Journalists from all over the world are attending the Lord (Conrad) Black trial in Chicago.  Lord Black and three co-defendants are accused of stealing millions of dollars by negotiating “non-compete payments” from purchasers of newspapers their company formerly owned.  This week testimony is being given by former Illinois governor Jim Thompson, who sat on the board of Lord Black’s newspaper empire when the controversial payments were negotiated.

James Bone of The Times of London says Mr Thompson’s testimony was immensely detrimental to Lord Black’s defence.

Jurors in the fraud trial of Lord Black of Crossharbour heard damaging testimony yesterday from a longtime local governor against the former Telegraph chairman.
. . .
Mr Thompson, who served as chairman of the newspaper conglomerate’s audit committee, said that he had not approved millions of dollars of the suspect payments.

Mark Steyn, who is blogging the trial for Maclean’s magazine, has a radically different take.

This morning must count as one of the most pitiful performances in public by any United States Governor, as Jim Thompson fell back time and again on his assertion that he had "skimmed" the relevant documents before approving them.
 
"I didn't say I didn't read it, I said I skimmed it."
 
"Skimming is reading?" sneered [defence lawyer] Mr [Edward] Greenspan.
 
"Skimming is a form of reading," insisted Governor Thompson. Counsel attempted to press him on the precise contours of this form of reading: surely if he was skimming, he would have concentrated on the parts of the documents most relevant to his role as Chairman of the Audit Committee. Which suggests that, even skimming, one of these eleven references to payments he approved (and which he now says he didn't approve) would have been seen by him.

Back to Mr Bone.

The former governor said that he had only “skimmed” the company’s financial documents because they were long. “I should have read them word by word. I did not. I skimmed them,” he said.
. . .
The former governor was confronted with a 2001 10-k financial filing by the company with the US Government that said in a footnote that some $15 million had been approved.

“That is what it says, but it’s not true,” Mr Thompson replied.

After watching Mrs [Marie-Josee] Kravis giving hostile evidence, Lord Black growled: “I don’t know how anyone can believe any of that stuff.”

Me neither.