35 years: A 61-year-old woman has been sentenced to 35 years in prison for stealing more than $200,000 from victims who paid for modular homes in New Orleans. The Times-Picayune reports Orleans Parish Criminal District Court Judge Robin Pittman sentenced Cecilia Slattery on Tuesday. Slattery had agreed to a plea deal that would have kept her out of prison altogether, had she repaid the more than $200,000 she stole from at least 10 victims who dropped down payments or paid in full for new homes. But when it came time to pay up at an August hearing, Slattery failed to show. Authorities found her in Florida. Her attorney, Patrick Giraud, shook his head after the sentencing, saying he had no idea Slattery would skip out of court and risk going to prison.
Hitting the breaks: The Louisiana Office of Motor Vehicles says it mistakenly sent out some incorrect refunds for vehicle renewal late-fee assessments. Improperly formatted data files sent to the bank caused the error, the OMV says. As soon as the programmers realized the mistake, spokeswoman Michelle Rayburn says, they notified the bank and sent a corrected file. Still, some incorrect checks were sent out. She did not say how many were sent, whether they were too big or too small, or by how much they were in error. Rayburn says the bank won’t honor those checks and has agreed to absorb any costs caused by the error. She says corrected checks could be mailed as soon as this week.
Out of touch: Sporadic outages of BlackBerry messaging and email service spread to the U.S. and Canada today, as problems stretched into the third day for Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa. Research In Motion, the Canadian company that makes the smartphones, says users in the Americas “may be experiencing intermittent service delays this morning,” and adds it’s working to fix the problem. Overseas, the outages started Monday, leaving many BlackBerry owners exasperated.
