UPI NewsTrack Quirks in the News

Math whiz, 14, on track for Cambridge

CAMBRIDGE, England, Jan. 8 (UPI) -- A 14-year-old could become the youngest student at Cambridge University in Britain in more than 200 years.

Arran Fernandez, who has been educated at home and lives with his parents in Surrey south of London, is used to breaking records, the Daily Mail reports. At 5, he passed a math GCSE, a test most students take at 15, and at 7 he became the youngest person to get an A in the advanced math GCSE.

"Math has been my favorite subject for as long as I can remember," he says.

Last summer, Arran passed the entrance exam for Fitzwilliam College at Cambridge. He has one more hurdle, the A-level physics exam.

If he enters Cambridge at 14, Arran would be the youngest student there since William Pitt the Younger became an undergraduate in 1773. Ten years later, Pitt became Britain's youngest prime minister.

Arran's ambitions lie elsewhere, with a prime number problem that has intrigued and frustrated mathematicians for 150 years.

"It would be nice to work for Cambridge," he said. "There are a few things I want to work on. I'd like to solve the Riemann Hypothesis."

Street cleaners seek laundry compensation

TORRE DEL GRECO, Italy, Jan. 8 (UPI) -- A group of Italian street cleaners are suing local officials for forcing them to use their own money and resources to wash their work clothes.

An attorney for the 17 workers in Torre del Greco, near Naples, said the workers were made to do their own laundry at an estimated cost of $720 per worker a year between 1998 and 2008, when the local council began paying to have the work clothes washed, the Italian news agency ANSA reported Friday.

The lawyer said the workers are seeking compensation for the approximately $7,900 they each spent on work-related laundry during the decade.

A similar case that went before the Italian supreme court in 1997 resulted in a payout by a firm to its workers, the lawyer said.

Denmark's healthy school menus 'too adult'

COPENHAGEN, Denmark, Jan. 8 (UPI) -- A recently implemented school lunch program in the Danish capital is drawing criticism from kids and teachers for not being age-appropriate.

The program, which began last week for Copenhagen's kindergarten and preschool students, was designed to provide healthy diets for the children, but a poll by Berlingske Research found half of children at 12 city schools had a "serious problem" with the food, the Copenhagen Post reported Friday.

The poll also found many teachers considered the food "too adult." The meals included smorrebrod, a Danish open-faced sandwich including liver pate or salami topped with cucumber, tomato, egg and thick dressing.

The Copenhagen Parental Organization, which supported the implementation of the new program, called for the menus to be reworked immediately.

"We fully expect the city to quickly intervene and eliminate whatever initial problems there are with the plan," board member Nina Reffstrup said. "We can't have the children starving."

Library de-mouser on 'amazing' cats list

LITCHFIELD, Ill., Jan. 8 (UPI) -- Officials at an Illinois library say a cat that set about tackling the building's mouse problem a year ago is gaining national attention from a cat magazine.

Litchfield Carnegie Public Library director Sara Zumwalt said the library obtained Stacks the cat about a year ago to address the growing rodent population inside the library and the mice quickly disappeared, the Springfield (Ill.) State Journal-Register reported Friday.

"We haven't had a mouse problem since she came," Zumwalt said of the 2-year-old feline.

The director said a Cat Fancy magazine writer told her Stacks is due to be listed as No. 13 in its February 2010 article on "45 Amazing Library Cats." Zumwalt said she does not know the system used by the magazine to rank the felines.

Zumwalt said Stacks is friendly toward library patrons and can often be found curled up on the laps of visitors using one of the facility's public-access computers.