xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
The newly installed municipal sewer system in the Florida Keys town of Islamorada was scheduled to go on line in May, but the real test will come shortly after that if the town cannot hook up a threshold number of residents to allow the system full, efficient functioning. The fallback plan, according to the town government, will require it to buy enough out-of-town sewage to boost the weak flow that would be running through the system.
To free up soldiers for war-zone duty, the Army hires contractors to man the gates at 57 domestic installations, including Fort Bragg and West Point, but in April, the Government Accountability Office announced that, despite three warnings, some of the contractors continue to hire an alarming number of convicted felons as security guards.
Nashville’s The Tennessean newspaper revealed in April that a man still serving time for hiring a hit man to kill his wife was actually put in charge of the purchasing office of the state’s emergency management agency. Inmate Daniel Erickson was participating in a rehabilitation program intended to help prisoners find work when they get out and apparently was so good at his job that agency officials promoted him.
(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or [email protected] or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.) NEWS OF THE WEIRD
