Quick Takes: Okla. State Student Dies in House Fire, U. of Chicago Gets Argonne Contract Renewal, Diploma Mill at Center of British Libel Verdict

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Quick Takes: Okla. State Student Dies in House Fire, U. of Chicago Gets Argonne Contract Renewal, Diploma Mill at Center of British Libel Verdict

August 1, 2006 - 4:00am

By

Doug Lederman

A junior at Oklahoma State University died in a fire in an off-campus house Sunday. The student, Kenneth Ray Egan, 21, did not live in the house, but was "a close friend of the residents and a frequent guest," the Stillwater Police Department said in a news release. Police officials said that they arrived at the house early Sunday morning to find Egan unconscious on a living room couch, and that their attempts to resuscitate him failed. The two residents of the house escaped and, according to the police department, did not know Egan was in the house.

The U.S. Department of Energy said Monday that the University of Chicago will continue to operate the Argonne National Laboratory under a five-year contract awarded to a new independent entity wholly owned by the university. Under the $2.5 billion deal between the department and UChicago Argonne LLC, two companies, Jacobs Engineering Group Inc. and BWXT Services Inc., will help the university manage the federal lab, and three institutions -- Northwestern University and the Universities of Illinois at Chicago and Urbana-Champaign -- will join Chicago in contributing a total of about $15.5 million in funds to the project.

A British court has ruled that the Daily Mirror newspaper libeled a celebrity hypnotherapist when it said he had purchased his doctorate from an alleged diploma mill in Louisiana, The Times of London reported. Paul McKenna sued the newspaper under Britain's generous libel law, citing articles in 1997 and 2003 that said McKenna had a "bogus" Ph.D. from LaSalle University, an unaccredited Louisiana institution that is now defunct. The court will consider damages in October.

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