Teen shoots himself in heart with nail gun

SAVANNAH - A Rincon teenager is recovering after shooting himself in the heart with a nail gun last week.

Stuart Taylor, 17, was hanging vinyl siding at a Wilmington Island job site Monday. As he climbed down a ladder, he jostled a nail gun he had left on an upper rung.

As he juggled it from his right hand to his left, he accidentally squeezed the trigger.

"It bumped my chest right where my heart is," he said.

He said he felt no pain at first but heard a co-worker say, "He just shot himself."

New police chief made good first impression

SAVANNAH - Savannah's new police chief begins work Nov. 13, but he impressed everyone at his first interview.

Michael Berkow's flight had landed at midnight, just hours before his first interview this summer as a candidate for chief of the Savannah-Chatham Metropolitan Police Department.

Despite the late hour, the Los Angeles assistant chief jumped into a rental car and toured some of the city's most crime-riddled neighborhoods.

Now that he will lead the department, many in Savannah want Mr. Berkow, 51, to continue that first night approach: Get out into the neighborhoods and talk with residents. In short, be aggressive on crime.

Savannah held a seven-month search for a new chief.

Board votes to fire county appraisers

MACON - The Macon-Bibb County Board of Tax Assessors voted Friday to oust the two people in charge of overseeing the 2006 countywide property revaluation.

Assessors decided to fire Chief Appraiser Robert Gerhardt and remove Pat Fallin as deputy chief appraiser after less than 25 minutes of talk in a closed session.

Chairman Alex Habersham said a majority of the board's members didn't like the way the revaluation has been handled and didn't think a new tax digest was forthcoming as long as the pair was in charge.

"This is not a knee-jerk move," he told The Macon Telegraph.

Vandals trash 1,200 copies of magazine

ATHENS - Vandals trashed 1,200 copies of a student-run conservative magazine at the University of Georgia and wrote derogatory comments on the publication's racks.

Copies of the Georgia GuardDawg were taken from racks across campus and dumped into trash cans Thursday night, student publisher David Kirby said. Racks were marked with remarks such as "communist," "gay" and "too liberal," he said.

The newspaper was started in 2003 to "provide the conservative viewpoint on issues horribly slanted by the faculty and the media," according to the group's Web site.

- Edited from wire reports