It’s time for our weekly roundup of stories that caught our attention this week.
A judge ordered a California advertising company to pay a San Francisco lawyer $7,000 for violating the state’s anti-spam laws, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Daniel Balsam filed the suit in 2008, while he was still in law school. Under California’s anti-spam law, unlike its federal counterpart, individuals can sue (and receive up to $1,000 in damages for each unwanted e-mail) even if they didn’t lose any money or accept any offers.
People pay more for cable than they pay for water, says the District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority. People complain if you try to raise water rates, but the nation is filled with century-old pipes that bring water to you or carry waste away. These largely unseen systems have been neglected, and they’re falling apart, the New York Times reports as part of its Toxic Waters series.
After three recent apparent suicides in the deep gorges on campus, professors at Cornell University are interrupting class to remind their students that they care about their well-being, according to the New York Times. The deaths, including two on successive days last week, have revived talk of the university’s reputation, which school officials say is undeserved, as a high-stress “suicide school.”
Although a judge threatened him with jail, an Ohio newspaper reporter who obtained a psychiatric evaluation of a suspected serial killer remains free after his source, another judge, came forward. Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Shirley Strickland Saffold said her colleague, Common Pleas Judge Timothy McGinty, was within his rights to release the report, although she blasted the paper’s coverage of her at the start of the hearing, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported.
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