In the news

Anthony Lee, 49, an unemployed British truck driver, was sentenced to five years in jail for trying to sell the Ritz hotel in central London for about $380 million to a duped investor.

The Rev. Bernice King, daughter of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., will not take the helm of her father’s civil-rights group, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, next month and instead will wait until infighting and allegations of financial mismanagement at the group are cleared up, a board member said.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., is considering whether to seek a vote this year on an immigration bill focused on farmworkers and a path to citizenship for young-adult illegal aliens who were brought into the U.S. as children, after determining that a broader immigration measure likely won’t get Republican support, his spokesman said.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president, inaugurated a new policy to encourage population growth, dismissing Iran’s decades of internationally acclaimed family planning as ungodly and a Western import.

Laura Dekker, 14, a Dutch girl who was born on a yacht in the South Pacific, received a go-ahead from a Dutch court to embark on her dream of becoming the youngest person to sail solo around the world, and she could set sail in two weeks.

Joseph Pereira, 55, a suspended US Airways pilot from Wexford, Pa., pleaded guilty to invasion of privacy after he used his cell phone to take photos up a 15-yearold girl’s skirt, and was sentenced to one year of probation and will be evaluated for a sex-offender treatment program.

Drew Ellis

and Lisa Satayut exchanged wedding vows at the TJ Maxx in Mount Pleasant, Mich., after the bride dreamed of marrying him in the store’s size 8 shoe aisle, The Morning Sun newspaper said.

Fidel Castro, 83, plans to release an autobiography next month about the years leading up to his 1959 revolution in Cuba, which ushered in five decades of communist rule on the island, the former president wrote in a “Reflections” column published on the Cuba Debate website.

Fyodor Yurchikhin

and Mikhail Kornienko, both Russian cosmonauts, completed a nearly sevenhour spacewalk outside the international space station to replace a video camera and improve cable connections.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 07/28/2010

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