PARAGOULD -- Thieves, perhaps inspired by the cool weather, are completing their "shopping" for the fall and winter. Early yesterday a Cotton Belt freight just north of the city was visited by one or more robbers and a box car containing a variety of "drop" shipments of merchandise was looted of men's pants, shoes, silk socks and other items. About $200 worth of goods was strewn along the right of way. It is believed that the robbers had hauled away all the merchandise that they could and threw out the remainder to be picked up by others.

• A special legislative committee Friday instructed Secretary of State Kelly Bryant to take bids on printing of bills for the next legislative session and to use a different format for the bills. It voted to have the bills printed on 8½-by-11-inch paper, which is twice the size of the pages used in the past. The lines of the bills will be numbered for easy reference in debate and in amendments.

• After one of the most intensive investigations in Arkansas State Police history, officials said Monday that they have arrested the blue light rapist who has terrorized women in eastern Arkansas for 21 months. Robert Todd Burmingham, 31, of the Pine Tree community in St. Francis County was taken into custody without incident shortly before 2 p.m. at a "farm shop" he works at as a laborer near Colt. He was being held on $300,000 bond in the Lee County jail in Marianna... Sgt. J.R. Howard, a state police investigator, was the lead investigator for a state police task force established in August to track down the man responsible for the sexual assaults and kidnappings of at least four women motorists. The rapist pulled his victims over by using a dashboard-mounted blue flashing police light... Police said Burmingham's name first came to their attention in 1996 during a Forrest City Police Department investigation of a "home invasion."

• A federal judge expressed little sympathy on Wednesday for Kelly Harbert, a former bank executive who was once featured in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for her charity work but later admitted defrauding seven banks by creating loans in the names of unsuspecting friends and her own parents. Harbert, 46, was sentenced to 30 months in prison, and was ordered to repay $441,912.49 to the seven banks... U.S. District Judge Leon Holmes cited the "sustained, repeated acts of dishonesty by someone in a position of trust" over other people's money in refusing to give her more of a break... Layton Stuart, the chairman, president, chief executive officer and sole shareholder of One Bank, said Harbert was the highest paid of all the loan officers, making an annual salary of about $135,000 when she was fired for the fraud.

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