferson School of Law is a second-tier
school, also known in the legal community as
“barely a law school.” With extremely low job
placement numbers and high tuition, it seems this student has much more to worry about
than having to retake a single course, like, say,
whether he prefers to spend the next decade
eating Ramen Noodles or Campbell’s Soup. Fortunately, if law doesn’t work out for this
guy, then at least there are always other career
options. There’s still hope for him to leave the
legal profession to become a truTV blogger,
just like yours truly.

VIDEO: 15 Million-Year-Old Whale Skull Excavated

A 15 million-year-old, 1,000-pound whale
skull was found on the Potomac River shore of
Virginia’s Stratford Hall Plantation – the
birthplace of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee
(born in 1807, which suddenly seems like not
such a long time ago). Bellow is a video of the excavation, put up by
John Nance, paleontology collections manager
at the Calvert Marine Museum, which
uncovered and now houses the skull. The skull is from a baleen whale — a
toothless filter-feeder, according to a Calvert
Marine Museum press release. At six feet long,
it’s one of the largest whale skulls ever
collected in the area. The rest of the skeleton is still buried in the
cliffs. In its press release, the museum said
the whale “would have been 25 or more feet
long.” “It would have been similar in size to a
modern day minke whale,” Nance told The
Huffington Post. (Minke whales are about 30
feet long.) Nance told The Washington Post that the
species can’t be identified conclusively until
the whole whale skeleton has been examined,
which could happen within the next couple of
weeks. The Stratford Cliffs, where the skull was found
— and where a boy once died in a landslide
while trying to add a cross to the cliffs’
graffiti – is famously rich with fossils from the
Miocene era, from about 23 million to 5.3
million years ago, when the climate was warmer and ocean covered much of the coast. “The Potomac as we know it today wasn’t
here 15 million years ago,” said Nance. “There
were baleen whales, toothed whales like
dolphins, dugongs, turtles, sharks and
crocodiles all living in the area at this time.” Dugongs are like manatees, and we’re finding
it hard to think about much except what it
would be like to see these animals living
within swimming distance of the nation’s
capital (now about a two-hour drive from
Stratford Hall). The only thing that can take our minds off that is imagining them also
consorting with some mastodons —
enormous elephant-like animals whose fossils
have also been discovered nearby. Hell, since
we’re in fantasyland now, let’s also imagine
that George Washington, whose birthplace is also in Westmoreland County, is there, too. Back in reality, Nance said the whale is a
dream find, but not the end of his dream
finds. He said his hope remains that at some
point, the cliffs will present him with the fossil
of a Miocene land animal. “A horse or a rhino,” he said. “It’s really
amazing to think about this area. It was a
tropical place … completely different from what it is today.”

Hair Robbery Is The New Trend In Venezuela

Venezuelans now need to worry about their
hair. Women in the city of Maracaibo in Venezuela
should be careful when wearing their hair
down. According to local news sources, a
group known as “piranhas” are now stealing
women’s hair — and they prefer it straight. The robbers will hold women at gunpoint in
malls and tell them to tie their hair into a
ponytail so that they can then cut it off and
sell it to beauty salons as hair extensions,
according to Venezuelan digital newspaper
Informe 21. Jhonatan Morales, a hair stylist in Venezuela,
told Globovision news that the use of hair
extensions has gone up by 30%, but that his
salon “doesn’t buy from street vendors
because we don’t know where that hair comes
from.” The mayor of Maracaibo, Eveling de Rosales,
addressed the issue saying “men and women
were being placed to guard and avoid this
happening again.” Venezuela’s soaring crime rates have been an
issue in recent years. Caracas, the country’s
capital, is the third most violent city in the
world, according to a study by the Citizen
Council for Public Safety and Criminal Justice. The murder rate in the South American
country has soared since Hugo Chavez took
office in 1999. In 2012 it was at 73 per
100,000 inhabitants, almost 15 times the U.S.
rate, according to the Los Angeles Times.