Lead Stories

Man-Car Relationships in Tennessee

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In separate incidents over a 48-hour period in March, a man in Spring Hill, Tennessee, fired about 90 rounds from an AK-47 point-blank into his car after it died on him on a major highway, and a man in Knoxville applied for a marriage license for himself and his 1996 Mustang following a split with his girlfriend. The court rejected the application.

In March Anthony M. Rizzo Jr., 62, a former school principal in Fairfax County, Virginia, escaped charges that he had repeatedly raped a ten-year-old girl in the 1980s thanks to a hung jury. The jury had not been allowed to know one fact: last year Rizzo won permanent disability retirement from the state of Virginia for a “psychosexual disorder” that makes him unable to supervise females without trying to force them to have sex with him. At the time Rizzo was applying for the disability status, he was denying the claims of eight female former coworkers who said they were victims of Rizzo’s “disorder.”

A March Los Angeles Times story reported on the royal Siamese cat family of Thailand, believed to be direct descendants of the cats that belonged to the beloved King Rama V. The cats live in teak-paneled quarters and are served three specially prepared meals a day on gold and silver dishes.

Five years ago News of the Weird reported on Max Weisberg, a bookie in Saint Paul, just after he had been released on charges of illegal gambling because the prosecutor was pessimistic about a conviction due to Weisberg’s mental capacity: though Weisberg is a genius with numbers, he reportedly has an IQ of 80. A jury in 1990 had acquitted him of a similar charge, finding that he didn’t seem to understand that gambling is illegal. In February police raided Weisberg’s home again, seizing $127,000 in alleged gambling proceeds, running the total seized from Weisberg over the last ten years to about $600,000.