HOUSTON

Enron CEO sentenced to 24 years in jail

Former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling, the most vilified figure from the most notorious financial scandal of the decade, was sentenced yesterday to 24 years, four months in the harshest sentence yet in the case that came to symbolize corporate fraud in America.

U.S. District Judge Sim Lake ordered Skilling, 52, to home confinement, wearing an ankle monitor, and told the U.S. Bureau of Prisons to recommend when Skilling should report to prison. Lake recommended no date, but suggested Skilling be sent to the federal facility in Butler, N.C.

Skilling, insisting he was innocent yet remorseful in a two-hour hearing, was the last top former official to be punished for the accounting tricks and shady business deals that led to the loss of thousands of jobs, more than $60 billion in Enron stock and more than $2 billion in employee pension plans when Enron collapsed.

Lake denied Skilling's request for bond.

JERUSALEM

Israel's Olmert strikes deal with hard-liner

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, in a bid for political survival, struck an alliance yesterday with a hard-liner who has called for stripping Israeli Arabs of citizenship, executing lawmakers for talking to Hamas and bombing Palestinian population centers.

Taking the hawkish Yisrael Beiteinu party into the government would shore up Olmert's coalition, weakened badly by the war with Hezbollah, but probably ends any hope for a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from much of the West Bank.

Yisrael Beiteinu's leader, Avigdor Lieberman, announced the deal yesterday after meeting Olmert. "We are joining the government," the smiling Lieberman said.

TREMONT, Penn.

Explosion kills one in eastern Penn. coal mine; four escape

A coal mine explosion killed a miner yesterday, but four others escaped, authorities said.

The blast happened at the R&D Coal Co. anthracite mine in Schuylkill County, about 80 miles northwest of Philadelphia.

"We have one confirmed fatality," said Kurt Knaus, a spokesman for the state Department of Environmental Protection. "I believe it is a recovery and not a rescue operation."

State and federal investigators were trying to determine the cause, he said. Regulators ordered the mine closed until an investigation is complete.

Four miners who were underground at the time were able to get out, said Kate Dugan, a spokeswoman for the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

DEARBORN

Four thousand Ford workers take buyout, retirement offers

About 4,000 Ford Motor Co. hourly workers at former Visteon Corp. plants have taken the company up on buyout and early retirement offers, a Ford official said yesterday.

The deadline for workers whose plants are run by Automotive Components Holdings LLC to take the offers was Friday.

Ford President of the Americas Mark Fields said in a conference call with reporters and industry analysts that about 40 percent of about 10,400 former Visteon workers agreed to leave the company under the offers.

The acceptance rate was slightly better than the company had expected, Fields said.

Earlier this year, Ford took the plants back from Visteon an formed a holding company. Visteon is Ford's former parts wing, but it was spun off as a separate company in 2000.

-Compiled from Daily wire reports

Site of the Day

If there's one thing in the sports world that makes die-hard fans cheer against their own team, it's fantasy sports leagues. Fantasycongress.com has the same effect, just with elected officials.

Here, political masterminds craft teams of congressmen, earning points as their officials sponsor and pass legislation. In the end, the team with the most points wins. But play at your own risk: The site has the potential to make lifelong Marxists grin at tax cuts.