Odds and ends 5/16/04

75-pound junk-food loving raccoon dies

PALMERTON, Pa. -- The world's weightiest raccoon, famed for his junk-food jones, has died after tipping the scales at nearly 75 pounds. Bandit will no longer raid his owner's pantry, hunting down chips, cheese curls and Froot Loops. "I haven't been eating, I haven't been sleeping," a bereaved Deborah "Pepper" Klitsch said Monday, two days after she euthanized her favorite pet. Klitsch denied that she overfed the rotund raccoon, whose weight ballooned to three times the average for his breed. He was born with a bad thyroid gland, she said. Bandit started to decline earlier this spring, following the deaths of two puppies he had grown up with. He had also developed a cancer-like growth on his side.

Camera phones, text messaging for cheaters

SALINAS, Calif. -- Cheating has gone high tech at Everett Alvarez High School, and administrators have the pictures to prove it. School officials banned cellular telephone use after a student was caught using a camera phone to photograph an exam and trying to send it to a friend. Cheating by using camera phones and text messaging has become a nationwide concern. Last year, six University of Maryland students admitted cheating on an accounting exam by using their phones to send information to one another via text messaging. The Salinas Union High School District has had a ban on "electronic signaling devices" since April 2003 but has let individual schools decide how to enforce it. A teacher caught the student who took the photograph of a test before he was able to transmit the image, principal Joe Rice said.

-- From wire reports