In brief: Rove group financing anti-Obama TV ads

NEW YORK – A Republican-leaning independent fundraising group announced Friday it would launch a $20 million television campaign criticizing President Barack Obama’s handling of the economy.

The ads, produced and financed by Crossroads GPS, will begin running Monday.

Spokesman Jonathan Collegio said the group would spend $5 million initially on cable television nationwide and on broadcast TV in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, New Mexico, Nevada and Virginia. Crossroads will spend a total of $20 million on the campaign over two months, Collegio said.

The 30-second ad illustrates how unemployment, the national debt and gas prices have all gone up since Obama took office in January 2009. It also suggests the $850 billion federal stimulus plan failed.

Crossroads GPS is an affiliate of American Crossroads, a Republican-leaning group with ties to Karl Rove, President George W. Bush’s former top political adviser.

Live bullets fired at Old West show

PIERRE, S.D. – One of the participants in a mock Old West gunbattle in South Dakota fired live ammunition instead of using blanks, wounding three tourists, authorities announced Friday.

More than 100 people attended the show a week ago staged by the Dakota Wild Bunch re-enactors, who perform several times a week in Hill City, a tourist town in the Black Hills.

The ammunition shattered a 65-year-old Minnesota woman’s fibula. A 48-year-old Pennsylvania man and a 52-year-old Nebraska man were also wounded.

The simulated gunbattles have been suspended at least until the sheriff’s department investigation ends. The Dakota Wild Bunch has been doing the show for about four years, Hill City administrator Brett McMacken said.

Black gets 13 more months in prison

CHICAGO – Former media baron Conrad Black is headed back to prison. A federal judge in Chicago said Friday that he had not served enough time for crimes related to his looting of a newspaper empire that once included the Chicago Sun-Times.

U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve sentenced Black to 42 months in prison on single counts of defrauding Chicago-based Hollinger International Inc. and obstructing justice. Counting time served, his remaining sentence will be 13 months.

Black’s wife, Barbara Amiel, fainted as soon as the sentence was announced.

Black had served 29 months of a 6 1/2-year sentence St. Eve imposed in 2007 after he was convicted by a jury of three counts of fraud related to bogus noncompete agreements.