Black Watch: Today’s Top Stories

There was nothing quite so spectacularly—how to put it?—comprehensive as yesterday’s coverage in the Post. But the reporting on Sussman’s last moments upon the stage (in all, a six-hour rebuttal that St. Eve had suggested in open court should have taken only two), the judge’s instructions, and the final passage of the jury toward their deliberations gave rise to another journalistic tsunami this morning. We learned, among other things, that Conrad Black is still bilingual (asked to sum up the case against him, he replied “de la pure fiction”) and that a man named Steven R. Merican, whose business card lists his profession as “evaluating juror opinions and developing courtroom objectives,” was handing out free advice for quotation to the press on the sidewalk outside the Dirksen building. You couldn’t make it up.