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says it can.
• Russell Bucklew was scheduled to be executed at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday for the 1996 killing of a romantic rival. He would have been the first U.S. inmate put to death since last month's botched execution in Oklahoma, in which the prisoner's vein collapsed while the lethal drugs were being administered.
• Bucklew, 46, has a condition that causes weakened and malformed veins, and his attorneys say this and the secrecy surrounding the state's lethal injection drug combine to make for an unacceptably high chance of something going wrong during his execution.
• After an 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel suspended the execution Tuesday, only to be overruled hours later by the full court, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito issued his own stay, setting the stage for the full high court to weigh the appeal. If the Supreme Court rejects the appeal, Missouri would have until midnight to carry out the execution.
• Mike O'Connell, a spokesman for the Missouri Department of Corrections, cautioned against reading too much into Alito's intervention.
• ___

• CAIRO (AP) -- A Cairo court on Wednesday convicted ousted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak of embezzlement and sentenced him to three years in prison.
• The graft case against the 86-year-old Mubarak, who is kept in custody at a military hospital, is one of two against the former president who was ousted in a popular uprising in 2011 after nearly three decades in power. He is being retried over the killings of hundreds of protesters during the uprising.
• Mubarak's two sons, one-time heir apparent Gamal and wealthy businessman Alaa, were also convicted Wednesday of graft and sentenced to four years in prison each in the same case.
• The three Mubaraks were convicted of charges that they embezzled millions of dollars' worth of state funds in over a decade toward the end of Hosni Mubarak's rule. The funds were meant for renovating and maintaining presidential palaces but were instead spent on upgrading the family's private residences.
• Hosni Mubarak "had an obligation to restrain himself and his sons from stealing state funds ... but instead, he gave himself and his sons license to embezzle them," Judge Osama Shaheen said as he handed down the verdict.

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