State
Florida cereal stealer gets long prison sentence
A homeless Bartow, Fla. man received a 15-year prison sentence for stealing cereal and a can of evaporated milk, according to the Associated Press.
Mark Anthony Griffin received the sentence because he was a repeat offender with upwards of 50 previous convictions to his name — the majority of these stemming from minor infractions.
The courts offered Griffin a plea agreement to serve a three-year sentence with two years of probation but rejected the deal.
During the sentencing hearing, Griffin’s brother cited alcohol abuse as the principle cause for his sibling’s legal troubles.
In the intervening period between his arrest and trial for cereal snatching, Griffin racked up four charges of trespassing and disorderly conduct to add to his criminal record.
Nation
South Dakota town removes rotten meat
The citizens of a small town in South Dakota can now breathe a sigh of relief — or more precisely, they can breathe without suffering olfactory bombardment from the fetid-fallout of 44 tons of rotting meat.
A crew of city and county workers have cleaned out an abandoned meat plant in Bridgewater, S.D., where 420 pounds of rancid bison meat had been the bane of the townspeople’s existence.
Workers donned protective masks and hazardous materials suits as they loaded five dump trucks and three extra-large trash bins with the spoiled meat, which they hauled off to the Sioux Falls, S.D. landfill some 40 miles away.
Although the odor finally dissipated, reliving the the residents of Bridgewater, the city has neither recouped the nearly $12,000 in cleanup costs nor received a cent of the additional $15,000 in unpaid property taxes from the absentee owner of the meat plant.
World
U.N. report pegs Norway as world’s best place to live
The results of the annual U.N. Human Development Index show the scenic Scandinavian sanctuary of Norway as the best place in the world to reside.
The study ranks countries based on quality of life factors such as life expectancy, literacy, school enrollment and gross domestic product per capita, according to the Associated Press.
China, the most improved country, rises seven spots from last year to come in at No. 92 out of the 182 countries included in the report.
Niger ranked at the very bottom of the index, one spot below Afghanistan.
The U.S. ranks 13 in the index, dropping one spot from the previous year.
The U.N. Development Programme used 2007 data to rank the countries.
