In the news

Conrad Black, one of four former Hollinger International executives convicted of swindling the media company’s shareholders out of $6.1 million, has been granted bail by a federal appeals court in Chicago, weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court weakened the law that was central to Black’s 2007 fraud conviction and kicked his case back to a lower court.

Joe Knight, under sheriff in Hunt County, Texas, said the public has turned in four duffel bags filled with what appears to be marijuana after rural homeowners reported hearing the bags drop onto their roofs.

Patti Blagojevich, the wife of former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, said she has been reading The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, a short-story collection by Arthur Conan Doyle, on her cell phone during her husband’s corruption trial.

Gov. Jay Nixon, a Missouri Democrat, has signed into law a pension overhaul that will require new employees, starting in 2011, to work more years for the state and contribute part of their salaries to get the pension benefits like those of their more experienced colleagues.

Patrick Roan, 51, of Iowa City, Iowa, has pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of fraud activity connected with computers, making him the third former employee of a U.S. Education Department contractor to plead guilty to illegally accessing President Barack Obama’s student loan records.

Clarence Thomas, 62, the Supreme Court justice who is known for rarely asking questions from the bench, told a crowd at the Utah State Bar’s summer convention that he thinks oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court have devolved into a 50-question version of Family Feud.

Ronald John Fanelli, 37, an American who has lived in Phuket, Thailand, for three years, has been arrested and charged with killing a bar hostess he met on the Thai resort island.

Darrell Bright

and his wife have donated three pet oxygen masks to the Munford, Tenn., Fire Department after hearing about Shelby County firefighters who were able to resuscitate a half-dozen pets after a house fire, saying the couple’s two dogs are like their children and while “it would be bad” if the house burned down, “it would be a tragedy” if the dogs were killed.

David Steeves, 45, has been sentenced in a New York court to 19 years to life in prison for killing his wife by lacing her coffee with cyanide.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 07/20/2010

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