Up-and-coming Sicilian mobster Domenico Palazzotto, 28, was outed in August by Italy’s L’Espresso magazine as the owner of a Facebook page that shows off Palazzotto’s muscled, bare-chested body. One concern is that the site may be designed to recruit members. One Palazzotto fan asked, “Do I need to send a (resume)?” “Yes, brother,” came the reply. “We need to consider your criminal record. We do not take people with clean records.” Palazzotto operates out of Palermo, and listed among his “likes” the singer Kenny Loggins.
Can’t Possibly Be True
— A 15-to-life sentence against Daniel Floyd in Brooklyn, N.Y., for a 2008 killing went for naught in July when the Brooklyn Supreme Court ordered a retrial. The sole reason the court cited was a decision by the trial judge on the first day to seat the potential jury pool but not Floyd’s mother. Because she was left standing that first day, she argued that her son’s right to a public trial had been violated.
— Two young men knocked on the door of a house of a Sebastian, Texas, woman at 12:30 am on Aug. 3, asking if they could come inside to charge their cellphone. The woman invited them in, and later offered them the use of her backyard shed to grab some sleep. A short time later, when a law enforcement manhunt widened into her neighborhood, she learned they were wanted for murdering a U.S. Border Patrol agent. Officers arrested the pair inside the shed.
— A team of researchers from the University of Texas at Arlington announced that they had developed a prototype of a wind turbine that might deliver electricity in tiny bursts to devices such as smartphones. The turbine is about half the size of a grain of rice. (Tiny solar backpacks already exist.)
The New Normal
— A Washington state agency suspended the license of anesthesiologist Arthur Zilberstein in June after finding that he had exchanged sexually explicit text messages during surgeries.
— One of the emerging occupational skills for Emergency Medical Technicians is holding up blankets at accident scenes to block onlookers from their urge to take gruesome photos to send to their friends.
Anger Management Needed
— A 40-year-old man’s throat was fatally slashed in August in Laurel, Mont., in a fight with an acquaintance over which military service — Army or Marines — is better.
— A 37-year-old man survived multiple bullet wounds in New York City in August after a 1 am dispute during the making of a rap music video. The dispute was over who would be the star of the video.
— Roger Harris, 63, and Bryan Bandes, 42, brawled in August on the 7th tee at the Springdale Golf Course near Uniontown, Penn., while they were arguing about the rule for playing a ball in a rain puddle. Harris apparently 3-wooded Bandes in the head.
Wait — What?
In Multnomah County, Ore., a Romanian princess pleaded guilty to cockfighting. Irina Walker, 61, was born in Switzerland where her father, King Michael I, lived after abdicating from the throne. She came to Oregon in 1983, where she fell in with former deputy sheriff John Walker, who was in the gambling and cockfighting business. According to a USA Today report, she was assisting him.
Solutions To Non-Problems
— Chung-Ang University in South Korea announced that its Dept. of Sport Science would begin accepting video gamers as legitimate student athletes.
— Berlin’s Lutheran Georgen Parochial cemetery reserved a 4,300-square-foot area of its grounds exclusively for lesbians or for women who, said a spokesman, “want to be buried among other lesbians.”
New World Order
Researchers from England’s University of Lincoln revealed that red-footed tortoises are not only inquisitive, but also make decisions that are associated with “complex cognitive behavior.” The tortoises learned to make decisions on touch-screen devices to get rewards of strawberries. Researcher Anna Wilkinson said the tortoises learned as quickly as rats and pigeons and faster than dogs.
Movies Come To Life
— In July, officials at the Djanogly City Academy in Nottingham, England, broke up an attempt by five students, age 11 to 14, attending a locked-down school to escape by tunneling under a security fence. They discovered the boys’ metal cutlery hidden at the scene.
— In a deadly ending reminiscent of scenes in several crime movies, a 22-year-old man fleeing police in Brooklyn, N.Y., crashed his car into the back of a flatbed truck and was decapitated as the body of the car (but not the part above the dashboard) went under the truck.
Least Competent Criminals
— A 40-year-old man was arrested in Seattle on July 31 after an inept crime spree. When he attempted to rob a restaurant, he was turned down by employees and customers. He was then turned down by two potential carjack victims (the first of whom added insult to injury by pulling out her cellphone camera and shooting video of his robbery attempt). The man gave up just as police arrived. His only take was the $15 he had swiped from the restaurant’s tip jar.
— Joshua Pawlak, 27, entered a total of four businesses in Woodbridge, N.J., on July 27 and met resistance or indifference to his demands for money. He came away from the four with only $2, also from a tip jar.
Readers’ Choice
— An airborne banner being towed by an airplane came loose in Fremont, Calif., and landed on a house, frightening the residents. The sign advertised GEICO insurance.
— A 10-foot-tall pine tree in Los Angeles’s Griffith Park was dedicated to the late musician George Harrison in 2009. It was recently destroyed by an infestation; another tree will be planted in its place, according to a city councilman. The infestation was by beetles.
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